Follow-up on "Apartheid Was Probably Good"

Rebutting a few objections

Lyman Stone

replied to my response to him . This post is my rebuttal.

First, I think Stone and I actually agree on one of the fundamental issues. He argues that it’s possible for an African country with African leaders to prosper. That’s entirely true! As I argued in Aporia magazine last year, the poverty of most of Africa has more to do with contingent historical factors and communist misrule rather than genetic factors.

But we were talking specifically about South African Apartheid! Every political system is judged based on the realistic alternatives, not your preferred ideal-world alternative. The defenders of Apartheid claimed that if Apartheid ended, South Africa would be taken over by communists and descend into barbarism, and they have been proven 100% correct. That’s why Apartheid was probably good. (Yes, Nelson Mandela was a card-carrying communist all along¹ and people who denied that fact should apologize.)

Mauritius

Stone starts with a silly point about tectonic plates. However, no one claims that tectonic plates are relevant to African countries’ growth. It doesn’t make sense to compare Mauritius to African countries because Mauritius has no historical, genetic, cultural or ancestral connection to Africa. Mauritius was an uninhabited island which was populated mostly by Indians in the 19th century.

Stone also said that National IQ tells you “essentially nothing” about long term economic growth rates from 1950 to 2022 in his sample of Mauritius and several Southern African countries. In his graph I see a big effect. The countries with the lowest National IQs grew at about a 1.5% rate and Mauritius grew at about a 2.5% rate. A 1 percentage point increase in the long run growth rate is a very big deal! However, we need to be careful with raw correlations between IQ and growth rate. Some countries in Stone’s sample were much more developed than others in 1950, so some countries (the ones which were very undeveloped in 1950) could benefit from a lot more catch-up-growth than others.

Botswana

Stone claims that Botswana is “a normal, functioning democracy, not white-minority rule.” But I didn’t claim that Botswana had white minority rule²! I claimed that Botswana was ruled by a narrow political elite class, originally headed by a hereditary crown prince.

Here are the facts about Botswana: For decades, Botswana was a one party state whose rulers were each the handpicked successor of the previous ruler. The original ruler who started this chain of handpicked successors was a hereditary monarch. That’s not what most people have in mind when they use the word “democracy.” I called it a “fake democracy” which I think is about right.

The hereditary prince who was the first ruler of modern Botswana drew on his education at the London School of Economics and implemented classically liberal economic policies which the black majority would never have voted for. That was a great thing.

Sanctions

Stone explains away the sanctions as the inevitable result of the domestic apartheid policy. He says that “international trade outcomes are endogenous to domestic policy.” But that makes no sense. It was possible for America and her allies to sanction and crush the South African regime because America and her allies were big and powerful and their rulers had a different ideology from South Africa’s rulers. If America’s rulers had had the same ideology as South Africa’s rulers, they would not have sanctioned South Africa.

Suppose someone told you: Imperial Japan’s political system was inherently unstable. We know it was unstable because it collapsed in 1945! That wouldn’t make sense. Japan’s government didn’t collapse because of some inherently unstable feature of its political system; it was deposed because Japan was conquered by a hostile power. In an alternate universe where Japan had been the rich and powerful country and America had been the poor and weaker one, then Japan could have conquered America and said “American democracy was inherently unstable. We know it was unstable because their government ended when we conquered them in 1945!”

Rhodesia

Stone makes much of the fact that Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) did less well than Botswana, even though Zimbabwe/Rhodesia’s population was 7% white. But this is actually a point in favor of my pro-Apartheid view, not Stone’s anti-Apartheid view! Rhodesia suffered because it was taken over by Robert Mugabe (a brutal communist). (Rhodesia was sanctioned by both Britain and even South Africa in the years immediately prior to the end of the Rhodesian regime). The transfer of power from Ian Smith to Robert Mugabe is an exact parallel of the the transfer of power from the Apartheid regime to the post-Apartheid regime in South Africa - it was a change from white, relatively classically liberal rule to black communist barbarian rule. Mugabe and his ZANU-PF were of the same political faction as Mandela and his MK.

South Africa compared to other countries in the region.

Stone produces this graph, showing South Africa’s GDP per capita as a ratio of the gdp per capita of the other countries in the region! He’s trying to show that South Africa was declining even in the 1950s. But this analysis makes no sense at all! South Africa was growing in absolute terms; Stone’s graph shows the ratio declining because the other countries in the region were growing faster. Of course the other countries in the region were growing faster. They were experiencing catch-up growth!

The “Cycle of Violence”

Stone also engages in some Leftist gobbledygook about “structural violence baked into the system” (isn’t every state based on “structural violence”?)…”reciprocal violence engendered by the apartheid regime”… “Blacks were never going to allow themselves to be permanently subordinated.” Well they allowed themselves to be subordinated from the 1600s until the mid 1900s when the population was whipped up by anti-Apartheid propaganda and barbarian warlords were armed by the Soviets. Is Stone just saying that it’s better when the highest ranks of political leadership are held by talented-hundredth blacks, as was the case in Botswana? I would agree with that.

Stone also takes another shot at me over my unrelated essay on “Social Conservatism.” He claims that I think that conservatives only started caring about abortion in the 20th century. In reality I said

[Abortion] is the one issue where today’s social conservatives line up with the historic conservative movement.

1. Not only was Mandela a member of the South African Communist Party, he was a member of the party’s central committee.

https://web.archive.org/web/20160303223354/http://www.sacp.org.za/main.php?ID=4151%20

2. The highest levels of political leadership were African and much of the bureaucracy was African. Admittedly, the private sector was dominated almost entirely by whites.

https://journals.co.za/doi/pdf/10.10520/AJA02562804_893?