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Home » South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn – Dr. Ernst Roets (Transcript)

South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn – Dr. Ernst Roets (Transcript)

Read the full transcript of Afrikaner activist Dr. Ernst Roets’s interview on The Dr. Jordan B. Peterson Podcast titled “South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn”, April 15, 2025.

The Complex History of South African Settlement

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Hello, everybody. I’ve watched over a very long period of time, the political and economic situation in South Africa both heat up and destabilize. And that’s taken somewhat of an accelerating turn in the last few years. Because of that, I’ve become increasingly interested in delving more deeply into the history of South Africa to understand the context and then also the political situation on the ground in that country now.

I came across the work of Dr. Ernst Roets, who wrote this book called “Kill the Boer,” which was published in 2018. He’s also a filmmaker. He made a film called “Tainted Heroes,” which is about the apartheid era in 2016, and another one called “Disrupted Land.” I hoped to talk to Dr. Roets about South Africa, its history, its current situation, and about hopes and concerns for the future. And that’s exactly what we did.

The first thing I wanted to do was to delve a little bit into the history of the origin of South Africa, because there’s a narrative in the West that the evil white Europeans came to a land dominated by black Africans and colonized it in their brutal and murderous fashion. Any territorial dispute has its bloody edge, let’s say. But the truth of the matter is that the settlement of South Africa is a hell of a lot more complex than that, and that the two primary racial groups that exist there today weren’t the original inhabitants of the land, whether they’re black or white.

We spent the first half of the podcast talking about the history of the settlement of South Africa. The original people there were Bushmen who aren’t particularly related genetically to the Bantu, the black people who live there now, and obviously not to the Europeans. So the situation with regards to ethnicity and race in South Africa is a lot more complicated than it appears on the surface.

So this is likely to be an unsettling conversation, so we might as well dive right in. The first thing I think that people who are watching and listening should know is a somewhat more detailed history of the settlement patterns in South Africa, because what most people in the West know about South Africa, you could put in a very small thimble with enough room left over for another thimble, and that includes me. People know nothing about South Africa, like really nothing. And they certainly don’t know anything about its settlement patterns.

I suppose people use the analog of the European settlement of the Americas, which is also a very complex story. By the time the pilgrims got to the eastern coast of the United States, there are estimates that 95% of the native Americans had already died from measles, smallpox, mumps, etc. The settlement story is extremely complex, but it’s even more complex in South Africa, and they’re not the same. So could you enlighten everyone who’s watching and listening about the settlement patterns, the relationship between the land and Europeans and the black Africans, and let’s just lay that out so we know where we stand first.

The Origins of South African Peoples

DR. ERNST ROETS: Well, let me firstly say thank you very much for speaking with me. And I can say with great self-assurance that a lot of people in South Africa would be very happy to hear that you are interested in what’s happening in South Africa.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Interested in and terrified by.

DR. ERNST ROETS: Well, hopefully we can flesh out a lot of that. You’re absolutely right to say that the history of, or the patterns of land ownership and the history leading to this is complex. We could do an entire interview just about that because there were so many events that happened in South Africa.

Broadly speaking, the people who live in South Africa who are of European descent, such as myself, arrived in 1652. That was the settlement when the Dutch East India Company arrived in what is today Cape Town, to start a refreshment station for ships traveling around Africa to trade with the East. It was initially the Dutch, and they were then joined by Germans and French especially, but some other Europeans as well.

We sometimes call them the Proto-Afrikaners because the Afrikaner people became a people. Obviously, it’s not just one singular event and then you are a people. But it happened over time when we developed our own language and culture in Africa. So that was about 400 years ago.

But what also happened in South Africa, in terms of the different black groups who live in South Africa, is we had, and still have, what is called the Khoisan. A lot of people know them as the Bushmen. That’s how they’re also known. A lot of them prefer to be called the Bushmen. People know them from the movie “The Gods Must Be Crazy” and so forth. And they are the true indigenous people. If you want to say who are the indigenous people of South Africa, it’s the Khoisan. They lived pretty much all over South Africa. They’ve been there for tens of thousands of years.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: And they’re a very ethnically and genetically separate group. There’s a lot of genetic and ethnic diversity in Africa, more than in the rest of the world, by a lot. And the Bushmen are very distinct. In fact, I’ve read that genetically they’re more akin to Asians than they are to black Africans.

DR. ERNST ROETS: I’ve heard that too.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: I’m just laying that out not to make any genetic claim of any sort, just so everybody’s clear about that. But just to know that these things are extremely complicated and all so-called black people aren’t the same by any stretch of the imagination, any more than—they’re probably less similar from a cultural and genetic perspective than Europeans are to one another.

DR.