The radical right’s obsession with southern Africa goes back even further. In 2015, the Charleston Post and Courierpublished a photograph of American white supremacist and mass murderer Dylann Roof. In the photo, Roof has on his jacket, one of the flag of apartheid-era South Africa and the other of the flag of Rhodesia. Just last year, during demonstrations in support of far-right activist Tommy Robinson, observers from Hope Note Hate noted the presence of someone wearing a shirt bearing the among the crowd supporters.

Racism as an Ideology

This southern African obsession is not new. It has roots that go back to the 1950s and 1960s. These years saw the beginning of the end of European colonialism and attempts by organizations like the UN to tackle . Based on my own research on the British radical right and its relationship with British imperialism, it is possible to shed light on what southern Africa has historically meant to the radical right. In interrogating their persistent obsession with southern Africa, we can better understand what people like Trump, Hopkins, and terrorists like Roof, mean when they invoke it today.

In the first instance, the postwar movements of the British far right, such as Oswald Mosley’s Union Movement and A. K. Chesterton’s League of Empire Loyalists, found South Africa attractive because its government spat into Harold Macmillan’s “.” After their victory in the 1948 general election, the Afrikaner National Party came to power and began instituting an intensified system of racial segregation, known as apartheid.

The policy of the South African dominion was very much at odds with post-war Labour and Conservative governments’ aim of a measured, moderate and eventual progress toward multi-racial self-government within its African colonies. The activists and ideologues of the British far right found South Africa’s unapologetically racist stance exhilarating, particularly in a world where fascism was marred by its associations with Nazi Germany.

In , South Africa functioned as the cornerstone for his plans for a united European recolonization and racial segregation of the African continent. , born to British settlers in South Africa shortly before the Boer War, felt a considerable and romantic affinity with its intransigent white settler community and shared their disparaging view of “.” For both, South Africa functioned one the one hand as “evidence” of the impossibility of racial mixture and, on the other, as a glowing example of the potentialities of white rule. They credited the white settlers of South Africa and those of the nearby semi-independent British colony of Southern Rhodesia with having carved civilization out a land of savagery.

In the 1960s, as the pace and scale of decolonization increased, and the radical right stepped up its campaigning against Commonwealth immigration, southern Africa acquired a new relevance. The experience of white settlers struggling against African nationalism and British colonial policy provided British radical-right activists with an emotive, metaphorical vocabulary. They employed this in their campaigns against immigration on the streets of Britain, recasting Britons as an endangered racial minority, akin to their southern African “kith and kin.”

Mythical Lands

Increasingly at odds with the newly-independent African and Asian Commonwealth member states, withdrew and became a republic in 1961. In 1965, Southern Rhodesia, under pressure to extend its voting franchise beyond its white population, unilaterally declared itself independent Rhodesia. The British radical right now the Commonwealth as “coloured,” dominated, they argued, by anti-British world leaders like India’s Jawaharlal Nehru or Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah.

Mosley’s Union Movement, Chesterton’s League and new radical-right groups such as the British National Party and the Greater Britain Movement called for Britain to withdraw from or disband the Commonwealth. To replace the Commonwealth, they proposed an alternative alliance with the “white” nations of South Africa and Rhodesia.

Beyond their historic links to the golden age of British imperialism, for the British radical right, South Africa and Rhodesia functioned as white supremacist Brigadoons, quasi-mythical lands of unimpeded white power. They believed that while Britain had declined, enfeebled by the welfare state and “invaded” by immigrants, South Africa and Rhodesia had remained in a pure, prelapsarian state. For them, the antithesis to the “metropolitan liberal elites” were the colonial underdogs. In idolizing the white settler regimes of southern Africa, the British radical right was also romanticizing the disenfranchisement, violent oppression and murder of people of color.

The history of the radical right demonstrates that we ought to be alert to the dangerous possibility that, when commentators today express “concern” for the plight of white farmers or wear the symbols of these regimes, they in fact are pining after the very same things.

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A historical precursor to these contemporary radical-right visions of Europe, and a British one at that, can be found in the shape of Oswald Mosley’s Union Movement (UM) between 1948 to 1973. The UM was the vehicle, at least for a time, of his attempt to return to politics following the Second World War. Despite the growing interest in transnational history and in non or anti-liberal internationalism, outside of the field of studies of fascism and the far-right the UM’s Europeanist vision often gets overlooked.

Europe, a Nation

As leader of the British Union of Fascists (BUF) from 1932 to 1940, Mosley was interned in May 1940 under suspicion that he might act as a potential fifth columnist. He was released from prison on health grounds in 1943. While some of his unrepentant followers returned more or less immediately to political activism, Mosley bided his time. Over the course of 1946 and 1947, he began to gather the disparate groups of his followers together.

In publications like the Mosley Newsletter and his second postwar book, The Alternative, Mosley set forth his revised creed. Mosley criticized interwar fascism as excessively nationalistic. The “National Socialist or Fascist movements” of the 1930s were indicted for their “narrow” focus “upon securing the interests of [their] own nations.” In the future, he argued, the goal should be to foster “the Idea of Kinship,” essentially cultural and racial solidarity between Europeans around the world.

In case this in any way resembled the sentiments of supporters of the League of Nations or the incipient UN, Mosley provided some clarification. This was not to be the “old Internationalism” which, according to Mosley, preached the doctrine of absolute equality between “the savage” and “the European.” Indeed, Mosley’s plan to unite Europe was to be based on the domination of the very people he considered “savages.”

His European vision, referred to by the slogan “Europe a Nation,” was to be built on the intensified colonial development of Africa, which was to serve as “the Empire of Europe.” To an extent, this represented the extension of Mosley’s interwar plans for a “Greater Britain”: an economically unified British Empire insulated from the interference and crises of the international financial system. Now, the “Greater Empire” of Europe was to be governed along authoritarian lines provided with an “untapped” African source of raw materials as well as a guaranteed market for goods.

has noted that Mosley’s “Euro-African” plans betray “the influence of the German Colonial Office and the geopolitics of Dr Anton Zischka, a Nazi ‘expert’ on Lebensraum.” Moreover, Mosley was theorizing about a European imperial revival at the same time as similar ideas were being considered by the postwar British state. Ernest Bevin, foreign secretary in the 1945-51 Attlee government, was keen to establish a united Europe under Anglo-French leadership, bolstered by the material resources of Africa, in order to check the influence of America and the Soviet Union. Beset by economic problems and poor relations with France, these plans were never realized.

While the Labour Party’s plans for Africa were based on Fabian ideas about colonial development and the gradual democratic political advancement of Africans, Mosley saw “Euro-Africa” as an authoritarian, white supremacist configuration. Macklin has aptly summarized the UM’s plans as “no more than a geographically enlarged National Socialism.” Britain, as Mosley rather crudely put it, had no “’sacred trust’ to keep jungles fit for negroes to live in.” He believed in trusteeship only in so far as it was “on behalf of White civilisation.” Britain was to conduct itself not in the humanitarian spirit of Fabianism, but in the bold and coercive spirit of Rhodes and other British imperial pioneers.

In collaboration with South Africa’s ex-government minister and Nazi sympathizer Oswald Pirow, Mosley formulated plans for a continent-wide extension of apartheid. The plan was to divide Africa into three parts: one for whites, the “central tropical” region for Africans, and a northern “Islamic Africa.” While Mosley and other UM members constantly maintained that this was to be an arrangement of separate but equal partners, they stressed the subordinate position of black Africans.

The precise way in which the African “cake” was to be cut was also unclear; Mosley maintained that “all of Africa where the white man can live belongs to the European.” The UM’s enthusiasm for “white” Africa later saw them support South African apartheid and back Southern Rhodesia when it withdrew from the Commonwealth in 1965.

Beyond Comprehension

As a political movement, however, the UM amounted to very little. Mosley’s followers — unrepentant fascists accustomed to the nationalism of the interwar BUF — were perturbed by his superficial internationalist turn. In his talk of going “Beyond Fascism, beyond democracy,” some of the old guard felt he had gone “beyond comprehension.” Mosley himself seemed to lose interest in the UM and, despite returning to stand unsuccessfully in a series of by-elections, spent much of his time abroad, moving to Ireland in 1951 and to France two years later.

Rather than heading a small movement struggling against anti-fascists on the streets of Britain, Mosley instead preferred to travel the world posing as a leading intellectual of the European radical right. To this end, he rubbed shoulders with Spanish fascists, exiled Nazis in Argentina and other European neo-Nazis, contributed to the European Social Movement’s journal Nationa Europa, and founded his own “high-brow” journal, The European.

In 2019, Mosley’s European vision does not feel so distant as current affairs increasingly come to resemble the darker parts of history. In Hungary, France, Germany, Italy, Romania, the United Kingdom and elsewhere, populist right-wing parties are coming together ahead of the elections for the European Parliament. With the revelation that and that populism tending ever more toward the radical right, it remains to be seen how these elections will go. While a victory for the radical right is highly unlikely to result in a neo-imperial union of Europe ruling Africa, the consequences for people of color and migrants will no doubt be dire.

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