by Jacques du Toit
In yesterday’s City Press, Alistair McKay claimed that “Apartheid desensitised white South Africans to human suffering and filled most of them with an unthinking sense of superiority and fear”.
Mr. McKay, Separate Development (SD) was above all an attempt to provide black South Africans with an opportunity to develop their own identity and control over their own forms of government. Unfortunately, especially the White English-speaking population undermined this by spreading various lies about the system abroad. Today those lies have become fact. Internally your universities agitated and assisted in destabilising the country, as did your Anglican Church and your press. Many people died in the ensuing riots. Shameful!
English big business undermined the system by building hostels for black labour. This drew them away from their traditional homelands, and put them in the most disgusting accommodation. No human should live like that. The liberal English press never moaned about that! Again this lead to sociopolitical unrest and even more deaths. Shameful! English capitalists made huge pools of black labour a permanent feature of traditionally white cities – a cocktail for future conflict.
You say: “Some judge a black South African’s intelligence purely on his or her English,…” Fascinating! The English mind, measuring everybody according to the level to which they have been Anglicised. I’ve never looked at a black this way!
You then proceed: “…and completely overlook the humbling and impressive multilingualism of so many black South Africans.” This is exactly what SD tried to achieve. Today an Anglo-African dispensation is forced down our throats. Nobody is better off for it.