Journeys Among the Forgotten
Riccardo Orizio’s Lost White Tribes

orizio [1]3,340 words

Riccardo Orizio
Lost White Tribes [2]
Trans. Avril Bardoni
London: Secker & Warburg, 2000

The history of the past century is a tale of subversion, retreat, and collapse. Everything continuously shrinks. Subversion at the center was critical to the process from the start, but externally it was observable in the swift crumbling of white geographical power from the periphery inward. 

First came the fierce ideological and political attacks upon “colonialism,” and the ensuing ignominious retreat from empire. This occurred with tremendous speed, an Insider movement involving elite subversion from within and revolutionary subversion from without.

Whites in every imperial capital and every colony from India to southern Africa, from Portugal to French Algeria who fought this juggernaut had the correct political instinct. It does not matter whether colonialism is deemed good or bad, wise or unwise, just or unjust. Racially, anti-colonialism was one phase in a crusade of extermination. Its proponents at home knew it, and its foes, the healthiest members of our race, instinctively sensed it as well.

The next phase was the takeover of Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), South West Africa (Namibia), and South Africa. The destruction of these First World nations—one of which had nuclear weapons—was a prelude to the destruction of all white homelands now in progress. Watching the takeover of South Africa was like watching a slow motion train wreck. (“Slow motion” to the observer; historically it occurred in the blink of an eye.)

Exactly the same process is now unfolding in the last bastions, the white homelands themselves. As in South Africa, the process is impossible not to see. The lack of any meaningful, revolutionary response to yet another massive Third World immigration bill in the US is eloquent proof of the fanaticism, extremism, and hegemony of the anti-white power structure.

Riccardo Orizio’s Lost White Tribes provides a glimpse into the near-future of whites everywhere if revolutionary action is not taken.

Orizio, an Italian Catholic ex-foreign correspondent for the Italian daily newspapers Corriere della Sera and La Repubblica, and for CNN, is the proprietor with his Anglican English wife, pediatrician Pia-Sophie Wool, of an exclusive retreat in Kenya offering safaris to the global rich. As one of their ads put it, “the thrill of a real African adventure lived in harmony with the Masai warriors coupled with high standards of style and comfort. The tents are furnished with colonial antiques, Persian carpets and African art. The atmosphere at the camp is informal but elegant.” Orizio and Wool (who “will work with the Maasai communities on different health projects”) described themselves as “a cosmopolitan, multilingual European couple, a writer and a doctor.”

Orizio, obviously, is a member of the Establishment, not a white nationalist. On his website [3] he prominently displays Polish Communist journalist and secret police informant Ryszard Kapuscinski’s endorsement of Lost White Tribes: “A humanistic book, revolving around tales of dying places and dying communities, around people who live surrounded by old furniture, old verandah, old books . . . The lost white tribes are individuals living a chapter of history that for the rest of the mankind is forever closed. Which is why, despite Riccardo Orizio’s sympathy with these obscure heroes, his is nevertheless an anti-colonial book.”

Lost White Tribes was first published in London in 2000. Dutch, Italian, American and Turkish editions followed. Whereas the subtitle of the English edition was “Journeys Among the Forgotten,” New York’s The Free Press gloatingly subtitled its 2001 American edition “The End of Privilege and the Last Colonials.”

The Dutch Burghers of Ceylon

Michael Ondaatje [4]

Michael Ondaatje

At a small hotel in Sri Lanka (Ceylon), author Orizio is served by a young white waiter. “He’s a Sri Lankan like me,” Orizio’s dark Sinhalese companion states matter-of-factly. “Hear how he speaks the language? He’s only a Dutch Burgher . . . Strange people. Dutch, or something of the sort. Maybe Portuguese. Some of them live in crumbling old houses. Nothing to cook with, roof falling in, but that’s where they like to live. As if this were still the 18th century. Perhaps, though they’re trash, they think they’re better than we are.”

With this grim sketch, proving once again that no matter how much we surrender or have taken from us we’ll always be hated for who we are, Orizio begins his slight but revealing account of six obscure, geographically dispersed “lost white tribes”: the Dutch Burghers of Ceylon, the German slaves of Jamaica, the Confederates of Brazil, the Poles of Haiti, the Basters (or Bastards) of Reheboth, Namibia (South West Africa), and the Blancs Matignon of Guadeloupe, a Leeward Island in the Caribbean Ocean. The people he describes are the remnants—some white, but many hybrid descendants of whites—who stayed behind when colonialism beat a shamefaced retreat before the rising tide of color against white world-supremacy.

The Dutch Burghers of Ceylon are the descendants of the Europeans who first arrived with the Dutch East India Company in the 1600s. They are mostly Dutch, but with an admixture of Portuguese, English, and other European nationalities whose members participated in the settlement and building of colonial Ceylon over the centuries.

In former times, the Dutch Burgher elite of Ceylon regarded the South African Boers, also of Dutch descent, as blood brothers. Contact between the two groups occurred after the English brought Boer POWs to Ceylon during the Boer War. Many Boer POWs married Dutch Burgher women. Burghers also served as combatants in that war, but on the English side because they were British subjects. (Ceylon was a British crown colony from 1798 to 1948.)

In recent years—as is true of all the groups described in the book—there has been a serious breakdown of racial barriers and greatly accelerated admixture between surviving Europeans and dark-skinned natives. For example, Michael Ondaatje, the author of the novel upon which the Academy Award-winning movie The English Patient was based, was born into the Dutch Burgher community, though his racial heritage is predominantly Tamil rather than European according Orizio’s interviewees. His surname “Ondaatje,” though, came from his Dutch ancestors.

In poignant counterpoint to the condescension and contempt displayed toward the impoverished white waiter by the black-skinned Sinhalese at the hotel, an elderly Dutch Burgher woman told Orizio, “We Burghers have become strangers in our own land. We have given so much, created so much. And now that I’m old, it sometimes happens at a reception that someone will ask me where I come from and how long have I lived in their beautiful country. They take me for a tourist, or a missionary. I tell them that my ancestors have probably been here longer than theirs. But the old times are gone forever. My parents and their friends would go horse-racing, then on to dinner, then dance until dawn. Then they would jump in their cars and dash down to the beach for a swim . . .”

The Germans of Jamaica

These people are the descendants of German indentured servants lured to the Caribbean island in the 1830s, probably under false pretenses. In return for working as virtual slaves on plantations for an agreed-upon number of years the newcomers were promised their freedom and a small plot of land.

After the completion of their service, however, they were given poor, agriculturally worthless land in the remote interior of the island around SeafordTown. There they have lived in poverty and isolation for 170 years. Orizio says there are now about 50 real Germans left, while the rest are hybrids.

One interviewee, Tony Wedemeyer, known as the “White Rastafarian,” had light skin and eyes and blond hair worn in dreadlocks; his brother was a Negro. Wedemeyer had had a series of blonde German lovers, young girls who traveled to Jamaica specifically to mate with black Rastafarians.

He told the author: “For centuries, Jamaicans have been a mixture of white, black, Chinese, Arab. Yet class distinctions still exist, and how! All based on the colour of your skin. If you’re Indian or Chinese, your class is defined automatically. We have seventeen different definitions for seventeen different shades of skin, from white white to black black. Each shade has its own name: Quadroon, Quintroon, Octoroon, etc. And the destiny of each is pre-determined.”

The Confederados of Brazil

festa-confederada [5]The Brazilian Confederates [6] are the descendants of southern veterans of the Civil War who migrated to Brazil between 1865 and 1885 to establish new plantations. (The Sons of Confederate Veterans established a Brazilian auxiliary, SCV Camp 1653, “Os Confederados” in 1994.) Some 10,000-20,000 emigrated, but many eventually returned to the US. Those who remained settled throughout Brazil, but the most stable group exists in and around Santa Barbara d’Oeste, in the country’s interior. There, descendants from all over the nation still gather at the Confederate cemetery (the tombstones are engraved in English) for an annual celebration.

Lost White Tribes features sixteen exceptionally clear color photographs taken by Orizio and Wool (who accompanied her husband on several of his journeys). Four of the photos are of Brazilian Confederates. One depicts a young Confederate girl with dark hair, skin, and eyes and non-white facial features, highlighting the intermarriage that has occurred. In vivid contrast, another photo shows a small Confederate lad wearing a gray uniform with a yellow sash and small gray cap. The boy is as handsomely Nordic in coloration and features as any of his unspoiled white American or European contemporaries. A third photo depicts a young Nordic Confederate couple in striking period costume.

The Basters of Namibia

baster [7]Of all the groups described by Orizio, the Basters (or Bastards) of South West Africa (Namibia), a wholly hybrid people, come across as the most likable. They are a cross between Dutch Boers and Hottentots (Khoikhoi), and live scattered across the vast, arid central plateau of South West Africa. Their unofficial capital is Reheboth, and they number between 30,000 and 45,000.

The Basters are descended from unions between Dutch pioneers and Hottentot or Nama women, resulting in a genetic and cultural mix that exists nowhere else in Africa. For three centuries they have been an ethnic entity in the truest sense, a tribe that came into being as a result of historical accident but has since developed a sturdy self-sufficiency and an identity distinct, both psychologically and genetically, from the peoples who founded it.

To English eyes, the Boers were guilty of two unforgivable sins: they used slaves as labourers on their farms, and they procreated children with these same slaves, Hottentot and Bushmen who expressed themselves in a language of clicks and snapping noises.

German physician and anthropologist Eugen Fischer, a prominent scientist in the Third Reich, wrote a famous early account of the Basters, unmentioned by Orizio, Die Rehobother Bastards und das Bastardierungsproblem beim Menschen (1913) (The Rehoboth Bastards and the Problem of Miscegenation Among Humans), a field study of interbreeding between two very different human races in a small population of 3,000 individuals whose family histories were known. Fischer concluded that interbreeding did not result in a new, intermediate race that was reproductively stable, but followed Mendelian laws according to which each generation would produce throw-backs to the original parent races as well as individuals of intermediate type.

The Basters, many of whom have Dutch or German names, are devout Calvinists. Their unofficial leader is designated “the Kaptein.” The charismatic Hans Diergaardt was the Kaptein interviewed by Orizio, though he died in 1999.

basters [8]

In the Baster aristocracy the most highly regarded and wealthiest families are those who “have the whitest skin and the surnames of the original Trekkers who came from the Cape in their ox-drawn wagons.” The Baster Great Trek from Cape Province across all of South West Africa as far north as Angola occurred in 1866–1870. The Basters overcame many hardships and hazards along the way.

Fierce anti-Communists, the Basters were bitterly opposed to the Namibian government controlled by the Negro Ovambo of SWAPO. In 1991, SWAPO confiscated the Baster farmlands; its long-range goal is the destruction of the Basters as an ethnic group. The Ovambo regard Basters as “racists.”

Although Orizio does not mention it, in March 1990 shocked Western journalists reported: “Hans Diergaardt holds a press conference with members of a white neo-nazi organization from South Africa. Both are opposed to black rule in their respective countries. Diergaardt says the Baster community does not acknowledge Namibia’s new constitution. On 19 March, Diergaardt declares Reheboth autonomous and says the Basters will return to the rule of their forefatherly law of 1872. He will hold a referendum to decide on independence for the region.”

Unfortunately, the separatist effort failed, and the following year black Communists seized the Baster farmlands.

The Blancs Matignon of Guadeloupe

The Blancs Matignon of Guadeloupe [9]Guadeloupe is a French possession in the Leeward Islands, West Indies, discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1493, abandoned by Spain in 1604, and settled by France in 1635. (The English contested French possession until 1815.)

The Blancs Matignon who live there—“Blancs” (white) from the color of their skin, “Matignon” from the most common surname of the group’s members, the name of the aristocratic French clan from which they claim descent, and the name of their village—today numbering around 400, are the obscure, poverty-stricken descendants of early French settlers who in Napoleon’s time abandoned the coastal areas to seek their fortune in the furthest corner of the island, the region today known as the Grands Fonds.

An online source states [10] that the Grands Fonds region was the refuge of aristocrats who fled the massacres of the French Revolution. Blancs Matignon, the name of their first settlement, still has a small farming community that has survived consanguineously.

Unfortunately, the economy of the back country has remained poor. The Matignon are despised by both the Negroes and the coastal Béké—“the wealthy, respectable whites, the tiny elite that studies, accumulates, and governs, maintaining strong ties with France.”

Due to their extreme geographical isolation, poverty, aloofness, and generations of intermarriage to avoid miscegenation with the surrounding Negroes, the Matignon are described much like the poor Southern whites shown in the movie Deliverance. They bear the brunt of ugly gossip and rumors of incest and deformed children supposedly hidden away from the eyes of the world. And yet, Orizio mentions seeing only one physically deformed person.

Today, Matignon intermarriage with Negroes is increasingly common and more and more children are coffee-colored Creoles or mulattos. Emigration to Canada, Australia, and France has also pushed the group to the verge of extinction.

In Orizio’s commonsense view, the solution is intermarriage with the Santois, a group of 1,500 rugged and fiercely independent fishermen of Norman and Breton descent who live a few miles away on Les Saintes, an archipelago of eight small islands. Unfortunately, the two groups do not get along (!).

Although the Matignon refused to be photographed by Orizio, he did manage to obtain three dazzling color photographs of the Santois (who were even more standoffish and uncooperative than the Matignon), showing two fishermen and a small blond child. These three individuals, all with striking good looks, are the most Nordic-looking of all the subjects whose photographs appear in the book.

Orizio’s ultimate assessment of the Blancs Matignon population is that it is “dying in this corner of the Caribbean in exactly the same way that it had lived, in silence, almost in secret, peering at the rest of the world through a keyhole.”

In view of ongoing anti-white repression and Third World inundation of all European homelands, the question unintentionally posed by the author is: Does the genetic, economic, social, and cultural devolution depicted here foreshadow the collective fate of Western man and the civilization he created? None of the groups studied has retained its racial or cultural integrity; all are in a state of steep decline. Is Lost White Tribes a prophetic journey into our own collective future?

Most of the groups maintained effective barriers for long periods of time—centuries, in some cases. And yet, today interracial sex and marriage are commonplace, and mixed race couples and their offspring frequently live in conditions of squalor, ignorance, and poverty no different from the debased people around them. It appears that this downhill slide accelerated markedly after World War II, and even since the 1960s. Why?

The collapse of colonialism eliminated white privilege, including a sense of pride and apartness. In many cases the non-white majority treated the remaining whites with contempt. Modern transportation and communications destroyed conditions of geographic and social isolation that formerly kept people apart.

While a handful of whites encountered in these pages possess pride and a weak sense of racial identity, the vast majority do not. A remarkable number of them, regardless of their geographic remoteness, know little about their European heritage and care less. Their “beliefs” are trendily anti-white. Some are filled with self-loathing and are hostile toward their own self-kind.

In fact, there is a striking homogeneity of views about this among whites in every corner of the planet. Wherever Orizio traveled he was greeted time and again by the refrain, “We’re not racist.” Only occasionally does the author mention his subjects watching television; but even those living in the most remote and poverty-stricken areas seem to do so.

Not one European nation or homeland—not one—is being spared the fate of these people. Based upon the stories in the book, there is nothing inherent in our nature that will automatically halt the process of racial devolution and genocide.

Instead, it will be necessary to summon the will from within to halt the trend and ruthlessly eliminate the tyrants who are murdering us.

The Poles of Haiti

Haitian Polish girl [11]

Haitian Polish girl

In Lost White Tribes, the Poles of Haiti are the limiting case, exemplifying the logical culmination of current racial trends and forces—namely, the complete eradication of whites physically, culturally, and spiritually.

These sad people derive from Polish soldiers sent to the French colony of Saint-Domingue by Napoleon at the beginning of the 1800s to aid French troops in suppressing the slave rebellion there.

The French were defeated, and in 1804 the bloodthirsty Negro Jean-Jacques Dessalines announced the establishment of the world’s first black republic, initiating a spectacular series of failures on the island. The French residents, together with all other whites save the aforementioned Poles, who had been captured by the Negro rebels, were pitilessly massacred. Dessalines boasted that he would “write this act of independence using the skull of the white man as my inkwell, his blood as my ink and his skin as my blotting paper.”

The captive Poles were not just spared, but warmly praised by the dictator. It is widely believed that Polish soldiers joined the Negro rebels and stood guard over their fellow whites while the latter were penned prior to being massacred.

The hybridized Negro descendants of these Polish soldiers (no pure whites survive) subsist today in the poor, remote village of Casales, where Orizio found only three youngsters, siblings, with slightly lighter complexions than the other children.

The people of Casales now speak Creole, not Polish. Poland

has been but a vague concept for generations. No one can even visualize what the real place may be like. The soldier-ancestors left no books, no documents, and in many cases not even mementos or tales to be passed down through the family. All that remains is a dance they call the polka, and those Slav features.

Casales has no electricity, no phone, no running water, no nurse, no cars, no school, and now no church. Even the graveyard with all Polish names on the headstones is semi-abandoned. We noticed, too, that every one of the few faces around us was as dark as Haitians anywhere else. Eventually a small girl stepped forward to ask the question that was in everyone’s mind. “Have you come from Poland?”

Isolated and forgotten peasants, immersed in the melancholy of their Slav ancestors, the hope lives on that this is all a nightmare, and that one day they will awaken in that magic land called Lapologne. Of this, however, they must not speak too much, or the spirits of the forest could come seeking revenge.

Meanwhile, in the abandoned churchyard beneath the Polish headstones, their white ancestors sleep silently in the shimmering island heat, never to waken again.