British Extremists Recruiting South Africans

The British National Party, a neofascist group that has advocated expelling non-white immigrants, is actively recruiting white South African expatriates with ties to white supremacist groups, according to a report in the British antifascist magazine Searchlight.

"It has clearly not escaped the notice of the BNP leadership that white South Africans who fled black majority rule and now live in the U.K. are potentially a fertile recruiting ground for the racist party," Searchlight reported this February.

South African BNP member Neil McAllister has been networking through a popular pub in London to recruit young South African ex-pats and enlist older South African businessmen as financial backers, the magazine said.

The most prominent South African member of the BNP is Arthur Kemp, a well-known BNP speaker who since 2007 has been in charge of training more than 200 of the party's top activists. Kemp, who arrived in England 13 years ago, is the author of March of the Titans: A History of the White Race. He also wrote a fawning history of AWB, a paramilitary South African neo-Nazi group.

Kemp runs the BNP's website with technical support from another South African, Lambertus "Bep" Nieuwhof. Both men have unsavory pasts in their home country. In the 1980s, Kemp, a former sergeant in the South African Security Police during apartheid, helped draw up a list of anti-apartheid leaders that may have been used in the assassination of an African National Congress leader in 1993. Nieuwhof played a more direct role in a terror campaign as one of three men who tried to set off a bomb in a recently integrated South African school. The bomb failed to explode, and Nieuwhof was caught and sentenced to a year in prison.

Kemp has contacts in the American radical right as well, and spent a good deal of time working with the West Virginia-based National Alliance, a neo-Nazi group, in 2006 and 2007.

SPLCentre Intelligence Report