Premium Post: A Short Biography of David De Lange (Afrikanerverse)

The back-story of the protective father from my short story "Picking Up Plans in Palma"

Back when my first publisher Digital Fiction Publications was active, they purchased two of my alternate-history short stories set in a world where the Dutch settled Southern Africa much earlier, leading a Cold War between an Afrikaner empire and the United States. The first one, “Coil Gun,” was my first professional-rate sale ($0.05/word at the time) and was included in the anthology Pressure Suite. It even inspired the cover art! The second one, “Picking Up Plans In Palma,” I independently published first with covers by Alex Claw before DFP picked it up for the collection Cosmic Hooey. Both stories are in my collection Flashing Steel, Flashing Fire.

Although the protagonist of “Palma” is an American Office of Strategic Services (the WWII-era name for what would become the CIA) analyst Connor Kelly, who finds himself dragooned into a mission to retrieve stolen plans for an orbital battle platform belonging to the enemy Afrikaner Confederation, partway into the story we meet his Afrikaner emigre girlfriend Katje’s father David de Lange.

In my email about worldbuilding the Confederation, I mentioned I had an idea for an “Armageddon Trilogy” featuring older versions of the characters from “Palma.” So I’ll give you a short biography of the elder de Lange. His story will begin above the paywall, but to get the rest of it — including spoilers for “Palma” and the events of the “Armageddon Trilogy” — you’ll need to sign up for a premium Substack subscription or join my Patreon.

So here we go…

David de Lange was born in 1944 in the city of Palma in what is now our world’s Mozambique, a distant descendant of one of the founding families of the Afrikaner Confederation. His sergeant father was injured in India during the Second Great War, in the fighting between the invading Soviets and the Afrikaner regime, and sent home as a trainer. Like all hale Afrikaner men, he was required to serve in the military, although in his case he went through the something resembling Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) at this world’s Stellenbosch University rather than entering the military as soon as he graduated high school. In his case, it was his interest in engineering, a skill the Confederation needed for its competition with the United States and its allies in the League of Democracies. While attending college in the early 1960s, he met and married Christina Kriel before formally beginning his military service.

By Afrikaner standards, most of David’s military career was rather uneventful. Owing to his engineering background he primarily served in electronic-warfare roles, although I imagine he had to deal with insurgent attacks now and again. He didn’t participate in the 1960-1962 Sudanese-Suez War in which Afrikaner proxies Syria, Ethiopia, and the Hejaz attacked this world’s much larger Egypt. Nor was he involved in the harebrained scheme to create an Afrikaner ally in the Western Hemisphere by supporting a white-supremacist uprising in southern Brazil in 1965. David did not fight in the November War proper against the new Yong Dynasty of China, although he did help put down internal unrest the conflict spawned in Africa. David and Christina’s two children, Thomas (b. 1968) and Katje (b. 1970), were born in this period. Although Afrikaner families were encouraged to have many children to keep up the white population, childbirth complications with Katje rendered Christina unable to have further children.

As David’s military service wound down, things got a lot hotter. In 1975, he was involved in a covert operation against an Afrikaner renegade named Samuel de Kock, whose atheism cost him his officer’s commission and voting rights. De Kock went full “the man who would be king” in the disputed borderlands between the Confederation and the Ouaddi Sultanate in real-life Chad, receiving assistance from the League of Democracies for undermining Afrikaner authority in the region, aiding in the insertion of spies, etc. Unknown to his superiors, de Kock had recently received a surface-to-air missile (SAM) battery and radars run by British special operators. David’s operation of specialized electronic countermeasure (ECM) equipment brought along just in case saved the expedition from a total massacre, but the loss of several officers to the surprise missile attack left him in command of the entire operation. Rather than retreat, David led the Afrikaner expedition to destroy the SAM batteries and kill de Kock himself, earning the high Afrikaner military honor of a katana.

(Centuries before, a proto-Afrikaner expedition sailed to Japan to rescue shipwrecked sailors from imprisonment, bloodying the shogun’s outdated armies before returning with the sailors, a number of Japanese “hidden Christians” willing to become Calvinists, and a lot of captured katanas. To be granted a katana is something like the Medal of Honor — it showed one risked one’s life in a faraway place at bad odds. To preserve its prestige, only those granted one by the government or their descendants are permitted to own such swords — and for the latter it is considered ill-mannered to show them off as though one oneself had earned them.)

David ultimately left the military and lived in Palma full-time with his family, working as an engineer in the local natural-gas industry and employing his former sergeant Joseph Mabandla as his gardener. However, as time passed, the growing political extremism in the Confederation disturbed de Lange’s relatively tranquil life. Katje, who as a child loved to ask questions, studied journalism at the more liberal Cape Town University and became a newspaper reporter despite growing pushback against Afrikaner women having careers outside the home. Meanwhile his son Thomas, who as a child was diligent about his prayers, had become involved in Theonomic Party, an explicitly theocratic movement notable for its increasingly reactionary domestic politics and advocacy for an aggressive foreign policy while doing his military service right out of high school.

Things came to a head in 1995 when Katje’s newspaper was sanctioned by the government under increasingly-stringent national security legislation and soon went out of business. Unable to find journalism work outside of “acceptable” freelance jobs covering society functions and schools and feeling suffocated by her culture’s increasingly stringent ideas about Christian womanhood in general, Katje decided to emigrate for freer pastures elsewhere. Not just the old homeland the Netherlands, where many discontented Afrikaners ended up, but the archenemy the United States of America. This was intolerable to Thomas, who physically attempted to keep Katje from leaving the house and had to be physically chastised by David. Thomas broke ties with his family and sank ever deeper into Theonomic ideology, especially once the party was elected into office by an increasingly fearful and angry Afrikaner electorate.

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