colonialism – Page 2

Former SA ambassador examines the land question

Justice Piitso says the question of the ownership of the economy is the nerve centre of the struggles of the people

A revolution will remain incomplete without the resolution of the fundamental question of land ownership.

Next week the people of Zimbabwe will have an opportunity to exercise their democratic right to elect the government of their choice when they will be going to the polls.

This will be the most historic elections paving way for the end of the power sharing unity government between the ZANU -PF under President Robert Mugabe and the MDC under Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai.

This complex transitional arrangement is unfolding under the auspices of the watchful eye of the international community. The recent past elections were marred by allegations of state sponsored violence and intimidation of voters that made it difficult for a conducive environment of a free and fair elections.

It will therefore be in the best interest of the people of Zimbabwe that the forthcoming elections take place within the enabling framework of a free and fair environment. The people of Zimbabwe, Southern African region, the continent and the world need peace and stability.

The elections are taking place against the background of protracted forms of struggles between the government of Zimbabwe and the former colonial power Britain, over the historic land ownership question.

The political tensions escalated when the government under the leadership of ZANU-PF, embarked on a programme of seizure of land from the hands of the few white into the hands of the vast majority of the black people of Zimbabwe.

The state led radical programme for seizure of land from the white Zimbabwean community, sparked a fierce reaction that prompted the international community to impose sanctions against the government under the leadership of President Mugabe.

The imposition of the economic sanctions by the international community was a confirmation that colonial societies are ordered by imperialism. The reason why we say the Zimbabwean revolution fiddled with the nervous system of the forces of imperialism and colonialism.

It is from this context that revolutionaries openly debate on the important question of the complexities of the post colonial transitional periods, and how they affect the struggles of our people in the former colonies and semi colonies.

Equally we need to appreciate this as a metamorphosis of how the post colonial contradictions manifest themselves in the arena of the struggles of our people, against imperialism and neo colonial domination.

In the year 1980 Zimbabwe was declared an independent state after decades of protracted forms of struggles for national liberation against British colonial domination and the racist South African apartheid regime.

The declaration of the independence of the former colonial state of Rhodesia, was a historic breakthrough in the struggles of our people for the liberation of the Southern African region.

The declaration of the independence of the former colonial state of Rhodesia was a product of a negotiated transitional political arrangement. The transitional negotiations culminated into the former colonial master Britain and the liberation movement of Zimbabwe signing the historic Lancaster Agreement.

At the heart of the watershed agreement was the unwavering commitment by the British colonial government to assist in ensuring equitable transfer of land back to the overwhelming majority of the people of Zimbabwe. It was agreed that the process should be completed within the first decade of the transitional period.

Historical records prove that the British colonial government rescinded by not expediting the process of the transfer of land as agreed at the Lancaster house. This is the fundamental problem that has aggravated the present socio economic crisis.

The Zimbabwean land ownership question is a living testimony of how complex post colonial transitional period can be in the context of the history of the struggles of our people in the former colonies and semi colonies. It also relates to the nature and the character of the struggles, between the oppressor and the oppressed nations, post colonial transitional period.

At the core of these struggles is the fundamental question of how do we involve the oppressed people in the former colonies and semi colonies into the mainstreams of our economy. The primary issue remains to be how do we resolve the fundamental question of the ownership of the economy.

The scientific historical realities have proven that the question of the ownership of the economy is the nerve centre of the struggles of our people. The basic reason why it has become the most contentious issue after every war of the independence of our people.

The pertinent question is how do we understand the interrelationship between the primary and secondary contradictions. The mistakes we must avoid is to elevate secondary contradictions at the expense of primary contradictions.

Imperialism is trying to confuse our people by elevating the superficial issues of human rights at the expense of the fundamental question of the ownership patterns of the economy.

We must therefore refuse the attempts by imperialism to reduce the role of the people in the former colonies and semi colonies into being praise singers of national anthems and hoisting of National flags.

The most fundamental question is how do we take forward the common struggles of our people to create a new world social order. Our immediate task is to implore our collective responsibility to resolve the contradictions of poverty, disease and underdevelopment inflicting the poor people of the world.

We therefore have to ask ourselves the most important question as to what are the lessons and experiences we have learned out of the contradictions of the Zimbabwean post colonial transition.

We have to ask ourselves the most important question as what is the role and influence of the phenomenon of imperialism and colonialism during the transitional period of the post colonial nation states.

The essence of any revolutionary phase is about generations of mankind making sacrifices. The people of Zimbabwe have made sacrifices during the struggles for liberation against British colonial rule, and they are still making sacrifices today as they continue with the struggles for the socio economic transformation of their country.

The struggles of the people of Zimbabwe are still consistence with the values, culture and traditions of the progressive movement of the world. Its posture is still anti colonial in form and content.

The only task confronting the collective leadership of the ZANU-PF is how to polish their understanding of the scientific revolutionary concept of the role of an individual in the making of history.

The collective leadership of the ZANU-PF will go into the annals of history, having been the first generations of the people of the former colonies and semi colonies to have fiddled with the nervous system of the forces of imperialism and colonialism.

Phatse Justice Piitso is the former Ambassador to the republic of Cuba and the former provincial secretary of the SACP.

Uhuru Kenyatta, Britain’s nightmare

After four days of counting and recounting votes, Uhuru Kenyatta was declared the winner of Kenya’s presidential election. This is not what the British government had been hoping for.

The failed attempt by the UK to warn people off voting for Kenyatta has changed the former colonial power’s standing in Kenya, both with its leaders and its people. Bungled diplomacy and most of all hubris, have ruined a crucial friendship in Africa.

Western governments made clear their support for Kenyatta’s rival, Raila Odinga. If Kenyatta was to win the election, they would limit relations with Kenya to “essential contact only”.

Clearly, the British had relied on their usual haughty manner to impress the natives once more.

The ostensible reason is that Kenyatta is to stand trial at the International Criminal Court on charges of crimes against humanity. Robert Mugabe however, enjoys the benefits of Western aid after having confiscating white farmland and ethnically cleansed his country.

Kenyatta is accused of having planned the violence which followed Kenya’s disputed 2007 election. Dealing with an ICC indictee could be difficult, so foreign diplomats made it clear that Kenya risked being marginalised if it voted for Kenyatta.

So keeping contact with an ICC indictee to a minimum; was the piont that diplomats repeatedly stressed in the months running up to the election on March 4. Kenyatta’s rivals began telling of the disastrous economic impact this could have on Kenya. Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan also weighed in, telling Kenyans that voting for an ICC suspect would complicate foreign relations.

But this tactic has backfired. Instead of scaring people into voting for Odinga, Kenyans have begun to question why they should listen to the West. This played into Kenyatta’s hands: he portrayed Odinga as a puppet of the West and the ICC case as an example of Western countries bullying Africans.

The UK has been a particular focus for Kenyatta’s attention. Any comments made by the British High Commissioner, Christian Turner, were seized upon as an example of modern colonialism. Kenyatta told how he would defend Kenya from such interference if he were elected president. Whilst votes were being counted, Christian Turner was once again drawn into the discussion, when Kenyatta’s Jubilee Coalition accused him of “shadowy, suspicious and rather animated involvement” in the election.

The bad feeling Kenyatta has shown towards the UK may partly be due to personal history. Uhuru Kenyatta’s father and Kenya’s first president, Jomo Kenyatta, was imprisoned during British rule. The current British government’s political and financial support of the ICC case involving Kenyatta does not help either, particularly now that the prosecution’s case is has weakened following the dropping of an unreliable key witness. But it is possible that much of it is down to simple opportunism. Kenyatta saw a way of using the ICC case to his advantage, turning Kenyans against foreigners who were “out to get Kenya”.

British diplomats failed be drawn into a debate, which was helping Kenyatta win the election.

Now that Kenyatta has been elected, the UK has a problem. Kenya is a hub for business and political interests in sub-Saharan Africa and is a close ally in security and counter-terrorism operations.

The importance of these ties is likely to override any desire to avoid contact with Kenyatta. Already the UK has started to backtrack. In a statement released by the Minister for Africa, Mark Simmonds, the UK reaffirmed its commitment to the “deep and historic partnership with Kenya”, although the statement avoided any mention of Kenyatta. The pre-election threats of very limited contact seem to have been forgotten, as the UK now tries to find a way of working closely with Kenya, but without much public contact with its president. However, it will take more than talk of deep and historic partnerships to mend the damage the UK has done.

Convincing Kenyatta that he still has something to gain from working with the UK will be difficult. – Source: Standpoint

‘Tintin in the Congo’ not racist, Belgian court rules

A Brussels court has rejected a legal bid to ban “Tintin in the Congo”, the second adventure of Belgian writer Hergé’s globe-trotting boy reporter. Black associations in the country claimed the book contained racist stereotypes.

“Tintin in the Congo” – a classic 1920s comic strip about Belgium’s celebrated fictional boy reporter – is not racist, a Brussels court ruled on Wednesday.

The Brussels Appeals Court upheld a 2011 ruling against Congolese immigrant Bienvenu Mbutu Mondondo and the Belgian Council of Black Associations, who wanted the book banned.

In 2010 Mbutu, who lives in Belgium, Congo’s former colonial ruler, said Tintin employed a little black helper who was seen as “stupid and without qualities”.

“It makes people think that blacks have not evolved,” he said.

In one scene, a black woman prostrates herself before Tintin, saying: “White man very great. White mister is big juju man.”

‘Gentle and candid humour’

Alain Amici, lawyer for the plaintiffs, told the court in 2011: “The negative stereotypes portrayed in this book are still read by a significant number of children. They have an impact on their behaviour.”

Not so, said Brussels judges, for whom “Tintin in the Congo” is full of “gentle and candid humour”.

The cartoon strip, written in the late 1920s, was Belgian writer Hergé’s second Tintin adventure. It was followed by stories in which the author tried to add greater realism and historical accuracy.

Hergé himself recognised that “Tintin in the Congo” was a “youthful sin” that reflected the prejudices of the time.

In 2007 a British court ruled that “Tintin in the Congo” should be sold with a warning that it includes racist content.

Mbutu has also tried to have the cartoon banned in France, unsuccessfully. – France24

Britain, the global bully

The global reach by Britain is astounding. A new study has found that at various times the British have invaded almost 90 per cent of the countries around the globe.

The analysis of the histories of the almost 200 countries in the world found only 22 which have never experienced an invasion by the British.

Among this select group of nations are far-off destinations such as Guatemala, Tajikistan and the Marshall Islands, as well some slightly closer to home, such as Luxembourg.

The analysis is contained in a new book, All the Countries We’ve Ever Invaded: And the Few We Never Got Round To.

Stuart Laycock, the author, has worked his way around the globe, through each country alphabetically, researching its history to establish whether, at any point, they have experienced an incursion by Britain.

Only a comparatively small proportion of the total in Mr Laycock’s list of invaded states actually formed an official part of the empire.

The remainder have been included because the British were found to have achieved some sort of military presence in the territory – however transitory – either through force, the threat of force, negotiation or payment.

Incursions by British pirates, privateers or armed explorers have also been included, provided they were operating with the approval of their government.

So, many countries which once formed part of the Spanish empire and seem to have little historical connection with the UK, such as Costa Rica, Ecuador and El Salvador, make the list because of the repeated raids they suffered from state-sanctioned British sailors.

Among some of the perhaps surprising entries on the list are:

* Cuba, where in 1741, a force under Admiral Edward Vernon stormed ashore at Guantánamo Bay. He renamed it Cumberland Bay, before being forced to withdraw in the face of hostile locals and an outbreak of disease among his men. Twenty one years later, Havana and a large part of the island fell to the British after a bloody siege, only to be handed back to the Spanish in 1763, along with another unlikely British possession, the Philippines, in exchange for Florida and Minorca.

*Iceland, invaded in 1940 by the British after the neutral nation refused to enter the war on the Allies side. The invasion force, of 745 marines, met with strong protest from the Iceland government, but no resistance.

* Vietnam, which has experienced repeated incursions by the British since the seventeenth century. The most recent – from 1945 to 1946 – saw the British fight a campaign for control of the country against communists, in a war that has been overshadowed by later conflicts involving first the French and then Americans.

It is thought to be the first time such a list has been compiled.

Mr Laycock, who has previously published books on Roman history, began the unusual quest after being asked by his 11-year-old son, Frederick, how many countries the British had invaded.

After almost two years of research he said he was shocked by the answer. “I was absolutely staggered when I reached the total. I like to think I have a relatively good general knowledge. But there are places where it hadn’t occurred to me that these things had ever happened. It shocked me.

“Other countries could write similar books – but they would be much shorter. I don’t think anyone could match this, although the Americans had a later start and have been working hard on it in the twentieth century.”

The only other nation which has achieved anything approaching the British total, Mr Laycock said, is France – which also holds the unfortunate record for having endured the most British invasions. “I realise people may argue with some of my reasons, but it is intended to prompt debate,” he added.

He believes the actual figure may well be higher and is inviting the public to get in touch to provide evidence of other invasions.

In the case of Mongolia, for instance – one of the 22 nations “not invaded”, according to the book – he believes it possible that there could have been a British invasion, but could find no direct proof.

The country was caught up in the turmoil following the Russian Revolution, in which the British and other powers intervened. Mr Laycock found evidence of a British military mission in Russia approximately 50 miles from the Mongolian border, but could not establish whether it got any closer.

The research lists countries based on their current national boundaries and names. Many of the invasions took place when these did not apply.

The research covered the 192 other UN member states as well as the Vatican City and Kosovo, which are not member states, but are recognised by the UK government as independent states.

The earliest invasion launched from these islands was an incursion into Gaul – now France – at the end of the second century. Clodius Albinus led an army, thought to include many Britons, across the Channel in an attempt to seize the imperial throne. The force was defeated in 197 at Lyon.

Mr Laycock added: “One one level, for the British, it is quite amazing and quite humbling, that this is all part of our history, but clearly there are parts of our history that we are less proud of. The book is not intended as any kind of moral judgment on our history or our empire. It is meant as a light-hearted bit of fun.”

The British invented concentration camps in South Africa where they killed 27 000 white Afrikaner women and children.

The countries never invaded by the British:

Andorra

Belarus

Bolivia

Burundi

Central African Republic

Chad

Congo, Republic of

Guatemala

Ivory Coast

Kyrgyzstan

Liechtenstein

Luxembourg

Mali

Marshall Islands

Monaco

Mongolia

Paraguay

Sao Tome and Principe

Sweden

Tajikistan

Uzbekistan

Vatican City

– Daily Telegraph

How Britain plundered the globe for 300 years

by George Monbiot of The Guardian

Opium, famine and banks all played their part in Britain’s plundering of the globe.

Why now? It’s not as if this is the first time Britain’s representatives have been caught out. The history of governments in all countries is the history of scandal, as those who rise to the top are generally the most ambitious, ruthless and unscrupulous people politics can produce. Pushing their own interests to the limit, they teeter perennially on the brink of disgrace, except when they fly clean over the edge. So why does the current ballyhoo threaten to destroy not only the government but also our antediluvian political system?

The past 15 years have produced the cash-for-questions racket, the Hinduja and Ecclestone affairs, the lies and fabrications that led to the invasion of Iraq, the forced abandonment of the BAE corruption probe, the cash-for-honours caper and the cash-for-amendments scandal. By comparison to the outright subversion of the functions of government in some of these cases, the is small beer. Any one of them should have prompted the sweeping political reforms we are now debating. But they didn’t.

For the past 300 years, the revolutions and reforms experienced by almost all other developed countries have been averted in Britain by foreign remittances.

The social unrest that might have transformed our politics was instead outsourced to our colonies and unwilling trading partners. The rebellions in Ireland, India, China, the Caribbean, Egypt, South Africa, Malaya, Kenya, Iran and other places we subjugated were the price of political peace in Britain. After decolonisation, our plunder of other nations was sustained by the banks. Now, for the first time in three centuries, they can no longer deliver, and we must at last confront our problems.

There will probably never be a full account of the robbery this country organised, but there are a few snapshots. In his book Capitalism and Colonial Production, Hamza Alavi estimates that the resource flow from India to Britain between 1793 and 1803 was in the order of £2m a year, the equivalent of many billions today. The economic drain from India, he notes, “has not only been a major factor in India’s impoverishment … it has also been a very significant factor in the industrial revolution in Britain”. As Ralph Davis observes in The Industrial Revolution and British Overseas Trade, from the 1760s onwards India’s wealth “bought the national debt back from the Dutch and others … leaving Britain nearly free from overseas indebtedness when it came to face the great French wars from 1793”.

In France by contrast, as Eric Hobsbawm notes in The Age of Revolution, “the financial troubles of the monarchy brought matters to a head”. In 1788 half of France’s national expenditure was used to service its debt: the “American War and its debt broke the back of the monarchy”.

Even as the French were overthrowing the ancien regime, Britain’s landed classes were able to strengthen their economic power, seizing common property from the country’s poor by means of enclosure. Partly as a result of remittances from India and the Caribbean, the economy was booming and the state had the funds to ride out political crises. Later, after smashing India’s own industrial capacity, Britain forced that country to become a major export market for our manufactured goods, sustaining industrial employment here (and avoiding social unrest) long after our products and processes became uncompetitive.

Colonial plunder permitted the British state to balance its resource deficits as well. For some 200 years a river of food flowed into this country from such places as Ireland, India and the Caribbean. In The Blood Never Dried, John Newsinger reveals that in 1748 Jamaica alone sent 17,400 tons of sugar to Britain; by 1815 this had risen to 73,800. It was all produced by stolen labour.

Just as grain was sucked out of Ireland at the height of its great famine, so Britain continued to drain India of food during its catastrophic hungers. In Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis shows that between 1876 and 1877 wheat exports to the UK from India doubled as subsistence there collapsed, and several million died of starvation. In the North-Western provinces famine was wholly engineered by British policy, as good harvests were exported to offset poor English production in 1876 and 1877.

Britain, in other words, outsourced famine as well as social unrest. There was terrible poverty in this country in the second half of the 19th century, but not mass starvation. The bad harvest of 1788 helped precipitate the French revolution, but the British state avoided such hazards. Others died on our behalf.

In the late 19th century, Davis shows, Britain’s vast deficits with the United States, Germany and its white dominions were balanced by huge annual surpluses with India and (as a result of the opium trade) China. For a generation “the starving Indian and Chinese peasantries … braced the entire system of international settlements, allowing England’s continued financial supremacy to temporarily co-exist with its relative industrial decline”. Britain’s trade surpluses with India allowed the City to become the world’s financial capital.

Its role in British colonisation was not a passive one. The bankruptcy, and subsequent British takeover, of Egypt in 1882 was hastened by a loan from Rothschild’s bank whose execution, Newsinger records, amounted to “fraud on a massive scale”. Jardine Matheson, once the biggest narco-trafficking outfit in history (it dominated the Chinese opium trade), later formed a major investment bank, Jardine Fleming. It was taken over by JP Morgan Chase in 2000.

We lost our colonies, but the plunder has continued by other means. As Joseph Stiglitz shows in Globalisation and its Discontents, the capital liberalisation forced on Asian economies by the IMF permitted northern traders to loot hundreds of billions of dollars, precipitating the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98. Poorer nations have also been strong-armed into a series of amazingly one-sided treaties and commitments, such as trade-related investment measures, bilateral investment agreements and the EU’s economic partnership agreements. If you have ever wondered how a small, densely populated country which produces very little supports itself, I would urge you to study these asymmetric arrangements.

But now, as John Lanchester demonstrates in a fascinating essay in the London Review of Books, the City could be fatally wounded. The nation that relied on financial services may take generations to recover from their collapse. The great British adventure – three centuries spent pillaging the labour, wealth and resources of other countries – is over. We cannot accept this, and seek gleeful revenge on a government that can no longer insulate us from reality.

Read the original article here.

Britain to appeal colonial torture judgement

Britain’s Foreign Office said it would appeal a High Court judgement on Friday that three elderly Kenyans who were tortured under British rule in the 1950s could pursue their claim for damages from London.

“The judgement has potentially significant and far reaching legal implications,” it said in a statement.

“The normal time limit for bringing a civil action is 3 to 6 years. In this case, that period has been extended to over 50 years despite the fact that the key decision makers are dead and unable to give their account of what happened.”

The Foreign Office added that it did not dispute that each of the three claimants in the case suffered torture and other ill treatment at the hands of the colonial administration.

Lawyers for the claimants said Friday’s judgement would be carefully studied by victims of alleged colonial torture from Malaya to the Yemen from Cyprus to Palestine, as well as South Africa.

The claimants, Jane Muthoni Mara, Wambuga Wa Nyingi and Paulo Muoka Nzili celebrated the news in Nairobi, Kenya. They were represented by a white lawyer, Martyn Day.

London’s High Court ruled the case, relating to the 1950s Mau Mau uprising, could proceed despite the time elapsed.

The ruling means the case will now go to a full trial. Lawyers for the three hailed it as a “historic” judgement.

While the government accepts UK forces tortured detainees it denies liability and will appeal against the decision.

After the 2011 ruling, the case went back to the High Court in July to consider a claim by the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) that the actions had been brought outside the legal time limit. The FCO said it faced “irredeemable difficulties” in relation to the availability of witnesses and documents.

As the news filtered through, several dozen elderly Kenyans erupted into cheers. They linked arms and danced through the grounds of the Kenyan Human Rights Commission, which has been supporting the claimants.

For them, and other veterans of the Mau Mau struggle, today’s judgement was a significant victory.

But elsewhere in Kenya the case has received little attention. Only a handful of reporters from the Kenyan media turned up to cover the reaction from the veterans themselves.

There are historical reasons for this. Many of those who found themselves in power following independence in 1963 had previously been associated with the Home Guard: those who fought with the British colonial authorities against the Mau Mau rebels.

When independence came, many believed this chapter in Kenya’s recent history would sow division rather than foster unity. The elderly veterans of that struggle are still fighting for recognition, both at home and abroad.

In his ruling, the judge said: “A fair trial for the Kenyans on this part of the case does remain possible and the evidence on both sides does remain significantly cogent for the court to complete its task satisfactorily.”

A lawyer for the three said the claimants had not been in court because they were in the Kenyan capital Nairobi, but they were “absolutely delighted” when they learned of the result.

Martyn Day said lawyers would be pressing for a trial “as quickly as possible” but they would also be pushing for the government to reach an out-of-court settlement.

“This is a historic judgement which will reverberate around the world and will have repercussions for years to come,” he said in a separate statement.

“The British government has admitted that these three Kenyans were brutally tortured by the British colony and yet they have been hiding behind technical legal defences for three years in order to avoid any legal responsibility. This was always morally repugnant and today the judge has also rejected these arguments.”

He added: “Following this judgement we can but hope that our government will at last do the honourable thing and sit down and resolve these claims. There will undoubtedly be victims of colonial torture from Malaya to the Yemen, from Cyprus to Palestine, who will be reading this judgement with great care.”

Written evidence from the three Kenyans sheds light on their treatment at the hands of colonial forces:

Mr Nyingi, 84, a father of 16, said he was arrested in 1952 and detained for about nine years. In one incident in 1959 he said he was beaten unconscious and still bears marks from leg manacles, whipping and caning. “I have brought this case because I want the world to know about the years I have lost and what was taken from a generation of Kenyans, he said
Mr Nzili, 85, said he was stripped, chained and castrated shortly after being arrested in 1957. “I felt completely destroyed and without hope,” he said
Ms Mara, 73, said she was 15 when she was raped at a detention camp. “I want the British citizens of today to know what their forefathers did to me and to so many others. These crimes cannot go unpunished and forgotten,” she said

A spokesman for the FCO said the judgement had “potentially significant and far-reaching legal implications”.

“The normal time limit for bringing a civil action is three to six years. In this case that period has been extended to over 50 years despite the fact that the key decision-makers are dead and unable to give their account of what happened,” the spokesman said.

“Since this is an important legal issue, we have taken the decision to appeal. In light of the legal proceedings it would not be appropriate for the government to comment any further on the detail of the case.”

The spokesman reiterated that the government did not dispute that each of the claimants suffered torture at the hands of colonial forces.

“We have always said that we understand the pain and grievance felt by those, on all sides, who were involved in the divisive and bloody events of the emergency period in Kenya, and it is right that those who feel they have a case are free to take it to the courts,” he said.

PRAAG calls for civil disobedience after passing of language bill

For more than two hundred years the Afrikaans language has been attacked and marginalised in South Africa, either by the British colonial authorities or by the ANC regime. During the days of National Party rule, English was allowed to retain its role as sole public language and Afrikaans was subjected to censorship.

PRAAG (the Pro-Afrikaans Action Group) therefore rejects the notion that Afrikaans could ever be classified with English as a “previously advantaged language”. Commenting in Johannesburg, Dr. Dan Roodt, the leader of PRAAG said: “No language has been more subject to state repression and marginalisation than Afrikaans. The new language bill simply represents a continuation of British imperialism and colonialism, with the genocidal ANC regime intent upon killing Afrikaans and a large number of its speakers.”

Roodt has called upon the international community to “take note of the dire situation in South Africa, with the ANC regime inviting ethnic conflict through its policy of cultural and linguistic imperialism, as well as attacks upon Afrikaans schools, place names, museums and libraries.”

PRAAG will join in court applications with other Afrikaans organisations to stop the illegal and totalitarian measures being taken against Afrikaans. However, it has also called for civil disobedience to the “sushi-devouring, corrupt, Milnerist satraps whose tyrannical rule over South Africa already represents a crime against humanity. Afrikaners especially should not pay toll fees, taxes or make any contribution to sustain these Idi Amin-like clowns who are dreaming of being British lords calling us donkeys for speaking Afrikaans.”

However, the pro-Afrikaans body has welcomed the “clarity” brought by the ANC’s new language law. “If final evidence had been needed that the unitary state of South Africa was doomed, this is it,” said Roodt. “The only logical way out is self-determination for Afrikaners, as soon as possible. There is currently a reawakening of our noble Afrikaner spirit that has sustained us in the struggle against imperialism for so long. We prevailed against the British Empire and will likewise survive the Nguni Empire in its venality, ugliness and arrogance.”