Tag: Dan Roodt

Deconstructing David Smith on Oscar Pistorius

The British Guardian is a notoriously anti-South African and more particularly anti-Afrikaans newspaper. As a purveyor of quasi-leftwing propaganda it is probably only rivalled by the former Soviet rag Pravda (‘The Truth’) which nowadays no longer enthuses about the class struggle and violent revolution. Unlike The Guardian.

The Oscar Pistorius incident is a kind of fait divers that would have gone unnoticed were he not a Paralympian athlete. However, for The Guardian’s Africa correspondent, David Smith, the murder is pregnant with meaning, revealing “deep-rooted attitudes to women, race and guns”. (See Oscar Pistorius: South Africa prepares for its own OJ-style trial of the century.)

A murder between two white people, which is ostensibly some kind of crime passionel, therefore has a deeper social meaning which the brainy Brecht-quoting Brit will reveal to us. Unfortunately for David Smith, his sensationalistic article, half-reportage, half-oped piece – but full-blooded propaganda – does not live up to its pop-psychological pretensions.

Smith, like his namesake in the Johannesburg Star, Janet Smith, who equally specialises in stereotypes about South Africa and Afrikaners, is confident that his British readers share those same idée reçues, reinforced by years of one-sided caricatures sent out from South Africa. Asserting racism in the Pistorius case, is like invoking a mediaeval theory of witches, referring to succubi that we know “exist out there somewhere”.

The notion that there is any similarity between the case of O.J. Simpson and Pistorius is equally spurious. In Simpson’s case there was a clear racial element, which eventually played itself out in the differential white and black perceptions of Simpson’s guilt. Simpson, a black man, had been accused of murdering his white wife. There is more of a resemblance to the recent allegations of abuse suffered by Mrs. Judy Sexwale at the hands of her cabinet minister husband than to the Pistorius case.

Yet probably accusations of black husbands beating up their white wives is not news to David Smith and The Guardian. It does not fit their edenic view of Africans as the innocent victims of white racism.

Smith and The Guardian, as far as I know, have never reported on farm murders or the many high-profile cases of white children, some even babies or toddlers, killed in cold blood by young black males in South Africa. Willemien Potgieter, Danielle Esterhuizen and Alyssa Botha come to mind. News from South Africa is carefully filtered to incite international animus against local whites, Afrikaners especially.

Obviously, David Smith and other foreign correspondents are acting in bad faith. Their writing flies in the face of journalistic ethics, credibility or even basic decency. In more than one sense, they are “framing” us, portraying us as ruthless killers and “racists” while we are the real victims of the sadistic violence raging in South Africa.

I would go even further and suggest that the British Left, that motley collection of Anglican radical clerics, cultural Marxists and whatever “militant tendency” remains in the Labour Party, are not happy with the slow pace of the killing in South Africa. The sadism, although vicious and bloodcurdling as when elderly ladies are tortured with hot irons, made to drink boiling water, gang-raped or hacked to pieces, does not happen on a scale large enough to satisfy the heirs of Kitchener or Roberts’s genocidal instincts.

David Smith, for example, laments the fact that there are “160 000 inmates who endure incarceration in Africa’s most overcrowded prison system”. We know that only 8% of murder cases ever result in a conviction in this country. The inefficiencies of our “transformed” criminal justice system, as well as corruption, see to that. Recently we learned that one third of all “South African” men had raped a woman on some occasion. Now, if all the murderers, the rapists and the robbers could have been apprehended and punished, there would no doubt have been a million “inmates enduring incarceration” in South Africa, almost elevating us to American levels of imprisonment.

However, even the fact that 8% of our murderers are in jail is too much too bear for British sadists who believe that these admirably passionate animals, the murderers and rapists, should be allowed to roam free within the paradise of cruelty that is South Africa.

Since the early nineteenth century, Britain has followed a remarkably consistent policy of ethnocide and even genocide towards the indigenous whites and Afrikaners of this country. I get the sense in David Smith’s ramblings about gun culture and white racism, that the process of decay and dissolution is not taking place fast enough. The hundreds of thousands of our people who are fleeing to Australia, New Zealand and other countries as a result of the violence, to be assimilated there into the Anglo-Saxon population, are not sufficient to ensure our immediate and sudden demise. More horror, more sadism is needed.

Hence Smith and all the others who are inciting black hatred against us, hoping for some sort of “final solution”. Smith’s message is clear: every Afrikaner male is, like Oscar Pistorius, a woman killer, a “gun freak” who needs to be eliminated in some or other way. Gated communities and other ways of protecting oneself from the paradise of cruelty brought about by British political intervention in South Africa, “arguably inflame the divide between the haves and the have-nots”, as Smith puts it. His platitudes tumble like clothes in a tumble dryer, but we must not miss the underlying logic that protecting oneself from violence is morally wrong. Within a sadistic universe the victim, once chosen by the master, has no right to resist being abused or slaughtered.

When the British camp commandant barks, we should all accept our fate unreservedly. Britain is an island state with an immense capacity for ethnocentrism, whether directed against Afrikaners, Russians, the French or the Germans. I recently re-read Kurt Vonnegut’s cult novel from the late sixties, Slaughterhouse Five, set against the backdrop of the Dresden bombing. British contempt for the Other inspired not only the Boer concentration camps and the Dresden bombing, but also the series of colonial killings in Africa and India. More recently, British soldiers in Irak have been accused of committing atrocities against the civilian population there. Terms used by these paragons of antiracism for Iraqis include: “stinking Arabs”, “yip-yaps”, towel-heads”, “flip-flops”, and “crusties.” (See The British Military in Iraq : A Legacy of War Crimes and Atrocities.)

To Britain and its journalists, South Africa is just a zoo or game park where they may gawk at the next “kill”, naturally siding with the predators, those magnificent creatures.

Not all South African blacks are amenable to the antiwhite hate being broadcast from London by the likes of David Smith and his local emulators. A decade or two ago Muff Anderson of the Johannesburg Sunday Times smuggled AK-47s from London in the boot of her car, dishing them out to any young warlord feeling like a bout of killing. She was widely lauded for this. Gun-smuggling is an interesting sideline to journalism as one creates the news one writes about.

On the other hand, the affable Zulu, President Jacob Zuma, has said some sympathetic things about Afrikaners and acknowledged our right to exist in South Africa. He is certainly for a return to law and order, even while South Africa is being destabilised by barely disguised ethnic and racial propaganda from Britain and those local media who still fawn at the feet of the colonial power.

The only South African politician currently finding favour in British eyes, is Mrs. Helen Zille, leader of the DA and the daughter of German immigrants who is trying her best to pass for English. On the subject of South Africa’s rape epidemic, when the Rape Crisis Centre in Cape Town appealed to Zille for funding, she callously replied: “Get in line – there are thousands of NGOs desperate for funding, all equally needy.” A few weeks later she was in front of the cameras protesting against the gang-rape and murder of the coloured girl of 15, Anene Booysen. Even if Zille’s accent is not quite pukka yet, at least she has mastered British hypocrisy.

Frankly, Oscar Pistorius holds little interest for me. Let him have his soap opera in court. However, we should refuse to let him be portrayed as some kind of archetypal white male or Afrikaner “everyman”, which he is not. I have never even heard him speak Afrikaans in public. Apart from his surname, you could really mistake him for an Englishman. Or a journalist. They have a taste for guns too, especially AK-47s. Just ask Muff Anderson.

Will the US Follow South Africa Down the Path of White Decline?

by Dan Roodt

In the aftermath of President Obama’s victory, the Wall Street Journal described the GOP as the WOP, the White Old Party. Indeed, the Republican Party finds itself in a demographic death spiral as youth, single women, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians overwhelmingly vote Democrat.

In fact, the Democratic Party could become the American version of South Africa’s ANC as immigration and high non-white birth rates ensure a steady stream of Democratic voters eager for “change” or even South African-style “transformation:” the ANC’s term for racial revolution and ever tighter anti-white measures.
The latest proposal is for all charities, such as orphanages or soup kitchens to lose their non-profit status if they serve any whites at all. It would mean that charitable organizations could serve only blacks and that whites would not be allowed to help each other in any organized way, even to alleviate poverty or care for orphaned white children.

In the United States, such extreme anti-white measures are probably unthinkable today, but as recently as the early 1980s the idea of a black president in South Africa was deemed equally unthinkable. Even Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s spokesman Bernard Ingham said at the time: “Anyone who thinks the ANC will form the government of South Africa is living in cloud cuckoo-land.”

In the 1960s, so-called apartheid South Africa was still considered such a desirable place to live that 500,000 Britons emigrated there, fleeing socialist Britain.

The question therefore arises: how could South Africa, once seen as a leading Western power more or less on par with Canada or Australia, collapse so quickly to become “just another African country?” And what lessons can white Americans draw from our tragic demise, as they ponder the outcome of a Presidential election in which the evidence of a demographic turn for the worse is clear for all to see?

Ilana Mercer’s book, Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa went some way towards portraying the horrors and mayhem of whites living under a hostile black government, but the underlying causes of South Africa’s spectacular collapse still need explanation.

A century ago, South African whites still enjoyed demographic parity with blacks and were a majority in most towns and cities. In 1950, demographers sympathetic to the National Party shocked everyone at a Stellenbosch University conference by stating that the black population could grow from 8 million to 20 million by 2000. This prediction seemed so outlandish no one believed it. The recent census confirmed that blacks now represent 40 million, far overshooting the “nightmare scenario” of 1950.

South African whites feared communism more than anything else, but American racial ideologies such as affirmative action and so-called BEE (“black economic empowerment—our version of minority procurement) are doing vastly more damage to them. At least under communism the Bolshoi ballet still functioned and the Soviet Union still had a space program. The pursuit of diversity and multiculturalism in South Africa has, however, led to across the board decline; some small towns regularly suffer water and electricity shortages.

In my opinion, America’s future will not resemble its past, but will look more like today’s South Africa. As the number of whites declines, loss of power will follow, leading to aggressive legislation pushing whites out of jobs and most positions of power.

Many whites will emigrate or move to the remaining red states, just as South Africa’s whites have emigrated since 1994. But ultimately there will be no place to go as the global demographic decline of whites means that even European countries suffer the same fate of dispossession.

Demography is destiny, as Auguste Comte said. There is a mysterious process whereby whites react to racial domination not by rioting or claiming special privileges as other races do, but by working harder, having even fewer children, and quarrelling among themselves. We see this happening in South Africa, in Western Europe and, of course, in America where white Republicans and Democrats are like two dogs fighting over a bone, while a third is about to run away with it and leave them with nothing.

The Republican Party is poised to adopt the attitude of South Africa’s liberal opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, which has forsaken its core white support and practices affirmative action in its own ranks. There are three women on its election posters: one white, one colored or mixed-race, and one black, at once expressing the party’s diversity and its disdain for the white male.

Jared Taylor asks that the Republican Party be loyal to its electorate and become the unabashed champion of white interests. Again, the history of South Africa is instructive. British Prime Minister Harold McMillan made a famous speech in the South African parliament  on February 3, 1960 in which he warned us that “the wind of change is blowing through the African continent” and that ultimately we would have to surrender power to the nonwhite majority. Our brilliant leader, Hendrik Verwoerd, promptly replied in an unprepared speech that “the tendency in Africa for nations to become independent, and at the same time to do justice to all, does not only mean being just to the black man of Africa, but also being just to the white man of Africa.”

Verwoerd’s slogan of “justice for the white man too” was rejected by most of the Western world. Lest we forget, the rank and file of the Republican Party rebelled against Ronald Reagan’s veto and passed sanctions against South Africa on Sept. 29, 1986.

Since that time, the U.S. has consistently pursued an anti-white foreign policy. In Southern Africa it supported black Marxist movements such as the African National Congress (ANC) and the South West African Peoples Organization (SWAPO). In Europe, it has called for a large Muslim state, Turkey, to be included in the European Union. Would the American elite ever adopt a pro-white policy domestically while pursuing the opposite of such a policy externally?

There are three forces that are likely to determine the Republican Party’s position on white interests. The first is the wishes of its own electorate; the second is the corporate sector that funds the party, and the third is the mainstream media. America’s large corporations support affirmative action and diversity, while the media support multiculturalism. The GOP will follow their bidding and betray its voters.

Like the whites of the former Rhodesia, South West Africa, and South Africa, Republicans will embark on a forlorn search for conservative allies “of color” whom non-white voters will reject as “traitors.” Even if a black woman such as Condoleezza Rice could be fielded as the next Republican presidential candidate, it is doubtful whether many blacks or Hispanics would vote for her.

Pat Buchanan and others have already chronicled “the death of the West,” but we need to understand the laws of this process, because it follows a pattern of false hopes, interspersed with successive betrayals by white leaders. The final days of the Roman Empire followed the same fatal chain of events.

The crisis is far deeper than most Americans realize. South Africa went from being a powerful, Western country to capitulation in just ten years: from 1980 to 1990. President Barack Obama has already started to fire some of his best generals, just like F.W. de Klerk purged his army of all pro-white generals prior to surrendering to the ANC.

I fear that white Americans take false comfort in “still being the majority.” They do not realize how quickly they will lose that status as global demographics change, and immigration to the US accelerates. South Africa is now being overrun by immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa. But America too will become a haven for African immigrants as the population of our continent doubles from the current one billion to two billion within the next 30 or 40 years.

It could even be that Africa’s burgeoning population poses a far greater demographic risk to Americans than Mexicans. Unprecedented technological change, especially in communications, has put immigration information at the disposal of Africans in even the remotest villages.
American whites could become a minority much sooner than they think. That has been our experience in South Africa; people appreciate the enormity of the changes only after it is too late.

Some white Americans may clamor for self-determination, and the South may want to secede again. However, any breakaway group will find itself in the political wilderness, without media support and fighting the forces of demography and history.

We need to form a global network to keep America from falling into the hands of anti-white zealots. We should constantly compare notes on successes and failures, taking heart from every advance. The United States is such a military and economic power that the battle now taking shape within its borders could well determine the fate of the West. If the United States goes the way of South Africa, whites everywhere will be in danger.

Pretoria PEN and the new occult censorship

by Dan Roodt

I belong to a writer’s organisation called Pretoria PEN which has been affiliated for the past six years to PEN International, a world-wide network of authors and journalists. Some of the people who have been presidents of PEN chapters or “centres” as they are called, have been famous writers such as Günter Grass, Václav Havel, Salman Rushdie and others.

However, since October last year I have been embroiled in an increasingly ugly procedural and quasi-political wrangle with a group of Cape authors who have hijacked Pretoria PEN. Yes, I know, lots of people in South Africa get hijacked all the time, usually facing an AK-47-wielding hijacker demanding their motor vehicle. Many also get killed or wounded in the process. Sometimes the hijackers kill their victims just for sport.

So immediately, as is our wont, I can hear a chorus of voices piping in: “Regard yourself as lucky. You are still alive!” That’s normally what people say to a hijack victim who has merely lost his car or pick-up truck. Or to a rape victim. Present-day South Africa is, after all, famous for all the wrong things, being the so-called “rape capital” of the world. We are also way up there with Colombia and a few others in the murder stakes. If only our rugby and cricket teams could maintain the same consistent standards as our murderers, we would have won the last few rugby matches against the All Blacks of New Zealand.

The three Cape authors who hijacked or tried to hijack our literary society are Fanie Olivier, John Miles and Piet Haasbroek. Strictly speaking, Olivier is a poet and not from the Cape either, as he commutes between Poznań and Durban. Poznań, as you probably know, is a Polish city. In one of my favourite short French novels by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, La salle de bain, there are some Polish painters who disturb the main character while he he has taken up residence in the bathroom, reading books and listening to football matches broadcast over the radio.

I was not disturbed by any Polish painter, a rare species in South Africa, but by a Polish email informing me that these three gentlemen were demanding the keys, figuratively speaking, to our little societal Volkswagen. We held meetings, amended our constitution and invited any dissident members to make their voices or their votes heard, to enter into debate and reasonable discussion, to no avail.

After Poznań, the action moved to Stellenbosch where on 7 March 2012 Olivier delivered a speech where he, inter alia, denounced organ music. Now, it may interest you that one of the aftereffects of apartheid or Afrikaner rule in South Africa is that the whole country is littered with organs, especially German ones, being of good quality. Many postgrads in music have written theses about the church organs of small towns. Of course, many of those small towns now bear different names and some of them are awash in sewage as the new town councils are more interested in buying Mercedes-Benzes than in maintaining their water purification systems. Visiting such run-down water purification plants has become a form of tourism among some local activists, one of them being Mr. Jaap Kelder of the National Taxpayers’ Association.

But I digress. The point of Olivier’s denuncation of organ music was that it had some connotation with Christianity. One of the sins committed by Pretoria PEN was that we had actually contracted one of those postgrads, an organist from the University of Pretoria’s music school, to come and give a recital to us after our AGM in January, boycotted by Olivier and his friends. And that was not only a faux pas, but also decidedly politically incorrect. In fact, during Olivier’s rambling little speech in Stellenbosch, the mere mention of the organ elicited howls of ridicule and guffaws of contempt.

Perhaps some background is needed. Fanie Olivier, the poet laureate of a place called Durban-Westville, has spent most of his life teaching literature at segregated universities, situated in the notorious Bantustans or “homelands” of apartheid. His father, a powerful figure and high-ranking member of a secret Afrikaner society known as the Broederbond (the Society of Brothers), was the first principal of the Indians-only University of Durban-Westville, so it is quite understandable that the heir to the throne, young Fanie, was also appointed there where he debuted with the anthology, Gom uit die sipres (Glue from the cypress).

Later he was a professor of Afrikaans at the University of Venda, in the former homeland known as the Republic of Venda. I am unaware that he ever took up Venda citizenship, although he may have learnt the language. For those who know little about South Africa, the Limpopo province, where the majority of Vendas live, in the former Republic of Venda, is where most ritual murders take place. A few hundred people get killed every year, to make medicine from body parts. Children too. Of course, this is never put on our tourist brochures and few people dare to write about it, except some bored court reporters who may happen to stumble upon such a case being heard. Usually, such reports are anodyne, with the race and ethnicity of murderer and victim carefully omitted and published towards the bottom of the inner pages of newspapers where only the very curious ever venture.

The thing about ritual murders is that they entail a belief in the occult. Some hijackers also buy muti, or medicine, from so-called sangomas or witch doctors, before setting out on the day’s business, pistol or assault rifle in hand. But “occult”, for those who know Latin, also has another meaning: “that which is concealed or difficult to detect”. Now, I am not of the school that looks for “influences” in an author’s work, but perhaps Fanie Olivier did to some extent acculturate during his many years at the University of Venda.

He has an uncanny belief in the powers of obfuscation, the ruse, making simple things abstruse, even claiming that our society, Pretoria PEN, “ceased to exist long ago”, as if he were waving Harry Potter’s magic wand or throwing the bones in a dark hut in Venda while declaiming some powerful incantation that will change a man into a croccodile or cause someone to drop dead hundreds of kilometres away.

I know vampires are fashionable too. Or the girl with the dragon tattoo. But the next scene in Fast Fanie’s racy tale (a previous cricket player here had the nickname, “Vinnige Fanie”) shifts to South Korea where, during the annual congress of PEN International, he presents himself as not only the President of Pretoria PEN, having hijacked us by remote control, magically, as it were, by email from Poland, but also its chief name-changer. Now, it so happens that name changes are another touchy topic in South Africa. One day you may be driving down a street, and the next the name may be changed to that of some Party stalwart or some arcane figure from a non-existent past, such as the mythical Chief Tshwane who, legend has it, founded a lost city, more or less in the same place as present-day Pretoria and therefore deserves to be eponymously honoured.

In the book South Africa’s Brave New World, R.W. Johnson ascribes a lot of the current South African obsessions with gambling, palaces and lost cities to the influence of entrepreneur Sol Kerzner who built a series of such casino palaces and follies, replete with artificial waterfalls and lakes, even beaches, in another Bantustan, the Republic of Bophutatswana. Johnson states somewhere that SA has now become “one big Bantustan”. Not far from where I live, there is a Renaissance Tuscan village with a casino and shops inside and artifical stars twinkling on the ceiling. Very African, you might say.

In a Bantustan, by knowing the right people and oiling the right palms, you could become a millionaire, and go off to Las Vegas or the Bahamas and repeat the trick there. Just look at Sol Kerzner. Vinnige Fanie is a man of ambition who knows his way around any Bantustan, especially the Grand Bantustan that Johnson refers to. He is also a lawyer, an advocate at the Durban bar, so able to ensnare hapless authors in his byzantine legalistic strategems.

But let’s stick to our plot and get back to the city of Gyeongju in South Korea. This is also historical, for it must be the first name change in history that was decreed in a completely different country, in the Far East, where dragons and not kitsch concrete elephants usually adorn the palaces. Poor old Pretoria, poor old Kruger whose statue still stands – for the time being at least – on Church Square, Pretoria. There he gets polluted by pigeon droppings and some pieces of his bronze get hacked off, nay hijacked by entrepreneurial individuals,  who sell them to scrap metal dealers. And Church Street was found to be such an offensive name that it was changed to… what? I will have to look it up on Google, one moment…

This is all very confusing. Church Street in Pretoria was so offensively long, being one of the first streets laid out in the city, that its name had to be changed to four other names: Helen Joseph, WF Nkomo, Stanza Bopape and Elias Motswaledi.

The only name that I recognise among those ones, is that of Helen Joseph, who happened to be a communist and not some legendary chief of the city lost in the mists of time, out of Rider Haggard or Edgar Rice Burroughs.

There is such a thing as Cape Communism. Or the Stellenbosch school of Marxism, which is why the university there is sometimes referred to as Stalinbosch. It is also a place where authors get banned if they do not say the right things, like I was banned from appearing on campus in 2005 during the Woordfees festival but finally managed to participate in a panel discussion only because I had armed bodyguards protecting me from being attacked by rabid Red Guards who regarded me as a bad influence on the public. In fact, I have it on good authority that some zealots are pressing for my books to be removed from the library of the University of Stellenbosch for being sexist or racist or both.

One of the people who accused me of “sexism” was André Brink who writes barely disguised autobiographical novels boasting about the number of his female conquests and in his latest novel, Philida, makes liberal use of the ethnic slur, “kaffir”, for which people in South Africa normally get dragged before the Equality Court and fined or even imprisoned. See the logic there? I don’t.

But back to Gyeongju where Pretoria PEN became the latest casualty of the ANC government’s name change policy, no doubt because it was seen as an “offensive” name, as offensive as the capital’s name or Paul Kruger’s name whose statue is being slowly devoured by the clients of scrap metal dealers. According to Fanie Olivier, delivering his rambling speech in Stellenbosch, “Pretoria PEN” was a “random” name. (He used the Afrikaans word “lukraak”, which more or less means random.)

One month after the meeting in Gyeongju, shortly after asking for Fanie Olivier’s address as it seems that this little exercise, plagiarised from the writings of Franz Kafka, will now go to court, I receive a laconic email from PEN International stating the following:

“We are writing to inform you that on 14 September 2012 the PEN International Assembly of Delegates at the 78th PEN Congress in Gyeongju, Korea voted to change the Pretoria PEN Centre’s name to PEN Afrikaans.
Following this decision, Pretoria PEN no longer exists as a Centre of PEN International.”

How curious. So our legally constituted literary society, founded in the real city of Pretoria, not some fictional realm of the imagination or the ANC government’s commissars, may be vaporised without even consulting us. No right of appeal, nothing.

Talking of commissars, is it any coincidence that the South African Minister of Higher Education also happens to be the leader of the Communist Party, that old blade runner, known as Blade Nzimande? Logically, those academics down at the University of Stellenbosch where the new “cloned” but rebranded Pretoria PEN is ostensibly headquartered, have to kow-tow to their minister who has wide powers to appoint and dissolve university councils. So now we understand a bit better how so many intellectual champions of apartheid and the Bible have now converted to another Book and find organ music execrable.

However, if literature is becoming more and more state-controlled in our de facto one-party state (65% of the population and 90% of black people vote for the ANC and its SACP alliance partner), there are also the corporate powers to consider. Often the big corporations and government work closely together, especially when contracts are awarded. It is generally accepted that the “New South Africa” is one of the most corrupt countries in the world. Not for nothing have we coined the term “tenderpreneur” to describe people doing business with the state.

Add to this mix the National Intelligence Agency whose white, Afrikaner members are apparently so desperate to keep their jobs amid rampant affirmative action that they will do anything to ensnare their own people in acts of high treason, conspiracy and sex scandals. Facebook and the commentary sections of South African web pages are apparently rife with NIA trolls who sow dissension, ridicule and slander. Public figures seen to be “dissidents” or “outspoken” are regularly vilified.

Quite a few members of Pretoria PEN, such as myself and singer/writer Steve Hofmeyr, have been subjected to whole campaigns, also in the media. Several people regularly posted a satirical poem that I had written as a 20-year old everywhere he could and also sent it to thousands of people by email, completely disregarding any copyright I may hold over the poem. One such person was apparently an English-speaking member of a far-right group who considered me to be a danger to society for having written such scabrous satirical poetry in my young days.

Is it pure coincidence that while Fanie Olivier is waging his behind-the-scenes email campaign against Pretoria PEN, there should be another group of trolls on Wikipedia publishing half-truths and distortions about me? When I enquire about their identity, I get promptly banned from Wikipedia! The anonymous literary critics on Wikipedia have also ascertained that I suffer from mental retardation, being insufferably stupid, and that all my books put together contain “nothing of any merit”. At least these Wiki-writers, even if faceless, are not ambiguous.

Part of Fanie Olivier and his henchmen’s approach was to “leak information” to friends, journalists at the Cape Town daily Die Burger and other Naspers publications who would then try to stigmatise me and others. Naspers tabloid Sondag went so far as to draw a completely spurious association between me and a supposed adult-dating site, suggesting that I was a pornographer. Naturally I complained to the Press Ombudsman of South Africa, who ordered the newspaper to publish an apology on its front page. The newspaper lodged one appeal after the other, but each time the original decision was upheld. In a final desperate attempt to stall the apology, the newspaper is suing the Press Ombudsman, a historical first in South Africa.

The journalist from Die Burger who had published Fanie Olivier’s “leak” was also ordered by the Ombudsman to publish an apology to me and Pretoria PEN at the beginning of 2012. That was before Naspers got around to the idea that it could bully the Ombud through lengthy court cases.

Only a few months ago, as president of Pretoria PEN, I testified before the Media Commission about press freedom in South Africa and mechanisms for keeping the Naspers group, which has a total monopoly in Afrikaans media, under control without curtailing freedom of the press.

I strongly suspect that the takeover attempt by Fanie Olivier, John Miles and Piet Haasbroek is being financed by some Naspers entity, such as one of their book-publishing concerns down in Cape Town. An unnamed “sponsor” paid for three people to fly to Gyeongju. At the very least, the name of this sponsor should be revealed, for the sake of transparency.

In the meantime, the Naspers propaganda machine is destroying authors’ or performers’ reputations, almost at will. This is the new censorship in South Africa which, in deference to Fanie Olivier and his fellow travellers, I would call “occult censorship”. It is vague, but no less insidious and effective.

In the old days we had the staid Judge Lammie Snyman and his fellow censors who saw it as their prerogative to protect us from communist or terrorist propaganda and obscenity. They were easy to deal with and almost counter-productive. They made heroes out of people like André Brink or Nadine Gordimer whose books were banned for a few short months or slightly longer before they were unbanned on appeal. Today, we are caught between Scylla and Charybdis, the state that wants to control everything according to the East German model, and the Naspers media monopoly that prides itself on being able to make or break anyone’s reputation. If you had deep pockets, you could take them on in the courts, or otherwise through the Ombudsman. As I have found out, even the Ombudsman will only give you a Pyrrhic victory as Naspers sees itself not bound by any adverse decision from the so-called “self-regulatory body”.

When the Naspers Sunday paper Rapport published the infamous interview with another Pretoria PEN member, Annelie Botes, on 21 November 2010 I immediately saw all the hallmarks of another character assassination. Preying on Annelie’s honesty and concern about crime and violence in South Africa, they focussed on one sentence where she spoke of her inner fears as a member of an ethnic and racial minority. The context was completely disregarded and she was immediately calumnied as xenophobic, even racist.

Annelie Botes is probably the most popular literary author in South Africa. Locally, she far outsells André Brink, Nadine Gordimer, J.M. Coetzee or any of the big names in South African literary fiction. She addresses difficult and courageous themes, such as autism, incest and child abuse in her works. The public loves her for it.

However, as a result of the Rapport interview, the K. Sello Duiker award was taken away from her and just yesterday she confessed on Facebook that her latest manuscript had been rejected by her publisher. In this way, another talented and widely-read author is being silenced.

I see on the CV of Annelie Botes that she also has a teaching licentiate in classical music – the piano – and was at one time a church organist. As a result, she will never be acceptable to any PEN Centre down in Cape Town, least of all one that meets on the campus of Stellenbosch University, with Philistine Fanie as its president.

Let’s make the organ our new resistance symbol, I feel! And the pen, of course, which may just be mightier than the hijacker’s AK-47, even in this country where violence and revolution have been romanticized for so long.

I receive quite a bit of fan mail, despite being banned in Stellenbosch. The other day I got a note from a young hacker who offered to hack the ebooks of all my literary enemies and upload them to the Swedish Pirate Bay and similar websites. That way no one would have to buy their books ever again; they and their publishers would make losses. I declined his offer, being something of a victim of piracy or “hacked” and dismembered works myself.

However, I thought to myself afterwards, have things become so desperate that such extreme measures, sabotaging or pirating the books of others, should be considered? Indeed, there is a sense of “living on the edge” in South Africa. We are locked into a struggle for survival, and in some respects our whole world is caving in around us. Whether it is the Marikana mining massacre or just another everyday xenophobic killing of an immigrant from another African country, or a farm murder, we are living in an “age of iron”, to borrow a phrase from J.M. Coetzee. The latter preferred emigration to Australia.

The theme of fear that Annelie Botes broached in her interview is becoming more and more palpable. Another colleague and Pretoria PEN member, Gustav Venter, has just published his novel Die amigdala van Alrina Smal in which a woman goes almost insane with fear after a sexual assault. Will it even be reviewed by the printed press, I wonder? It also deviates from the post-card multicultural paradise that everybody sees in South Africa and for that reason might fall victim to the new occult censorship.

Effectively, Annelie Botes, Steve Hofmeyr, Gustav Venter, Fransi Phillips and all the other innovative and courageous authors depicting our contemporary reality in their works, together with me, have been excluded from PEN International without due process or any right of appeal. The censors of Stellenbosch and the media monopoly have spoken.

Yet we do need to organise ourselves to confront our imminent exclusion from the literary community, in South Africa and abroad. Already Fanie Olivier is making legal threats to us if we continue to exercise that right as we have been doing since 2004. He claims to have the support of the London management of PEN International.

But we have the right to associate with one another, as well as the right to communicate with other authors and NGOs all over the world. Let no one intimidate us into surrendering that right, nor into giving up the fight for free speech in South Africa.

Britain likes anarchy, especially in South Africa

by Dan Roodt

Over the past week or two, I have been embroiled in a polemic in Business Day and elsewhere about South African and Afrikaner history. First of all, I challenged the ubiquitous assumption that apartheid visited some form of genocide upon South African blacks. Neither did apartheid “withhold education from blacks” as historian Hermann Giliomee has so amply demonstrated in a few recent articles.

I got some irate replies from Mrs. Louise Asmal, wife of the destructive former minister of education Kader Asmal. Mrs. Asmal is Irish, therefore a foreigner enthralled by the stereotyped views of our history proliferating abroad. Dr. Wilmot James of the Democratic Alliance also responded to my “apartheid revisionism” by regaling us on the apparent injustices suffered by his family under the previous South African government.

However, any injustices from 1948 to 1994 must pale into insignificance next to the injustices, nay, atrocities suffered by Afrikaners since 1994, not to mention much of the nineteenth century and especially the Anglo-Boer. One letter writer to Business Day had the temerity to suggest that 34 000 Boer women in the British concentration camps had died as a result of “cultural factors” such as a lack of hygiene.

If only the Germans had thought of that one: the Jews died at Auschwitz and Dachau “because they were dirty”. Take that, you dirty Jew! There you have it, you vile Afrikaner miscreant!

I have often wondered at the source of British arrogance. When I worked in Johannesburg dealing rooms, we were often visited by high-flying financiers out of the City of London with dirty collars and cuffs. In the Johannesburg heat you also became aware that these people, although living in five-star hotels, did not make the morning shower one of their regular habits.

More often than not they were nothing short of uncouth, lacked any form of culture and were given to getting drunk ever so often. Yet these British yobs in dirty shirts with double cuffs sporting flashy cuff links radiated a sense of know-it-all superiority that was a wonder to behold.

The presenter of Top Gear, Jeremy Clarkson, recently fulminated against his own countrymen, saying about Britain: “We are the country that invented the concentration camp.” Notwithstanding Tony Blair’s lies about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, the British sense of moral superiority has never been stirred, let alone shaken.

Talking of James Bond, that great hero of fiction and film, it reminds me of something else: Britons are, like African warlords, “licensed to kill”. That is why it is almost futile to mention any past or present British war crimes and human-rights violations. It will only elicit boredom or the impression that one has broken some rule of etiquette merely by mentioning it.

Currently I am reading a book by one Willem Steenkamp, who is apparently the former military correspondent of the Cape Times. Entitled, Assegais, drums and dragoons: a military and social history of the Cape, it is irritating in parts, because one senses that the author is trying to offer a politically correct re-reading of early Cape history. For example, he spends a whole chapter arguing that the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were marvels of racial integration and intermarriage so that we are all in fact “Coloureds”. If so, then it must be a genetic miracle that Afrikaners from the oldest families still manage to produce offspring that appear even more European in features and in skin colour than the children of many European nations. Every time I drive past an Afrikaans high school, I am simply amazed at the incongruous sight of all these beautiful, gamboling white children in the African sun. On my mother’s side I have a lot of Botha blood, Botha being one of the oldest and most common Afrikaner surnames, going back to the early Cape. Yet a Dutch TV team, with an American geneticist in tow, replete with Harvard Ph.D., gave me a DNA test. To their utter disappointment, I was found to be of 100% European ancestry, or if you prefer, white, that dreaded concept.

However, if one disregards Steenkamp’s attempts at political correctness, the book contains some interesting material on the building of the Castle at the Cape of Good Hope in the seventeenth century. He quotes an author, Mentzel, who described life at the Castle thus:

“…for a man who loves method it is a veritable joy to observe the excellent order maintained in the Castle. The whole work of the day is mapped out by the clock and is performed with the utmost punctuality.”

To some extent, those two sentences describe much of the Afrikaner ideal for South Africa, one we had lived up to for most of the time when he had any say in government. On a recent visit to the Pretoria archives, I was astonished to see the meticulous way in which the early pioneers had immediately set about recording the meting out of the first farms in the Transvaal in the 1840s. I twice saw another of South Africa’s surfeit of Bothas, PW, at his home in the Wilderness near George, and on both occasions he repeated the words to me:  “I believe in orderly government.”

The Castle at the Cape of Good Hope is something of a symbol of that order which we have vainly tried to maintain in South Africa, and not only because the Castle was used as an emblem for the old South African Defence Force, prior to the ANC’s takeover.

Whence the need for such a fortress in the seventeenth century? From the very moment that Jan van Riebeeck and his fellow pioneers set foot in the Cape on 6 April 1652, they had to protect themselves from two constant enemies: the cantankerous, often violent Khoikhoi or “Koina” as Steenkamp calls them,  as well as, of course, belligerent Britain or England as it was known then.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, England was nothing less than a pirate nation, attacking merchant ships from other nations at will, much like Somalian pirates do today in the Indian ocean off the horn of Africa. Again and again the Netherlands had to fend off the English pirates and troublemakers, until the courageous Dutch Admiral Michiel de Ruyter sailed up the Thames and all but destroyed the English fleet. That gave us a few decades of respite.

Unfortunately, the treacherous British who changed alliances as it suited them, eventually got the upper hand and since then our misery here in South Africa has not ceased. Instead of “privateers” holding a commission from Queen Elizabeth I or some other monarch, a licence to rob and kill like James Bond, we are now faced with a motley collection of NGOs, churches, propagandists and rapacious mining magnates who would gladly see South Africa reduced to rubble if only they could make a quick buck in the process.

In the City of London the current anarchy and mining strikes must be a boon to traders who would be long gold and platinum, but short the rand and South African government bonds. They also propagate “land reform” in the hope of destroying our agriculture so that we would ultimately be completely at the mercy of British NGOs like Oxfam or Save the Children. Except, it is not our children that they will be saving.

In this way, there is a strange synergy between the British privateer, his profit motive that does not balk at bribery of the odious ANC officials, and the strange breed of histrionic, publicity-seeking “do-gooder” that also abounds in the British Isles. The latter have wrought almost more evil than the looting privateer or “businessman”. One such individual was Father Trevor Huddleston of the Anglican Church. Without Huddleston and his various public and private stratagems, the ANC terrorist regime would never have come to power in South Africa and we would have been spared the current descent into anarchy.

From my reading of the facts since Huddleston’s fateful arrival in South Africa in 1945, the ANC would long have fallen by the wayside as just another failed, penniless black organisation with megalomaniac dreams. Huddleston more or less “created” – trained, indoctrinated and groomed – subsequently world-famous black heroes such as Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu.

The culture of licence, criminality, violence, prostitution and gangsterish “glamour” that characterised Huddleston’s Sophiatown, would eventually overwhelm the entire country. Of course, Sophiatown has been lionised by English authors such as Nadine Gordimer and Anthony Sampson, the first editor of the black Drum magazine. Gordimer even wrote a roman à clef, A world of strangers, with an ill-disguised Anthony Sampson as the main character, boozing in shebeens and chasing after township whores.

After 1948, Britain or at least Labourite Britain, launched a total propaganda onslaught against South Africa, aided and abetted by much of the local English media who have never shaken off their colonial, jingoist origins during nineteenth-century British rule. They have maintained their fawning, sycophantic dependence upon English so-called “liberal” ideas, together with their often irrational and pathetic sense of “being superior” to Afrikaners.

Recently , the ideal of Sophiatown during the 1940s and 1950s, that “multiracial” demi-monde, has triumphed over that of the Castle. Thanks to the English menace, we have come full circle since 1652. The “excellent order” that we have created by being disciplined and law-abiding, together with the prosperity resulting from that order, have been swept away.

Those periods of South African history when Britain and its callous officials dominated us, notwithstanding its hysterical clergy, inciting blacks or Khoikhoi against the indigenous white population, have always been characterised by the kind of lawlessness and mayhem that we are currently experiencing.

But we must also blame ourselves, in having allowed – despite the historical evidence – this catastrophe. Our forefathers could withstand Britain, for decades and even centuries. They fortified themselves against all those English ships out there and formed commandos of citizens to defend themselves and to maintain order. In fact, the commando system that the ANC abolished had been more than three centuries old!

Why have we been found wanting?

Were Afrikaners ‘dirty African peasants’?

by Dan Roodt

Pauline Morris in Boer women and children died ‘due to backwardness wants to “open up a critical debate on the realities of the Boer War concentration camps”, as part of the wider “de-mythologising” of South African history.

I can only say: “Bring it on!” Let us open the archives and reread the tens of thousands of letters and other evidence that have been gathering dust for over a hundred years. In fact, I recently visited the archives in Pretoria and was the first person ever to peruse some of the files related to the barbaric destruction inflicted by Britain on each and every farm and household in the Transvaal and especially the Free State. Some, but not all, victims received derisory compensation for their losses after the war.

To some extent, dr. Elma Ross has already revealed the true nature of the camps by describing her own family history, characterising the British as “terrorists”. Britain was a signatory to the Hague Convention of 1899, a forerunner of the Geneva Conventions prohibiting war and atrocities upon civilians. The Hague Convention entered into force on September 4, 1900, just in time to apply to the form of “total war” that Kitchener and Roberts waged upon the entire Boer population during the second, non-conventional phase of the war.

There can be no doubt that, were it not for the policy of “reconciliation between the two white races” followed after the war, culminating in Union in 1910, Britain would have been prosecuted for war crimes under the Hague Convention, just like Germany was after World War II. Some Afrikaner groups believe that Britain could still be prosecuted even today. At the very least Britain should be made to acknowledge its war crimes at the European level, similar to demands by former French President Chirac that Turkey should “recognise its past” and the Armenian genocide (1915-23) before being able to join the EU.

Whatever the sophistries thought up these days by British historians and their colleagues at jingoist institutions like the University of Cape Town where Elizabeth van Heyningen is apparently a professor of history, it cannot be denied that the camps formed part of a military operation. That they were partly successful in breaking Boer resolve to defend their sovereignty, is also widely acknowledged.

The jingoist case for Afrikaner women and children “dying due to ignorance and lack of hygiene” seems to rest upon the wider English belief (or myth?) that pioneer Afrikaners in the nineteenth century were not, as Prof. Elizabeth van Heyningen puts it in one of her journal articles, “civilised Europeans” but “dirty African peasants”.

That these “dirty African peasants” were literate enough to write letters and diaries about their war and concentration camp experiences and that their “civilised” British captors found it necessary to destroy their pianos and other musical instruments while burning down their homes, seem to contradict many a confident English stereotype.

Perhaps we should also enquire about the hygienic habits of Johannesburg’s much-admired uitlander population in the 1890s when the outbreak of syphilis relating to widespread prostitution presented a major public health problem to Paul Kruger’s Republican government.

Is South Africa the next Liberia?

by Dan Roodt

I ended off my last column with a reference to “the dark eye of Africa”, a term used by Laurens van der Post in his eponymous lecture in 1954. Following in the footsteps of Van der Post, how are we supposed to make sense of the sadistic violence, murders and rapes taking place in South Africa every day?

Just yesterday on this website I read of a case where a 38-year old black man raped and murdered his own 92-year old grandmother. Over the last two weeks we have had at least three very high-profile murders, on 13-year old Alyssa Botha, 50-year old André Jordaan and only a few days ago, on the world-famous boxer Corrie Sanders.

According to at least one expert who has analysed our crime statistics released last week, every white person in this country will be exposed to a so-called “contact crime” – an armed robbery or violent attack on his person – over the next three and a half years. More than fifty people are murdered every day, as many as are murdered in some European countries in a whole year!

The worst is, much of the “xenophobic killings” of foreign Africans do not even get reported by the police. Some of them are in the country illegally and the local black policemen turn a blind eye when they are murdered, except where it gets video-ed. Then you might get an account published in the New York Times as happened last year when Barry Bearak described such a murder in Watching the Murder of an Innocent Man.

Many people still pretend that South Africa is a normal society, even a liberal democracy. But they are simply dishonest or blind to the reality that we have become a kind of Barbary Coast, albeit inland, where the rules of pirates prevail. Also the events and controversies surrounding Julius Malema are to be seen in this light, as manifestations of pirates quarrelling over stolen loot.

Malema is rumoured to have ties with organised gangs and black mercenaries from Zimbabwe. Against the backdrop of a sadistic society with atrocities being committed almost as part of a daily ritual like shaving or brushing one’s teeth, the internecine power struggle between Malema and the establishment ANC portend still more conflict ahead.

Both the American Stephen Ellis and the French journalist Stephen Smith characterised the civil war or anarchy in Liberia as a defining moment in Africa after the Cold War. The “paradise of cruelty” created by Charles Taylor in Liberia and Sierra Leone with child soldiers committing atrocities, resonates profoundly with present-day South Africa.

Ironically, South Africa has attained barbarism at the very moment when many international observers – let’s call them naïve do-gooders – saw the country elevating itself to Wesern-style democracy. Even the mayor of Ekurhuleni, the sprawling conglomeration of municipalities cobbled together by the ANC on the East Rand, described the murderers of Corrie Sanders as “barbarians”. And he is both black and an ANC politician, therefore an incumbent of “democracy”; which makes his use of the word so much more significant, even poignant.

Those same “angels of virtue”, the international do-gooders – but who naturally have their own interests at heart too – are fond of explaining our problems by way of institutional failure, socio-economic conditions, “inequality”, or even the ubiquitous scapegoat, “apartheid”. Yet the barbarian urge at the heart of the New South Africa goes far deeper than that. It is more a problem of consciousness. A society can only sustain so much violence. After that it becomes self-perpetuating, a conditioned reflex, a way of life.

Zuma’s little war chant, “Bring me my machine gun”, acquires a whole new meaning, as the motto not only of ANC rule, but of a whole epoch.

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The mine workers at Marikana seem to have opted for violence and intimidation as a far better way of negotiating with mine owners than our byzantine labour laws and regulations. Given the success of their strategy so far, they appear to have been vindicated.

South Africa has become so phantasmagorical, so far removed from any semblance of normality that one has to look to fiction, especially science fiction or a futuristic horror world to gain any understanding of what is going on here. Mad Max comes to mind. But at least Max was driven by rage at the killing of his wife, baby and best friend. Our killers are actuated by pure sadism, by the mystical pleasure of killing, raping and hurting.

 South Africa seems to be doomed to a kind of reverse narcissism. The more it stares into the mirror, especially that mirror held up to it by the mass media, the more it sees an image that is the opposite of itself. During the previous dispensation, which was mostly orderly and without the gratuitous viciousness of the present order, many people saw us as a profoundly evil society. Nowadays, with things falling apart completely and anarchy upon us, those same people and newspaper pundits discern in this utterly sick society a pristine exemplar of liberal democracy and human rights.

 Malema is already the Big Man of South African politics. He just needs a militia to take us, as they say, to the next level.

Apartheid protected us from Africa’s ‘dark eye’

by Dan Roodt

In response to my letter originally published in Business Day and available as a column here, Apartheid evil is hype, there has been at least three irate replies (see underneath) and one of support, Apartheid better than nightmare of ANC rule. Dr. Wilmot James of the DA even wants me to “apologise” for “denying him his history”.

I find this rather strange as his party is more or less the successor of the National Party. Especially in Dr. James’s Western Cape, many ex-NP members and therefore apartheid “perpetrators” still hold office or are otherwise to be found in positions of influence within the DA. If they were really “war criminals” deserving a Nuremberg trial, would they have been so readily accepted by Dr. James as colleagues?

Every departure from orthodoxy is normally treated with disdain, if not outrage. However, given the increasing crisis in our country, it is high time that we went back to the drawing board and revisited some old political themes that have kept us busy for over a hundred years, if not more.

Apartheid revisionism should not threaten anyone as I am sure not even die-hard supporters of apartheid wish to return to the system pertaining in the 1960s. But we still need to understand our recent history, as opposed to mere propaganda and exaggerations. We could do with a bit more of the French penser à contre-courant.

Anti-apartheid author Nadine Gordimer referred somewhere to the “Manichean poison that she was forced to imbibe” in her works. But is this not true of the entire anti-apartheid movement? In order to succeed and to persuade the Scandinavians to donate millions to the ANC, the old system needed to be painted in starkly moral terms, as a Manichean conflict between good blacks and evil whites/Afrikaners.

The reality was of course much more complex and murky than that. And these days, as they say, we are getting mugged by reality in many ways, sometimes literally.

At least Mrs. Louise Asmal admits that “apartheid’s crime against humanity had nothing to do with death camps and mass graves”. If we can all agree to that, the type of apartheid revisionism that Hermann Giliomee and I have been advocating has already largely succeeded. In this, Mrs. Asmal has been preceded by Judge Albie Sachs who similarly told me a few years ago in Pretoria that “comparisons between apartheid and Nazism were not helpful”. Now we just need to persuade Archbishop Tutu and his former Truth Commission of the same thing, and there might be enough common ground to talk to one another.

Being an alumnus of Wits, I had a very sparse education, especially on apartheid theorists. I do not think anyone at Wits has ever read anything by Afrikaner politicians or theorists besides the out-of-context quote from Verwoerd on Bantu Education, the true purport of which Giliomee has so magnificently elucidated in his recent articles. Fortunately for me, I was given a lot of old political books a few years ago that originated from the late Otto Krause’s library, so at least I learned something about the political thinking prior to 1994.

No serious apartheid theorist, at least since the Second World War, has ever claimed, as Mrs. Asmal puts it, “that the white man was inherently superior to the black, and hence somehow acquired a right to rule over him and train him up to be a servant to his white master”. This is precisely the kind of crude reductionism which is as “unhelpful” as the oft-repeated truism that apartheid was a form of Nazism.

Verwoerd, if anything, erred in his assessment of blacks’ capacity for rapid and autonomous development. In this respect Verwoerd was far closer to Steve Biko’s type of thinking around black self-sufficiency than to traditional colonial ideas of European superiority that Churchill, among others, believed in.

According to Giliomee in Reconsidering Verwoerd and Bantu Eduction, Verwoerd was appalled that the Congo had become independent without any trained administrators. He defended his educational policy by saying: “We shall have to negotiate frequently in future with blacks about many things, including educational matters and policy issues. It would be better to negotiate with people with a good grounding and properly trained.”

So Verwoerd, unlike the myth that has been created by anglophone liberals and leftists, really was a “champion of education for black South Africans” (see below, the letter by Marius Roodt of Boksburg).

Admittedly, there existed unfair or even draconian measures under apartheid which have been enumerated many times, such as petty segregation, influx control and group areas, to which Dr. Wilmot James alludes. However, I am sure we could find similar, if not worse, excesses in the current system. Many informal settlements or slums have been forcibly cleared or relocated under the ANC government, just like Sophiatown, District Six or Fordsburg. Many Afrikaners have lost their family farms due to land reform. Each such event must be analysed on its own merits, instead of attributing it simply to the blind ideological fervour of the previous government. PW Botha once explained to me that he had only decided to move District Six during his tenure as Minister of Community Development after pleading at length with the landlords to maintain their properties and to stop a slum culture from developing there.

Ultimately, apartheid was an African political system adapted to African conditions, often in response to intense violence and the constant threat of political instability, especially during the Cold War. If we compare South Africa to Mocambique, Angola, Tanzania or even Zimbabwe, we can see that we have been spared the worst of an African-style socialist revolution. At least until now.

There is a uniquely African horror which apartheid protected us from and which is again manifesting itself in the form of farm murders, child rape, xenophobic killings and our slide into mayhem. Conrad painted it in Heart of Darkness, as well as Coetzee in Disgrace. Laurens van der Post gave an interesting lecture to the Psychological Club of Zurich on 3 March 1954, which was subsequently published by The Hogarth Press, entitled The Dark Eye in Africa.

To us as Africans, it is of no use to repeat the moralisms and platitudes of the foreign-born, Scandinavian-financed anti-apartheid movement, even if they do represent the dominant ideology now. We need to find our own truth, commensurate with our unique reality.

LETTER: Roodt must apologise

Business Day, 12 September 2012

I WAS appalled to read Dan Roodt’s ignorant and insensitive revisionist rantings (Apartheid evil is hype, Letters, September 10).

Evil is surely not reducible simply to the existence of death camps. It did not start there but the National Party’s apartheid policies systematically and deliberately stripped black people of their assets.

Mr Roodt’s “refined” Hendrik Verwoerd created Bantustans that became the impoverished dumping grounds for so-called surplus black people. In urban areas, the act of seeking a livelihood was regulated by influx control, pass laws and routine time in jail — and for black people in their thousands.

Mr Roodt’s “cultured” Dr Verwoerd shut down the great Jan Hendrik Hofmeyr’s feeding schemes for all (including black) children introduced during the war, closed the mission schools that educated individuals like Nelson Mandela and criminally, deliberately and shamefully invested a mere pittance in the education of black children.

His colleague, the equally “cultured” Dr Eben Donges passed laws that split up families (the Population Registration Act classified half my family white and the other half coloured), criminalised sex and marriage across the colour line and enacted the Group Areas Act that saw my father lose the house he built with sweat and labour not once, but twice.

Mr Roodt’s beloved John Vorster passed one law after the other to put anyone with a moral conscience in jail without trial (I spent five days of hell in the Bellville Police Station and three weeks in Victor Verster Prison under the Internal Security Act, a picnic compared to what my brother-in-law and others had to endure at the hands of Jeff Benzien’s torture) and unleashed his security police and the death squads on those who had the courage to resist apartheid. That many South Africans nevertheless made a success of their lives was despite apartheid.

This is personal you see. With his pen Mr Roodt denies me my history. With his pen Mr Roodt denies millions of South Africans their history. Shame on you. You owe all of us an apology. All because you thrive on attention, howsoever perversely it is obtained.

Dr Wilmot James

Federal Chairperson: Democratic Alliance.

LETTER: What gall, Mr Roodt!

Business Day, 12 September 2012

WHERE does Dan Roodt (Apartheid evil is hype, Letters, September 10) get the gall to write as he does? Has he no idea of what apartheid meant to most South Africans?

Apartheid’s crime against humanity had nothing to do with death camps or mass graves. Apartheid’s crime against humanity was to proclaim that the white man was inherently superior to the black, and hence somehow acquired a right to rule over him and train him up to be a servant to his white master.

Dr Verwoerd, when he was native affairs minister in 1954, asked in the senate: “What is the use of teaching a Bantu child mathematics when it cannot use it in practice?” (Note the demeaning use of “it”). He was quite clear that Africans could never aspire to equality with “Europeans”; therefore their education should give them no hope of bettering themselves.

Perhaps Mr Roodt may now admit to being rather more of a buffoon than my late husband.

Louise Asmal

Via e-mail

LETTER: SA now a better place

Business Day, 12 September 2012

DAN Roodt (Apartheid evil is hype, Letters, September 10) makes the quite staggering claim that apartheid should not be classified as a crime against humanity. Any right-thinking person cannot deny that apartheid was exactly that! Black South Africans were stripped of their citizenship, forced to undergo schooling in a language not of their choice, removed from areas where they had made their homes, barred from numerous professions, and prevented from attending the university of their choice, along with numerous other indignities and infringements on their rights.

He also makes the mind-boggling assertion that Hendrik Verwoerd was actually a champion of African education. However, in 1966, the last year of Dr Verwoerd’s premiership, only 1,547 Africans wrote matric, of whom 56% achieved a pass. This is compared to 2010, when nearly 450,000 black South Africans wrote matric, with a pass rate of 63%.

For such an avowed crusader of education for black South Africans Dr Verwoerd had quite a patchy record in this regard. While he was prime minister, the ironically named Extension of University Education Act was passed, which forced black South Africans to attend “bush colleges” rather than the established universities of the major cities, which were restricted to whites. He was also quoted as saying in 1953: “There is no place for (the Bantu) in the European community above the level of certain forms of labour.… What is the use of teaching the Bantu child mathematics when it cannot use it in practice?” He was also quoted as saying that the aim of Bantu education was to keep “the Bantu child a Bantu child”. In the 1960s the average spend by the government on a white pupil was at least 10 times of that of a black pupil.

Dr Verwoerd was a great many things, but a champion of education for black South Africans he was not.

Harking back to a bygone “golden era” of apartheid (even Julius Malema has been guilty of this recently) is dangerous. This country has a great many obstacles to overcome, but headway is being made. The increase in literacy, the phenomenal number of houses built, the electrification of millions of homes, and the constitution are all major achievements and evidence of a better SA. This country has major problems, but there is absolutely no doubt that this is a better place than it was under the leadership of Dr Verwoerd.

However, we must remain vigilant.

The dumping of textbooks in Limpopo was inexcusable and the current crisis in education is, along with a number of other issues, a warning sign for our country.

We should work together to ensure that SA becomes a success, and that all races feel at home in this great country. A successful SA will ensure that claims that this country was better under apartheid will be rightly scoffed at.

Marius Roodt (no relation)

Boksburg

Nothing maverick about The Daily Maverick’s sucking up to Woolworths

The Daily Maverick should rebaptise itself as “The Cute Conformist”, for that is really what it is, a bunch of people who sound like your average ANC propagandist on the SABC, except they think they are cute.

One such very cute conformist writing for that cyber rag is a certain Justin MacCarthy. I had never heard of him, until someone mentioned that he had accused me of producing a rant against Woolworths. MacCarthy is given to clichés, so probably everyone who does not agree with him, is guilty of “ranting”.

However, one of the commentators on his piece states that MacCarthy is actually the MD of TBWA/Hunt Lascaris who happens to be the lead advertising agency for… You guessed it: Woolworths. How mercenary, how venal! If this is the quality of people Woolworths actually pay to do their PR for them, I am getting more and more confident that we are going to bring the PC Cape firm to its knees with our current campaign.

Judging from his profile on The Daily Maverick, alias The Cute Conformist, MacCarthy also lives in Durban. Yes, that hot and humid place in KZN, the area where they speak Zulu. I have some memories of Durban and petty ethnic insults that seem to sprout amid the tropical verdancy in that “Indian Ocean City” as Mbeki referred to it during the World Conference Against Racism that yours truly proudly attended. I was one of about five whites among the multicultural multitude. I saw the ANC wasting a few hundred million rand to produce hot air, amid general disorganisation, non-functioning interpretation systems (with all the equipment lying around) while Jews and Palestinians screamed at each other.

Talking of petty ethnic banter in Durban, that is about the sum total of the stupendously brilliant “adman” Justin MacCarthy’s intellectual repertoire. Not only does he fulminate – or “rant”, to bring it back to his set of platitudes – against Afrikaners, but also against white English-speaking South Africans (Wessas). In fact, his tedious sermon of an article bears the long-winded title: “Moaning Myrtle and Mrs Woolworths: Why white English speaking South Africans are failing our country.”

MacCarthy’s penchant for cliché and the unexamined idée reçue is complemented by his urge to entertain us on his autobiography. Therefore in the first paragraph he lurches into confessing that he is actually a foreigner, an uitlander. Again, I seem to recall Mbeki declaring at some point: “Never again will you be uitlanders,” addressing himself to some undefined leftist and presumably white alcholic or drug-crazed populace with a stated allegiance to Great Britain and its creation, the ANC, like the uitlanders of old. However, Justin MacCarthy uses the word buitelander, which lacks the historical reference to the people who caused the Anglo-Boer War. The most hilarious part of his preaching which I am going to quote at length here, as I am sure it will amuse you too, is that he “is not given to generalisations”. Apparently he was at Wits, that bush college in Jan Smuts Avenue which I also attended in days gone by. However, “An Introduction to Logic” in Philosophy 1 was oviously not one of the courses he took:

“When I first came to South Africa, I thought racism belonged to white Afrikaners of a certain ilk. How disappointing, then, to find that the selective blindness plaguing the country is not only frighteningly widespread, but that even a new generation of white people feels as entitled as ever.

I’ve followed the furore in a frappuccino over the Woolworths boycott with a great deal of interest these past few weeks. When the ‘story’ broke I admit I was quite dismissive and thought it would be over by the time I’d finished my double espresso. I was wrong. Not to inflate the issue with any greater import than it deserves, but it got under my skin and irritated me like a mozzie in my ear. In fact, I find the entire matter not only distasteful but quite alarming. It’s actually revealed an issue of much greater proportion than I imagined – and one of critical national importance.

I’m not given to generalisations. They’re often concocted from a narrow base of opinionated observation and therefore dangerous. However, I am making an exception here, and using several, which (in my defence) are based on many years of broad-based observation. So when I refer to white English-speaking South Africans, for instance, I refer to them as a collective – which is, by definition, a generalisation, and therefore unfair. I admit upfront that my accusations are far from universal.

In my teens, my primary association with Apartheid was not blacks or coloureds or Indians (we were separated then) but the white Afrikaner male. I was a buitelander to them (being an Irish import), and I was here in their land of milk and honey by their good grace. When I turned 16 they insisted I join their army. I politely declined. They did everything in their considerable power to force me into conscription, including amending a law to close a loophole on dodging buitelanders. They bullied and intimidated me and threatened me with all manner of foul impositions, so that my lasting impression of the Afrikaner was that of a myopic, insecure bully, empowered to enforce doctrine and dogma by the authority of their illegitimate State. Their leader, the serpentine, lip-licking, finger-wagging Groot Krokodil who spat threatening warnings about black people and communists and the devil from my parents’ television set, personified everything that was grotesquely distasteful about this tribe of denialists. I evolved into adulthood with a deep distaste for anyone who belonged to this tribe, a view that was compounded by the police intolerance and brutality I witnessed first-hand at demonstrations on Wits campus. Their iron-rigid dogma, unshakable intolerance and viciously violent enforcement of their will awoke in me the horrors of Apartheid and the hotbed of student activism that fizzed comparatively peacefully around the fringes of the township violence so prevalent throughout the eighties. Even at a liberal institution like Wits University, I had to sign my name and student number to access the special library reading room where one could consume the filth penned by the likes of Marx and Engels, under constant suspicion that Craig Williamson was taking note of my silent revolutionary intentions.

My prejudice was hard to shake, and every now and then I get an unpleasant reminder like a surge of indigestion that elements of this benighted tribe remain. Like when I read Dan Roodt’s rant about Woolworths and his “War Against Racism”, or when I learned of the trade union organisation Solidarity’s call for a boycott in which they take an appallingly poor dig at Woolworths’ proposition (“making a differentiation” [sic]). However, this should not be unexpected, as a vocal number of Calvinistic Afrikaners are rather disgruntled by their loss of absolute authority. It sits uncomfortably with aspects of their superior being belief system.

Yet many, many are not. Many get on with life and work an honest day and pray to their god and demand no more than what is enshrined in our Constitution. They have skills and application and they possess a can-do attitude. They make a number of aspects of our economy productive and efficient. They pay their taxes and help their neighbours and are generally cheerful and conscientious citizens who understand that as possessors of knowledge and skill, they have a responsibility to deliver on their contribution to making this country stable and prosperous.

What struck me about the calls to boycott Woolworths was the reaction of middle-class English speaking white South Africa. In as much as a cry of racism is expected from diehard enclaves of the Afrikaner resistance, I didn’t expect the outpourings of bile from this bunch that I thought understood the dynamics, if for no other reason than they are the beneficiaries of the finest education South Africa has to offer. The weight and volume of derogatory comments, misinformed myopism and out-and-out racism shocked me. PRAAG, the pro-Afrikaner organisation of which Dan Roodt is some sort of high priest, has managed a whole 1,500 petition signatories in their WAR on Woolworths. That’s pretty feeble. My 13-year-old son has half that many BBM contacts. Dan the Man also has 2,665 Twitter followers. Solidariteit doesn’t disclose the number of signatories to their anti-Woolworths campaign, but they do have 12,500 Facebook fans collected over the three years they’ve had the profile (the trade union itself was founded in 1902). They also have 2,880 Twitter followers. It’s probably safe to assume that the majority of their members support their cause either actively or passively. These are the guys claiming to be behind the temporary suspension of Woolworths’ Facebook wall. Assuming a high duplication of Facebook and Twitter fans/followers, neither organisation has a particularly impressive following in the numbers game.

Conversely, an English speaking blogger and self-styled “internet marketing” expert by the name of Justin Harrison has 34,600 Facebook fans and 68,900 Twitter followers, although he maintains he doesn’t like Twitter and is going to close his account – which two weeks later he still hasn’t gotten around to doing. He has, since he went public with his protest over Woolworths, protected his Twitter account under the pretext that he couldn’t take the hate. His blog, http://www.justinharrison.com/,has a significant following, although it has been down for some days with a redirect to his Facebook page, leading me to suspect him of attempting to control the buzz. Perhaps his views on EE were having an effect on his business interests. Now, Mr Harrison has courted quite a bit of controversy since his call to boycott. 2OceansVibe, a streaming radio station and website that appears to be developing a bit of a CSI bent, did an exposé of sorts on Harrison’s social media following after some industry folk asked “who?” when his numbers were bandied about. His website has subsequently undergone unscheduled maintenance for the past 10 days, lending more credence to my suspicions.

Controversy, bought followers and credibility questions aside, what Harrison did achieve was to be the first to spot the Woolworths recruitment ad and create a fuss (according to him at least). His various blog posts, Facebook posts and tweets ranted about the gross unfairness, unconstitutionality and immorality of Employment Equity. He fed the trolls and they feasted. By comparison, the News24 comments feed was relatively tame. Now that takes some doing.

Immersing myself in this swamp emanating from the bile ducts of the internet, I discovered a whole boil of racism festering and seemingly lanced by the Woolworths recruitment ad. The majority of the whining came from English speaking whites, possibly because they make up a disproportionate percentage of Woolworths’ customer base, or possibly because they’re just as racist as their Calvinistic broeders. What they almost universally displayed was a distinct misunderstanding of the difference between BBBEE and EE (which are related, not equated) and a complete insensitivity to what Ferial Haffajee in her fabulous article The Woolworths boycott brigade eloquently termed “intergenerational privileges”. The dramatic irony of their invoking Constitutional rights they had barely anything to do with coupled with a blind miscomprehension of just how fundamental redress is to their survival, forged from the vantage point of their soapbox of inherited privilege, is so ironic as to be worthy of a Shakespearean three-part drama.

Here’s the reality, white South Africa, whether or not you like it, agree with it, are guilted into submission or just plain accept it as part of living in this magnificent country: unless we address the grotesque imbalance of access to the corridors of wealth creation, this country will fail and it won’t by any stretch be just the government’s fault. It will be just as much your own. This country is magnificent while you have access to education, jobs, skills and the means to make a good living. It’s not if you don’t and are forced to live off government grants and have no real prospects of improvement. That plain sucks. It sucks emotional energy and replaces it with anger and resentment that feed the monsters like Julius Malema who use it for the advancement of their personal agenda. Malema is a dangerous character, not because of who he is, but because of the support he can mobilise. When you have no voice and no representation, you’ll take Julius over nothing. Silence Julius, and another thousand will fill his place. Look at the history of civilisation, and every time the inequality gap has reached a tipping point. You have to be blinded by dogma not to get it.

If you are a white product of the new South Africa (in the sense that you were born after 1990 or so) then open your mind and read our history. You cannot dismiss Apartheid as the “sins of our fathers”.  As hard as that may be to swallow, it’s a fact, and as much as you may feel a victim of history, be bloody thankful you weren’t born black in 1960. You have been born to a position of privilege, so quit moaning about a small element of job reservation and use that privilege to your own advantage. Learn some more skills, work that much harder, or go to the big school of entrepreneurism and take the hard road.”

I apologise for subjecting you to all that, but I felt it to be quite a revealing “confession of an adman”. Now I understand why most advertisements in South Africa these days do not show any white faces, why Vodacom thinks the average white man has never heard of “Bluetooth” and needs some black genius to explain it to him or why paying a visit to your local bank often feels like a visit to a branch office of the Cuban Communist Party, as you will be confronted with socialist-realist-style propaganda posters masquerading as advertising or “corporate communication”.

Let me just summarise three of his dogmatic and ethnocentric suppositions, which any mild application of intelligence, historical research and coherent argument will reveal to be baseless.

Afrikaners are a benighted tribe: Just name one other tribe in Africa and many other parts of the world that has produced the finest body of prose and poetry on the African continent, folk songs, Cape Dutch houses, as well as modern and postmodern architecture, our own popular music stars, engineering feats such as the old Transnet, Eskom, Sasol, the Rooivalk helicopter, G5 and G6 cannons, not to mention the atom bomb by means of an innovative enrichment process.

Whites have inherited privilege: Unlike in the U.K. and many European countries, we white South Africans do not really have a class system. We are far poorer, on average, than most Westerners for the simple reason that we have poured a huge amount of our income, wealth and manpower into “black upliftment” over decades and even centuries. Since 1948 we have spent trillions of rand on blacks via our taxes, charitable contributions, donations, corporate responsibility programmes, church welfare schemes, etc., only to demonstrate the old adage: “Never a good deed shall go unpunished.” We owe blacks absolutely nothing. In fact, they owe us. Big time!

Without BEE, EE and the alphabet soup of discriminatory measures, this country will fail: No, this country will fail because of these measures. Already the wholesale ethnic cleasing of white engineers and accountants from the municipalities has caused many towns and cities to fail, with raw sewage running down the streets and into rivers, the degradation of roads and a chaotic lack of town planning, no to mention the financial bankruptcy of many such towns. The same goes for state hospitals, Eskom and Transnet. The only reason why Eskom is still functioning, is because of its huge tariff increases, to “fund” the structural inefficiences brought on by rampant greed and affirmative action.

Woolworths, too, is taxing its white consumers to finance its sojourn into the dizzy world of ANC race politics. Very soon you will see quotes from Steve Biko and Frantz Fanon printed on your insipid packet of Thai spring rolls at Woolworths, as those two are apparently very much en vogue at the moment.

I am an Afrikaner or, by Justin MacCarthy’s and probably Woolworths’s definition, an “element of this benighted tribe” that “remains”. In one of Zapiro’s cartoons he actually referred to the old South Africa as “Jurassic Park”, with the same kind of exasperation that Afrikaners are not yet extinct. Despite the murder of 3000 farmers, the killing last week of André Jordaan of Muldersdrift and the week before of 13-year old Alyssa Botha. And all the others that have been raped, killed, humiliated, driven off through affirmative action, insults, innuendo, baseless accusations of being “guilty of a crime against humanity” and so on.

We are still here, against all odds. Unlike the white Rhodesians, the Portuguese of Moçambique and Angola (500 years of Portuguese settlement in Angola), the Indians of Idi Amin’s Uganda and other African minorities who have simply been ethnically cleansed from their lands, we refuse to bow to the pressure to simply “move on”. We are supposed to go and disappear into the wider Anglo-Saxon empire, somewhere in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom. After all, the more effective form of genocide, apart from simply massacring the target population, is assimilation.

However, although I consider myself an Afrikaner, we must acknowledge that the total onslaught – PW Botha did not live to see his term vindicated by the New South Africa – is against all whites in this country. In a sense the ANC has never recognised that there are two language communities, two Western cultures, in this country. To them, we are simply “the whites”, the “non-designated group” against whom it is fine to discriminate or even to incite violence as Malema and so many others, even Zuma, have done.

There is a community of prejudice between the ANC, Malema, Woolworths, TBWA/Hunt Lascaris and Justin MacCathy. While they cry “racism!” at every turn, their style of generalisation, of stereotyping, of Kafkaesque accusation and calumny correspond to most legal or academic definitions of racism or ethnic prejudice. That is why I am going to lay a complaint of “apartheid” against Woolworths, because they are more guilty of apartheid by the international definition than government officials of the old South Africa.

Ultimately, Justin MacCarthy is an identityless opportunist, a drifter without any real culture except maybe yesterday’s American fashion that the mass media will stamp on him like he in turn will toil to stamp it on us and everyone else who queues up at McDonald’s or KFC or any of the global icons that define our “South African”landscape. By the way, someone mentioned the other day that “no white person is allowed to own a McDonald’s franchise”. That is something worth investigating, once we have finished with Woolworths.

The uitlander opportunist that J.B.M. Hertzog referred to as the “foreign fortune seeker” is therefore still with us. As ever, he is the source of conflict and discord. He is the purveyor of lies, propaganda and “generalisations”, slinging mud against “the whites”, notwithstanding our well-nigh pristine human-rights record, compared to other nations, be they German, British, Japanese, American, Rwandan, Cambodian, or whatever.

I specifically refer to Hertzog because he was more or less the inventor of the notion of “South Africanism” and of a broader Afrikaner identity that included all “indigenous whites”.

When an uitlander like MacCarthy, confidently full of his hatred for local whites, having been well fed on British leftist and Scandinavian propaganda in the 1980s, therefore vilifies Wessas, I feel concerned too. In fact, I have a theory that there are only two types of Afrikaners in South Africa: the ones who still speak Afrikaans and the ones who lost their language through British policy in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Of course, today many Afrikaans children are also growing up “English” in foreign lands due to ANC policy, so we are all in the same boat.

This ANC nightmare was foisted on us by Britain, Sweden and Norway who provided the money, the propanda and strategic know-how for what was virtually a coup d’état in the early nineties. Regime change. With an election to follow. How many times have not seen that in the recent past, causing the same violence, misery and instability as in South Africa?

Once the nightmare is over, a new Afrikaner nation will rise up and the old wounds will heal. Once again we will be strong, and fair and tolerant like we have always been.

All those who are currently managing the unjust and, yes, exceedingly racist “transformation system” – and that includes people like Justin MacCarthy who are in a real sense collaborators – wil some day have to answer to us.

However, unlike the ANC and their odious hangers-on, we are not prone to terror and violence. We will use logic and reason to defeat them. The current system is so full of legal and other contradictions that it will almost collapse of its own accord.

But as in those self-defence manoeuvres in which one uses the attacker’s momentum to help topple his body and bring him crashing down, we need to give the system a push in the right direction. Let’s keep on boycotting Woolworths.

Also, don’t forget to sign our petition against Woolworths.

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Apartheid better than nightmare of ANC rule

by S.J. Oosthuizen, Helderkruin

IT WAS expected there would be a rash of anti-apartheid, anti-Dan Roodt replies to his letter (Apartheid evil is hype, Business Day Letters, September 10).

Saying a few positive words about apartheid is tantamount to eschewing Mom and apple pie: the politically correct righteously rush to judgment against anyone who dares to compare what we had with what we have now.

Clearly there were defects and aberrations in a policy that was designed to separate the races. And at a time and in a world where many were unshackling themselves from the yoke of western imperialism, apartheid was an affront.

But then what was to be done? The situation was unique. Taking the United Party’s policy to its end-goal would have simply brought the African National Congress or its surrogates to power 40 years earlier.

The “qualified franchise” so beloved of the political fence-sitters would have been swept away in a wave similar to that which brought Kwame Nkrumah and Julius Nyerere to power, and look what happened to their countries. They still have not recovered.

Apartheid was abhorrent to some and brought hardship. But it gave the government of the day the breathing space to create a functioning country that eventually brought benefits to the broader population.

It’s no wonder so many prominent blacks say “it was better under apartheid”. To your correspondents who say SA is now a better place, I ask which planet are they on? Under the African National Congress (ANC) the country is a travesty. There is not one facet of life that has not been corroded by this government and its hangers-on.

Former ANC member Dave Dalling said “everything the ANC touches turns to dust”. The wholesale plundering of our country continues unabated, and there is no shame, no accountability. Narcissism permeates the ANC’s DNA — nothing is its fault.

A small taxpayer base is bled to support a big welfare state.

Farmers must repair roads to get to market, our hospitals are death traps, our parks and our cities are filthy.

Millions of aliens pay our border police to enter our country at will, our education now ranks with the lowest in the world, and schoolbooks are trashed with nary an apology.

Sewage runs down our municipalities’ main streets while councilors buy yet another big car for themselves.

Over 1-million of our citizens have fled. They didn’t believe the hogwash that it’s better now. There are scores of new crimes, there are only 200 dairy farmers left, while other farmers are regularly murdered.

We are now a net food importer. We can buy a passport, a matric certificate and even a PhD from a government employee for a bribe, and we let animals starve to death on our so-called experimental farms.

Better? They have got to be joking, these people who trash Dan Roodt. A state president with 283 charges of fraud quashed by a tame prosecutor, a mining industry being destroyed before our very eyes, our nurses and doctors raped in hospitals, our so-called leaders stealing from their own children’s feeding schemes.

No, dear correspondents, it’s not better now. It’s a real nightmare and the “international community” who told us apartheid was evil does not have to live under this calamitous ANC regime.

If Africa is more like Singapore, why are we getting so many refugees?

by Dan Roodt

Living in South Africa, one gets used to being called a moron by every visiting foreigner, especially ones of the liberal to left-wing persuasion. After all, they seem to reason, we do not know anything about our own history. We do not understand our own country or our own continent. Nor do we have any grasp of Africa or African culture, despite many of our people speaking African languages and compiling dictionaries in those languages.

The same goes for what is called the mass media. The bigger and more influential they are, the more you will find the view that the average Afrikaner or white commentator in this country is a barely literate buffoon. Many a time I have come across the phrase about this country: “Apartheid destroyed South Africa.”

If you had flown in an aeroplane over South Africa in 1994, shortly after Nelson Mandela became president, you would have seen just how “destroyed” South Africa was. We had more roads and railways than Great Britain. Having a far bigger surface area also helps, I suppose. At one time we were one of the few countries exporting more food than we imported, notwithstanding being a semi-arid country.

The criteria for measuring progress in Africa seem to differ from other places. Economic growth, income per capita,  life expectancy, quality of life, infant mortality, the level of education, all those ordinary measures of a country’s success or progress are suspended in favour of focussing on, well, some racial element.

The racial element could be the mystique of Africa, its smiling, simple people happily singing to some merry tune like the coffee plantation workers on Karen Blixen’s farm  in the Hollywood movie “Out of Africa”. Or it could be the successful eradication of Western influence, the confiscation of land owned by white farmers, the imposition of racial job quotas to prevent whites from working in South Africa, and so on.

Organising a successful pogrom against whites in Africa is always cause for celebration. Whichever dictator or strongman is involved in such an operation, may be assured of vast amounts of Scandinavian aid money before, during and after the operation.

A few weeks ago, the correspondent for the New York Times in Johannesburg, Lydia Polgreen, wrote a more or less glowing account of the Zimbabwean tobacco industry. Since nationalising the farms of white farmers and replacing them with “small-scale” black farmers, the country has taken a great leap forward, it appears.

Enthused Polgreen: “The success of these small-scale farmers has led some experts to reassess the legacy of Zimbabwe’s forced land redistribution, even as they condemn its violence and destruction.” Read the whole article: In Zimbabwe Land Takeover, a Golden Lining.

One week after the publication of this article, the UN’s World Food Programme announced that Zimbabwe was in dire need of food aid for 1,6 million people. This is the result of Zimbabwean “land reform” and “restoring the dignity of the African who no longer toils for a white boss”. Of course, up to half the Zimbabwean population has already fled to South Africa in search of food and jobs where they continue to toil for white bosses in restaurants, on farms and as cleaners and gardeners in suburban houses.

Zimbabweans have voted for Robert Mugabe for years. He has rewarded them with the kind of policies that they preferred: crypto-Marxism, confiscation of white assets, robber capitalism, cronyism, a small elite lording it over an impoverished majority enduring increasing hardship, environmental degradation, collapse of infrastructure, hyperinflation and economic crisis.

However, in South Africa these Zimbabwean voters who have democratically chosen to saunter down the road to national disaster, are considered “refugees”. Not only that, but according to a recent article on The Daily Maverick website, South Africa is the country in the world receiving the most refugees. Last year we took in a whopping 219 368 of them. By contrast, the USA only got 40 000 refugees. In many West-European countries, refugees are considered a major problem when about 20 000 announce themselves at the border posts in any given year. Yet we are supposed to endure the flow of hundreds of thousands of refugees across our borders, together with many more illegal aliens, as part of our fate.

But the biggest paradox of all is the following: Why would any African want to leave his democratic, prosperous, economically booming home country for the not so bright lights of Johannesburg, Pretoria, Durban or Cape Town? After all, according to the world’s mass media, we are “the destroyed country”, the least successful on the African continent.

Perhaps the New York Times correspondent in Johannesburg, Lydia Polgreen, could solve that conundrum. This is all the more remarkable in the light of recent pronouncements by American academics that the image of poor sub-Saharan Africans holding out a begging bowl for help or Bono to organise an aid concert is very passé. Malthus was wrong. Unbridled population growth is the road to riches and Africa’s “youth bulge” represents a “demographic dividend”.

This may sound like satire or sarcasm, but it is not. On the CNN website, I came across a piece asking the rhetorical question: Is Africa the new Asia? Written by Professor Richard Aidoo from the Department of Politics and Geography, Coastal Carolina University, the article asserts that Ghana has had a 13,5% growth rate recently, portending an “African miracle”. On the demographic issue, Professor Aidoo writes:

“Africa has another potential advantage – a youthful population with a hunger for change. Many of the uprisings in support of democracy across the continent have been championed by disaffected young people bitten by the technology bug and anxious for opportunities. For these young and driven Africans, change isn’t a distant hope, but something achievable. The memories of colonial exploitation are receding further into the rearview mirror as young Africans look forward.”

Aidoo cites the British Economist in support of his views. Howard W. French, a New York-based African expert who teaches at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and is a former senior writer and foreign correspondent for the New York Times, concurs that the continent is already way up the economic scale. He writes in The Atlantic:

“Africa, with a population expected to roughly double by mid-century, has become recognized as the world’s fastest growing continent. But the less-told story is of Africa’s economic rise. In the last decade Africa’s overall growth rates have quietly approached those of Asia, and according to projections by the IMF, on average Africa will have the world’s fastest growing economy of any continent over the next five years.

Seven of the world’s 10 fastest-growing economies are African. The continent is famously resource rich, which has surely helped, but some recent studies suggest that the biggest drivers are far less customary for Africa, and far more encouraging for its future: wholesale and retail commerce, transportation, telecommunications, and manufacturing.”

After 18 years of ANC rule, South Africa’s formerly first-world infrastructure is crumbling. Raw sewage is flowing into our rivers. The roads are full of holes. Our previously superb health care system is in a shambles with patients left to die in state hospitals. Despite record spending, the education department cannot deliver school books to some of its schools. South Africa has two million mostly white and corporate taxpayers who supply a welfare state for 50 million people. We are definitely not an Asian tiger economy, but by traditional measures SA is still the biggest economy on the continent.

But those are traditional measures. Clearly, people in the know and pundits associated with The New York Times, have decided otherwise.

If someone could just explain to me why so many Africans are still flocking to this country which suffered so much damage in the past and has still “not quite recovered from apartheid”, I would be really glad. After all, why would you leave one of the fastest growing economies in the world seething with bright young technology entrepreneurs, to settle in our country still blighted by white, Western influence?

Apartheid evil is hype

by Dan Roodt

South Africa is listed in Samuel Huntington’s book as a country prone to a “clash of civilisations”. Hence the acrimonious exchanges that characterise South African discussions of politics and history.

The South African left scored a major propaganda victory some time in the 1980s when reformist National Party policies were vilified as the “apartheid crime against humanity”. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission compared us to the Nazis. Hyperbole reigned supreme.

How many death camps did John Vorster open up and how many mass graves have the BBC shown to the world? The BBC would surely have loved to find even one mass grave as testimony to Afrikaner evil, yet it could only report on rugby player Geo Cronjé’s supposed refusal to share a room with a non-white player a few years ago.

Further investigation of Mr Cronjé’s “crime against humanity” revealed it to be a red herring.

On Wednesday, I reminded listeners of 702 that all history, including apartheid, was open to interpretation. One black SABC journalist responded by saying that I was “revising history and her pain”. However, there is far more pain to come as we witness the shambles our country is turning into. Inevitably, unflattering comparisons are being drawn between the old and the new SA, unflattering to the post-1994 dispensation.

Apartheid revisionism is in the air. Historian Hermann Giliomee recently delivered a hammer blow to the truism that “apartheid withheld education from blacks” by pointing out that “syllabi of schools in the higher standard were the same as those in white schools”.

It is also completely false that Hendrik Verwoerd discouraged the study of science and mathematics in black schools; the main problem was the lack of qualified teachers, as it remains to this day. According to an insider within the Gauteng education department, the maths average among black matriculants is currently a hopeless 20%.

A refined and cultured man like Dr Verwoerd would have been highly shocked by the Limpopo schoolbook affair. No doubt he is “spinning in his grave” as that educational buffoon, Kader Asmal, once put it, but for entirely different reasons. The tragic demise of his educational legacy should fill us all with sadness.

Within an Orwellian climate of hysteria and cries of “racism!” whenever the anti-apartheid myths are exposed, historians and commentators will need great courage to rehabilitate our history to anything resembling the truth.

This piece also appeared as a letter in the Johannesburg Business Day.

You can’t have your banana and eat it

“In his ‘Wrath of dethroned white males’ (see underneath), Professor Malegapuru Makgoba has dared to offer a biological explanation for the power structure that prevails in the new South Africa. Makgoba is perhaps the leading theoretical Africanist in our country today. I am sorry, therefore, to bother him with Eurocentric logic, but his argument represents a tautology,” writes Dan Roodt.

In his “Wrath of dethroned white males” Professor Malegapuru Makgoba has dared to offer a biological explanation for the power structure that prevails in the new South Africa. According to him, the white male has been “dethroned” and should now learn to adapt to a subservient, even submissive, role within our society.

Until now, Social Darwinism or the model of society as a competition for resources where the fittest will survive and prosper, has often been associated with notions of European superiority. After all, Europeans from a minute area in north-western Europe managed to get on to little sailing boats to colonise and rule the greater part of the Earth for a few hundred years. Britain is said to have conquered 100-million people in the Indian sub-continent with 800 soldiers and 2 000 Indian auxiliaries.

Makgoba’s view of African male dominance therefore represents a novel departure from a previously Eurocentric idea. However, he is not the first South African to take an interest in biological explanations for human behaviour or politics. Two of his predecessors would be Eugene Marais and Jan Smuts.

Marais was keen on the study of primates, especially baboons, and wrote two books about them, The Soul of the Ape and Burgers van die Berge. The great Afrikaner physician, journalist, poet and intellectual stressed the similarity between human and baboon behaviour, including an occurrence where he observed human boys and young baboons playing together, making clay figures and imitating one another.

This extraordinary incident is recounted in Burgers van die Berge. It fits in with Makgoba’s view that imitation and “aping” are normal features of both human and baboon societies. Nowhere would Marais, however, advance the notion that imitation was solely linked to hierarchy and dominance.

Makgoba is perhaps the leading theoretical Africanist in our country today. I am sorry, therefore, to bother him with Eurocentric logic, but his argument represents a tautology. Because black males are in power, he deduces that they are both dominant and “fitter” than white males. However, it could be that they are dominant for reasons other than their fitness.

Not so long ago, Mathatha Tsedu, the then editor of the Sunday Times, caused quite a ripple when he wrote in his column on July 13 2003 that black men sometimes display a lack of prowess. He quoted an anonymous Cabinet member who had told him: “When you come from where we come from and you then have to realise that if you want something done quickly you have to rely on whites, it is really debilitating. You bleed internally, but our very own comrades do not work. There is generally no work ethic.”

Of course, there could be a debate about what attributes an alpha male should have in human society. Should he be intelligent, physically strong or both? Should he be a good manager, highly numerate and literate, disciplined and with a good work ethic? Or are these but the traits of a tame white baboon and are universal criteria for primate success such as aggression, reproductive prowess and dominant behaviour more important?

Makgoba’s assessment leans toward the latter interpretation. However, I do not think that the same conditions of Darwinian survival pertain in the human world as opposed to the animal world. Human beings display altruistic behaviour uncommon in many species so that they would not necessarily subjugate the weaker members of their society as happens in a primate hierarchy.

Take the nuclear project at Pelindaba that existed under the previous government, for example. A handful of white Afrikaner males produced six nuclear bombs, deadly enough to kill millions of people in one fell swoop. In a straight Darwinian contest, they should have used that power to eliminate their black male rivals forever, thereby ensuring their own dominance within Makgoba’s scheme of rivalry between white and black males. Yet not only did they refrain from using the bombs, but they handed over power to the black males and peacefully dismantled their own lethal weapons.

Biologically speaking, such behaviour is absurd. No male baboon would be caught dead playing into the hands of his rival. Yet this is precisely what we have seen in South Africa.

At another level, however, one could argue that a form of social Darwinism is still operative at every level in a capitalist society where individuals and companies are selected for fitness through economic competition. This leads to a further contradiction in Makgoba’s argument, for while exalting black male fitness over white male weakness, he insists on affirmative action and black economic empowerment.

Because of racial-preference measures in our society, Darwinian competition, even at the more civilised economic level — as opposed to brute contests with bared teeth and flailing limbs — is flawed.

Either black males such as Makgoba will have to discard racial preference so that the real Darwinian contest may begin, or they will have to continue invoking sympathy for the poor, downtrodden black male having been disadvantaged by centuries of colonial oppression and racism. In other words, they will have to choose between Darwinism and altruism.

As they would say in the baboon world: you can’t have your banana and eat it.

Originally published in the Mail & Guardian on 1 April 2005

Wrath of dethroned white males

by Malegapuru Makgoba
In the primate family, to which humankind belongs, there are certain heritage features which display “clear dominance relationships among members, and the proclivity to imitate”, hence such terms as “aping and monkey business”. Alienated. Quarrelsome. Spoilers. Certain white males exhibit all the symptoms of the dethroned male baboon.

A critical factor of human development and leadership is “our primate heritage” as defined in the book Leading Minds: An Anatomy of Leadership, by Howard Gardner, Harvard University’s distinguished psychologist and professor of education.

In the primate family, to which humankind belongs, there are certain heritage features which display “clear dominance relationships among members, and the proclivity to imitate”, hence such terms as “aping and monkey business”.

These heritage features are most pronounced in males who compete for control of the social cluster, for protection of offspring and possession of the most desirable females.

Baboons or bonobos, for example, are often headed by a dominant male with pretenders to the throne hanging around. The dominant male ensures that progeny are not only his through reproduction, but also that all members of the colony imitate him. He becomes the “gold standard”. Ultimately the dominant male is dethroned by a younger and fitter male, only to repeat another variation cycle of hierarchy, dominance and imitation.

The dethroned male becomes depressed, quarrelsome and a spoiler of the new order until he gets ostracised from the colony to lead a frustrated, lonely and unhappy life. This is our “primate heritage”.

I use this example because baboons are familiar to most South Africans; they are among our closest primate relatives genetically and a totem for some Africans. African people have been referred to as bobbejaan and at times shot and killed by certain white males who apparently “confuse or mistake” us for baboons.

More importantly, I use this example because humankind is reflective and should do better than our primate relatives; also because the dethroned white male in South Africa is playing the same role as dethroned baboon troop leaders do.

The primate practice teaches us that information is not sufficient to bring about change; that change often only occurs when it is enforced on even such a highly sophisticated species as humankind.

A group of dethroned white males called “Die Boeremag” are recently alleged to have been plotting a coup and even entertaining the exciting thought of assembling all Africans on the N1 and then chasing or marching them to Zimbabwe. In their naïve logic, Zimbabwe belongs to Africans and South Africa belongs to whites.

Another group of white males are languishing in a Zimbabwean jail for masterminding a coup in Equatorial Guinea; a group of white male farmers have emigrated to Nigeria; and some white males are alleged to be causing “instability in the Free State”.

Recently, Justice John Hlophe to his credit raised the issue of racism within the Cape Division of the judiciary as largely ascribed to and associated with white males. Many prominent Africans have complained repeatedly and with increasing frequency over the decade about “alienation and institutionalised racism” within the academic, church, corporate, media, sports and public/government sectors of our country.

As the transformation of our society deepens, like the peeling of an onion, more racist white males are being caught, fingered out and revealed. Surely we must by now recognise and respect that Africans who have been victims of racism over centuries and generations understand better than the perpetrators about what racism is, means and feels.

We must equally accept that 350 years of racist experiences and socialisation cannot be overcome in 10 years of freedom. The request for “reconciliation” and “forgiveness” masquerades as a quest for memory loss. Regrettably, whenever an African raises this issue, the white male response has been “to play the man rather than the ball”.

Racism, a socially constructed phenomenon with no biological basis, is a complex system of symbols and meanings that continues to modify over time as a consequence of both societal structural changes and political struggles. A segment of white males continues to deny the collective body of African experiences and instead wants to monopolise and to dictate the definition and appropriate meaning to racism. If and when they do accept the existence of racism, it is often detached and projected. Lately, many African students at campuses of higher learning are complaining about “racism, alienation and social exclusion”. The main culprits are the younger generation of white males imitating their elders.

Similar symptoms of the dethroned are evident in the caustic, negative terms in which the debate about black economic empowerment is framed; in the ways in which black executives are vilified; and in the way in which employment equity is always viewed through the prism of its impact on the longevity and well-being of the (dethroned) white male.

The dawn of the new dispensation has retired a segment of previously dominant and ambitious white males prematurely. This segment has lost its power, authority and a sense of purpose in society. Whether intended or unintended, conscious or unconscious, a sector of white males have an adaptation problem.

They have become bitter; but this also has become a serious problem for our society and a major obstacle to our democratic transformation. Some members of this group, which is out of kilter with the mindset of liberated African society, have become spoilers — across a wide range of activities. It has become not only ungrateful but also oblivious to Ubuntu. This group does not seem to understand the word “reconciliation”.

All these take place in the midst of a society making every effort to reconcile its horrible past and to transform itself into a just, equitable and non-racial society. The creation of a non-racist society will emerge to a large extent through the conscious confrontation of the current pervasive racism by all.

It is crucial here to indicate that not all white males display this obnoxious, arrogant, racist behaviour we continue to experience 10 years after liberation. In fact, to the contrary, many white males have made great strides, great sacrifices and significant contributions to this evolving equitable, non-racist and non-sexist South Africa we are creating through our Constitution and our African renaissance vision.

But the group of spoiler white males, just like the male baboon or bonobo, was once a dominant force through colonial and apartheid conquests. Over centuries this group defined that which was civilisation as opposed to that which was barbarism. He defined that which was liberal as opposed to that which was autocratic. Even when he excluded women, blacks and the uneducated classes in society, he still called this liberal philosophy.

He defined culture, morality, ethics and the shape and form of wealth distribution according to the way it suited and advantaged him. He created and bequeathed the world an illiberal, unjust, unequal, racist and sexist society. Over centuries and through dominant enforcement he ensured that his mindset or world view was imitated without question by those he presided over. This dominant white male has had an unparalleled and unrivalled opportunity in which to shape the history and future of the world and humankind according to his image.

But as history and nature would have it, unfortunately the white male in his prime was never able to conquer everyone. The great Arab and Chinese histories and cultures continued to challenge the monolithic culture of the white male. The indestructible and experiential cultures of the Africans remained impervious and alive despite centuries of imperial invasion and concerted efforts to obliterate these.

With the demise of the empires and of Western values, even the stiff upper lips of these white males begun to quiver. This white male feels ostracised from society and is leading “a frustrated, lonely and an unhappy life away from the herd”.

We now have a predominantly African government presiding over an African country and a predominantly African society with dominant African values. This African force will follow our primate heritage of cultural social clusters, dominance and imitation, with modifications made by our Constitution, which respects human dignity, diversity and non-sexism. It will also be influenced by the context of the 21st century, globalisation and the greater mosaic of interdependent cultures.

Africans will transform and reconcile this society by ensuring that the fingerprints of their African culture, value and knowledge systems and notions of social order are embedded in and are the blueprints of a future South African society.

Africans will not transform this country through previously dominant foreign rules, values or cultures. No dominant group ever transforms society through subservience and alien values. This would simply be against our primate heritage. When the English were dominant we were anglicised, when the Afrikaners were dominant we were Europeanised, now that Africans are dominant we must Africanise and not apologise for our Africanness.

The white male should instead be excited by the new prospects of imitating Africans. When we say “Mayibuye iAfrika” we mean it and mean business. Democratic governments are representative of the will, values and aspirations of the majority and not the will and aspirations of a whingeing white male minority.

While Ubuntu will continue to influence our drive for reconciliation, let there be no doubt that sooner or later African dominance and the imitation of most that is African shall permeate all spheres of South African society

This message should be loud and clear just as the writing is on the wall for all to whom South Africa belongs. All modern democratic societies celebrate diversity around a common vision, in our case an African vision. It should therefore become common sense that the white male soon learns to speak, write and spell in an African language; that he, like Johnny Clegg, learns to dance and sing like Ladysmith Black Mambazo. He should learn kwaito, dance like Lebo, dress like Madiba, enjoy eating “smiley and walkies” and attend ‘“lekgotla” and socialise at our taverns.

He must soon accept, value and imitate the things that matter dearly to Africans. The sooner this white male gets out of his denial mode, the sooner he will receive treatment and proper African rehabilitation. Surely, our white male group can and should do better than the baboon or the bonobo.

Malegapuru Makgoba is the vice-chancellor of the University of KwaZulu-Natal and writes in his personal capacity

Originally published in the Mail & Guardian on 25 March 2005

The failure of South African democracy

Let’s face it: South African democracy has failed. There may still be the trappings of people voting every five years and the annual ritual of parliament being opened, but it has turned out to be just a white elephant.

Every election is a racial census. The average “voter” is answering to a vague ethnic calling of voting ANC in order “to show those goddamn whites”, but has no inkling what the economy, foreign policy or the myriad laws streaming out of parliament are all about. You might as well ask him to vote on the latest theory in astrophysics. He is voting on the colour of the document’s cover, not on the contents thereof.

But the ignorance of the electorate is only the start of the problem. This system of government, the so-called Westminster system, was designed in Britain to suit British people. South Africa is a jumble of languages, races and ethnic groups, a real multiethnic society that has nothing in common with the British isles except that we use British spelling conventions. If anything, we should have had the Swiss cantonal system as Leon Louw and others have suggested, where each district could rule itself and even secede from itself if it no longer found the cantonal policies to its liking.

It is true that the National Party was stupid. But the stupidest thing it ever did was to concede to this insane political system that is destroying our country and leading to massive waste, corruption, genocidal violence, books in rivers or rubbish dumps and a small number of politically connected people living like the mediaeval Pope while the rest of us only scrape by.

Both Aristotle and Plato were skeptical of democracy and considered it even outright dangerous. There are other ways of deciding issues than having a bunch of would-be parasites put their faces on placards and making a cross next to their names, knowing full well that these people are going to steal from the very parliament where they are making laws that we are supposed to obey. I am here referring to the parliamentary travel scandal, of course. But the constant stream of scandals around South Africa’s “leaders” reads like a report from some pirates’ island in the Caribbean, in the days when being a buccaneer was nothing to be frowned upon.

There is no moral principle like “democracy”. An elected leader is no better than a king or an aristocrat or a dictator, unless he behaves better of course. Evidently, South Africa’s elected representatives comport themselves like robbers and the state is their Cave of Ali Baba.

Democracy, at least in theory, should lead to good government. With all the apartheid revisionism going on at the moment, most thinking, honest people are starting to agree that we actually had better government, education and health services when the Afrikaner minority governed South Africa from 1948 to 1994. A Canadian political scientist, Heribert Adam, actually called the thing by its name, an oligarchy. It would have warmed Aristotle’s heart. Or that of Nietzsche, who saw in democracy the most degenerate system ever devised by man.

The old system was an oligarchy and it served us fairly well, a lot better than the current, criminal free-for-all. Of course, in some respects it was slightly feudal and unfair. But no more unfair than the present system, with its “modern”, liberated appearance but dark, primitive underbelly.

The only concept that adequately describes the South African political system is sadism, or taking pleasure in hurting people. It is the rule of people over others who are aware that such rule will cause the others pain. You have to take the punishment and follow ever more complex rules, while they, being sadists, are above the rules.

Our South African rulers are a law unto themselves. Who could disagree with that statement?

Democracy, like any system, is a means to an end. It is not end in itself. To make it more understandable: a political system is like the operating system of your computer. You choose the most functional one that gives you the least problems. If Windows had to crash every second day, then you would change to a Mac or Linux or whatever. Ultimately, you need the system that will run the most smoothly. It must be there in the background and not bother you with constant error messages or sudden freezes, slowness and mood swings.

In the ancient Greek city of Athens democracy existed for less than 200 years before it was done away with under the Macedonians Phillip and Alexander. Even in modern Europe, democracy has not been universal. In Africa, as in South Africa, it remains an experiment and has caused more wars and problems than it has solved.

Apparently one third of all our taxes get lost due to corruption, “tenderpreneurs” and the like. Financially, democracy therefore costs us a third of the annual budget or about R330 billion. This must be the most expensive system we could ever think of, which is destroying the country bit by bit. Even a dictator like Idi Amin or Robert Mugabe would be cheaper as no dictator could possibly embezzle such a large amount every year. In a certain sense, South African democracy means having 5000 dictators raping the country all at once.

Democracy has failed us utterly. Whosoever would deny that, is either stupid or dishonest. Or both.

US-style ‘minority procurement’ or BEE is ill-suited to South Africa

by Dan Roodt

Deputy President Motlanthe’s call for black business to become more “cost-competitive” in tendering for state business is another noble-sounding ideal denied by reality.

South Africa is so committed to race preference that there is no turning back. It is inscribed in the Constitution and in the minds of almost everyone. BEE, which nowadays gets referred to as Black Elite Enrichment, is a political principle and not an economic one.

The mythology of “apartheid” being a Nazi-like system which “killed millions of people” (this was stated to me by a Wits academic) and withheld education from black people has created the “debt” which must be discharged through hand-outs to the black elite, masquerading as “business”.

Big Business in South Africa has always meddled in politics and has taken a kind of decadent pleasure in kow-towing to a radical government. Some sucker will always pay for BEE and affirmative action, whether it will be pension funds, the middle-class taxpayer or the poor simply getting poorer. We have been infected with American ideas dreamt up to pamper a smaller number of blacks in an economy forty times bigger than ours.

US-style “minority procurement” or BEE is as ill-suited to us as Pik Botha’s anecdote of a snow plough sold to a former homeland government for its airport. “Every airport must have a snow plough” was the sales pitch. Just like every black man must have a business and enjoy some form of preference to soothe his pride and dignity.

South Africa is already a failure as its education and health systems crumble and the numbers queuing up to be “empowered” from the state’s coffers swell. But this is all part of the master plan; a sovereign state at the southern tip of Africa did not suit the major powers.

Many abroad will applaud South Africa’s eventual descent into Zimbabwean bankruptcy and squalor, with gleeful Schadenfreude. It is our fate, which was decided in 1994 and even before.

South Africa is a weak state, if not a failed one. The previous Afrikaner state had some strategic value as it could exert some influence over the sea routes and bother its adversaries. This weak or failed state has about as much strategic importance as Swaziland or Lesotho.

No-one could care less about whether Zuma or Malema governs us, or whether the state pays R7 or R27 for a bottle of water.