Mystery of the two U.S.A.s

Re: Parallels between the U.S.' & South Africa's histories

Until 1994, the histories of South Africa and the United States, both settler nations, ran roughly parallel. Leaving World War II a respected ally of Western allies, the then-Union of South Africa presented itself to the modern world as an America for the world’s southern half. Like the U.S., the Union’s full name abbreviated to “U.S.A.” And this U.S.A. shared key features with the other, or so schoolchildren were being taught in the 1950s:

~Both were modern industrial nations created by white people on overseas terrain.
~Both had a representative form of government on the European model and a culture built on Christian values and traditions.
~In religion, America’s “Pilgrims” and South Africa’s voortrekkers both were Calvinist Protestants with a connection to Holland, and in both locations they had made a covenant with God near the start of their experience.
~In both places, pioneers set out in ox wagons to find a promised land—the Great Trek corresponding to America’s Westward Expansion.
~Both peoples showed their mettle in facing a larger native population who fought them before being subdued and Christianized.
~Both then had the English in the role of bully, and both had fought two wars of independence against them—the Afrikaners (Boers), for better or worse, losing only the rematch.

Not needing to be taught in school were these further similarities:
~Both settler peoples viewed these indigenous as culturally and intellectually—and genetically—inferior, and both tried to destroy or isolate native culture.
~Both had a contemptuous lexicon for the locals—kaffir (“infidel”) in Africa roughly equivalent to nigger in the U.S., where newly enfranchised blacks had replaced the defeated natives as bogeyman.
~In both, the treacheries of the native peoples and key battles with them were basic folk history. For Custer’s Last Stand, South Africa had the Treachery of Dingaan—for the Massacre at Wounded Knee the Battle of Blood River.
~Both romanticized indigenous fighters once they were defeated or dead: Shaka and Sitting Bull, the Zulu impi (regiment) and the Plains horseman, the Zulu warrior and the Sioux.
~For both, the national story, otherwise, was the story of a settler folk and a settler culture.
~Both had a national folk shrine: In America, Mt. Rushmore (“Shrine of Democracy”), carved from sacred Sioux land. In South Africa, the Voortrekker Monument near Pretoria, commemorating the triumph of the self-styled “Afrikaner” over black African peoples.

These histories have diverged since 1994, when South Africa’s native peoples—a vast majority—won full rights and came to power. In the U.S., after a challenge mounted in the 1970s by militants and intellectuals, indigenous peoples have turned increasingly to the nation’s courts for relief, with some success in gaining access to traditional land and respect for traditional ways. They remain stuck, though, in a settler mythology that obscures and misrepresents their real place in an American history that continues much as it began.