It is quite amusing, but up to now there has not been much of a reaction to my recently published essay, Raiders of the lost Empire, now going into its third week. So far, the most extensive response has been from the USA where that thoughtful Hegel and Kojève enthusiast, Roger Devlin, wrote a review on American Renaissance. I get the impression that much of cultural-Marxist Johannesburg and Cape Town is just trying to ignore some of the points raised in my essay, as they do not want their own ethnic presuppositions challenged.
Given the many issues dividing white South Africans, not least Afrikaners themselves, I was a bit loath to stir up more internecine squabbling by focussing on South Africa’s new (and old) “English” identity. Yet I felt this issue had to be raised, if we are to understand the current identity problems afflicting South Africa and that are leading to so much violence, sadism and social decay.
Not surprisingly, someone calling himself AnalogMan responded on the American Renaissance commentary section by expressing his “disappointment” as “an English-speaking South African (with an Afrikaner mother)”. He also went on to say that “Afrikaans books, movies, folk music – they’re abysmal”.
Well, there you have it, despite his Afrikaner mother, he feels that the totality of Afrikaans cultural production is “abysmal”! But probably cultural-Marxist Johannesburg and Cape Town would agree with him, without ever having read a word or listened to a note of what they so peremptorily denounce.
Perhaps I should quote his full comment, before posting my reply, to put the reader fully in the picture.
As one of those English-speaking South Africans (with an Afrikaner mother), I’m a little disappointed in Dr Roodt. He’s welcome to his opinions, and I understand the bitterness of Afrikaners toward the British Empire, but he goes overboard with his hyperbole.
Yes, South Africa supported Britain and America through several wars, and was shamefully betrayed, but those were largely English-speaking volunteers, not Afrikaners. Back home, many Afrikaners supported Germany. They had an organization called the Ossewa Brandwag (Ox-wagon Vanguard). Turned out they were right after all, but they can’t simultaneously claim to have been deceived.
Yes, it’s true that Britain supported terrorism (the Church of England boasted that it gave more money to the ANC than anybody else), but so did the Netherlands, France and Germany, ancestral homelands of the Afrikaners. I am no more responsible for British sins than Afrikaners are for the sins of those countries.
The poofter Barry Ronge is no more representative of English South Africans than Andre Brink is of Afrikaners.
It’s not “post-revolutionary, anglicised South Africa” that is to blame for the abominable standard of education, or even for the silly new flag, described by the other poofter Afrikaner comedian Pieter-Dirk Uys as “a beach towel with a Y-front” (as these poor people are wont to do; geddit? Y-front – that’s underpants – snicker). It’s post-revolutionary negrified South Africa.
“.. the booming South African economy allowed their children to fully participate in the decadent Anglo-American hippie culture of the 1960s and 1970s” … well, not quite. I was there. Afrikaners were firmly in control of the government. Censorship was strict. South Africa never even got television until 1976. It was only on my wedding night that I discovered that women did not have stars on their chests. OK, bit of an exaggeration, there. But the government was afraid that TV would destroy the Afrikaans language, since most programming would be imported from America (by that time Britain was boycotting us and we couldn’t get their TV programs anyway). A lot of it was dubbed into Afrikaans, but SA could not produce enough material locally to compete. Decadent hippie culture? Must have missed it, somehow.
Look, when I was a kid, there was a lot of rivalry between the English- and Afrikaans-speakers. They called us rooinek (redneck) or soutpiel (salt- er… member) and we called them rock-spider or hairy-back. We grew out of it. It’s sad that Dr Roodt is still hanging on to the old attitudes.
To say that no one in South Africa speaks or writes English very well is just silly. A billion dollars on an election – come off it. Afrikaans books, movies, folk music – they’re abysmal. Google “youtube boeremusiek” or watch this video (with a Confederate connection) if you’re interested and have the stomach for it. We’re not just envious.
Question Diversity is at least somewhat correct when he compares Afrikaners to Southrons. They are despised for being unsophisticated, some of them are real jerks, but they have a natural courtesy that I admire (when they want to). I have many times stood in a group of Afrikaners, where I was the only English-speaker present, and they all spoke English, even among themselves, even though they struggled, out of consideration for me. It’s quite embarrassing.
But they sound… quite different. Here’s a sample. Obviously, it’s a caricature, but you get the picture.
Perhaps AnalogMan should read my whole essay and not just this review, however good it is in giving an overview. Ultimately, it is about more than just petty chauvinistic feelings and name-calling. Twice I was asked to leave shops in Cape Town because I spoke Afrikaans to my children, but I do not hold that against all English-speaking South Africans. In the 1950’s still there were signs in Durban: “Flat (apartment) to let: Indians and Dutchmen need not apply.”
Today, of course, Durban is black and such niceties belong to a bygone age. All South African whites have to some extent been brainwashed, but the zeal for multiculturalism is strongest among English-speakers by far. During the fateful 1992 referendum by which FW de Klerk tricked the electorate into voting for the coming ANC takeover by calling it “the pursuit of negotiations”, 85% of English-speakers voted “yes” while the Afrikaner vote was split 50-50. But just the other day I noticed something on Twitter which I might share with you.
In my essay I quote the PhD thesis by Sarah Britten who is apparently also an advertising executive in Johannesburg, in which she examined the role of SABMiller in “shaping the new multicultural South African (English) identity”. Britten and I had some exchange of views last year on our respective websites so I sometimes look at her usually politically correct opinions on Twitter. The other day I noticed two things: She had changed her profile pic, showing herself in an Indian sari with a red dot on her forehead. At first I thought she had been to some fancy-dress party dressed as a married Indian woman. Having spent a year down in Durban, I more or less know that a dot on the forehead denotes married status. She also tweets quite a bit about her recent marriage to a “hot guy” ten years her senior. (She is about 40; all of this is public information on her Twitter.)
I suppose I am a bit slow to understand these things, but the ultimate revelation came in two of her latest tweets. On Saturday 6 September, the day Verwoerd was assassinated in 1966, she tweeted:
Verwoerd died on this day in 1966. There are a lot of things in my life he would have hated and I’m proud of that.
— Sarah Britten (@Anatinus) September 6, 2014
What could those things have been, I wondered? And then further down, also on 6 September, I read:
I didn’t just get married this year. I got a whole second family. The Pillays and Govenders have been nothing but welcoming to me. — Sarah Britten (@Anatinus) September 6, 2014
So there we have it. That explains why she now wears a sari and a red dot on her forehead. This is another example supporting my argument: that the identity crisis of the pseudo-British elite in South Africa has caused most of our problems. The very same people who would not let their apartments to Afrikaners whom they considered to be on the same level as Indians, are now marrying the Indians!
I could write another book about the Verwoerd obsession of English South Africa. Verwoerd went to English schools in Rhodesia where he was the best student in his final year and won a Rhodes scholarship to go to Oxford, which he declined. Apart from his aversion to the British royal family (in his newspaper he ignored the visit of the then Princess Elizabeth to Johannesburg and drily referred to “traffic congestion caused by foreign visitors” on page two), he demonstrated only goodwill to English-speakers and was something of a white nationalist, avant la lettre. He famously said to the British Foreign Secretary, Harold McMillan, “that there should not only be justice for the black man in Africa, but also for the white man”. Yet, no other public figure has so consistently been vilified as Verwoerd, to this day, by English academics, journalists, politicians, authors, the clergy, etc. Almost every day there is some negative reference to Verwoerd in our media. The worst insult is comparing anyone to Verwoerd!
Note also how Sarah Britten puts it: “Verwoerd died on this day in 1966.” As if he died of natural causes. I suppose you could say that JF Kennedy also “just died”. She omits any reference to the fact that Verwoerd was stabbed to death by a white-looking Greek mulatto and former member of the Communist Party, Tsafendas, right inside parliament where he was on the verge of giving a speech!
If you think that “Afrikaans books, movies, folk music – they’re abysmal”, you are just acting out the stereotype we have of the aloof Englishman who prefers to ignore Afrikaans. Actually, let me tell you a Russian joke. Despite our very different histories, there is currently a growing affinity between Russians and Afrikaners as we have in common our language nationalism and being hated by the British. The Russian joke goes like this:
An Englishman was shipwrecked and stranded on a desert island. Months later a ship arrived to rescue him, but his rescuers noticed three primitive structures built on the island, spread widely apart. One he lived in, but what were the other two for? his rescuers wondered.
“The second one is my club,” the Englishman replied.
“But what about the other one, what is that?”
“That is another club and I am ignoring it,” he said.
Maybe this not funny, but Russians whose culture dictates that they never smile at strangers because it would show insincerity, can be seen shaking with mirth when they recount this joke and I think it contains a kernel of truth.
For most of our history, Afrikaners have been that “other club” in South Africa, the one to be ignored, except where we could be called racists, fascists, and so on. Verwoerd was a highly cultured man who once dipped into the state budget when opera singer Mimi Coertse came to him, begging for money for some production. He also saw Stravinsky once who was at that time considered an avant garde composer. Mimi Coertse was studying in Vienna as a 20-year old when the lead soprano of the Viennese State Opera suddenly fell ill. Mimi was her understudy and then got the role of the Queen of the Night in Mozart’s Magic Flute thrust upon her. For twenty years afterwards, Mimi was something of a goddess in one of Europe’s former aristocratic capitals, singing one role after the other. She sang most of our Afrikaans folk songs too, turning them into the equivalent of German lieder. You may listen to her singing “Heimwee” (longing) on YouTube here:
Afrikaans music represents 20 percent of the market in South Africa, competing against black music and imported American music. Steve Hofmeyr, who has now been banned from singing Die Stem in certain places, has sold 2 million CD’s. Our politicians may have betrayed us, but we still have singers who can get 50 000 people together to sing our national anthem with tears in their eyes. And, as ever, the liberal journalists are vilifying and attacking our beloved Steve who joked the other day that the only riot he had ever caused at a concert was at the autograph stand, yet he is being banned for “public safety reasons” from certain towns and also because he “promotes racism”. Singing your own national anthem that speaks of South Africa’s cliffs and skies, “promotes racism”, apparently.
On my book shelf I have an Encyclopaedia of South African music in four volumes (ed. Jacques P. Malan), written by Afrikaner academics and at one time every small town had its own circle of musicians. Afrikaans music today is so varied, going from modern classical symphonies to folk, country, Boeremusiek, pop, rock, heavy metal and even rap that it does not fit into any single category. On Saturday night my daughter went to listen to Jack Parow, an Afrikaner rapper, with the difference that his “raps” are quite poetic and in pure Afrikaans, unlike American rap with its ghetto slang and glorification of the hood culture.
Regarding literature, it is of course ironic that South African English authors should have received the Nobel Prize twice, once for Nadine Gordimer whose parents were Jews from Latvia and once for J.M. Coetzee, an anglicised Afrikaner. Yet despite the vast state subsidies and cushy jobs for leftist English authors, Afrikaans literature still dwarfs English writing in this country. A single Afrikaner author, Karel Schoeman, has written more books and of greater quality than Gordimer and Coetzee combined. But his themes are not overtly political and he shuns publicity, at one time living in a small Free State town called Trompsburg with a sign on the door stating, “Interviews by appointment only.” Some of his books have been translated into English and into French, but he will never be fêted as an anti-apartheid or “anti-racist” author, so I daresay the Swedish Academy is not going to give him the Nobel prize anytime soon. All over South Africa, there are clubs of readers we call leeskringe (literally reading circles) where usually middle-aged ladies read and discuss serious Afrikaans books.
Afrikaans literature is not recognised because it is ignored and we have had to contend with cultural boycotts, exclusion, affirmative action, derision, etc. Even now there is something of a cultural boycott against us by most of the EU embassies in Pretoria. The US and UK governments would rather die than welcome even one Afrikaner classical pianist into their countries by sponsoring a plane ticket, for example, let alone a cultural exchange with people writing in the so-called “language of apartheid”, Afrikaans. Blacks writing in English in South Africa are showered with prizes, money and international acclaim, whereas most of the time, we do not exist, except for a few politically correct authors like André Brink who have been translated or write bilingually and are thought to be the sum total of Afrikaans writing. I have stopped reading Brink because I cannot stand his anti-white diatribes anymore. His last novel, Philida, was a South African equivalent of the movie Twelve years a slave. Sickening.
But then Brink has spent most of his life as a tenured radical at South African English universities, such as Rhodes and Cape Town. So he understands by now what is expected of him in the international literary stakes: trashing whitey.