Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has signed economic and cooperation deals in Zimbabwe.
Zimbabwe is in “desperate need of investment,” Thea Fourie, an analyst at IHS Global Insight in Johannesburg, told Bloomberg in an e-mailed statement. Mugabe “has reached out to partners such as China and Russia to fill the gap,” according to Fourie.
Trade bans and economic embargoes were placed on Mugabe and senior members of his ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front party in 2002 by the US, the EU, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
Lavrov signed a $3 billion investment deal with Mugabe that will allow Russian firms to help develop Zimbabwe’s platinum resources.
The Russian foreign minister said it’s important to recognize pluralism in the international community, as well as “the emergence of new, big players, including the African continent, whose interests and voices must be taken into account in world politics.”
The project is the largest single foreign investment in Zimbabwe since it gained independence in 1980.
Mugabe, 90, met Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov at his rural home in Kutama Village, 130 kilometers north of the capital Harare.
Mugabe said international sanctions have to be approved by the UN.
If I was a white Zimbabwean with a vote in that country’s (sham) elections, I would definitely vote for Mugabe. Which African leader has done more to show Western governments the true colours of black African leadership?
Ian Smith, the Prime Minister of the erstwhile Rhodesia, was reviled as an evil white racist when he made his dire predictions of what that country would become under black majority rule. The British, having stabbed their own kith and kin in the back, went into fits of black-worship when Mugabe ascended to power under agreements they brokered. While pumping in billions of pounds to support the economy of Zimbabwe, after having tried in vain for 15 years to destroy it with economic sanctions against the economy of Rhodesia, the Pommies were going to show, then Apartheid South Africa, that blacks could rule a country as well as, if not better than, any white man! Thanks to Mugabe, all the British can do now is propagate revisionist history in which the abomination of Zimbabwe is supposedly not of their making!
Robert Mugabe receiving the honorary Knight Grand Cross in the Civil Division of The Most Honorable Order of Bath (knighthood) from Queen Elizabeth II of Britain.
Let’s not forget that the British Queen knighted Robert Mugabe and leading British universities, such as the University of Edinburgh, showered him with honorary doctorates (now quietly and unceremoniously revoked)!
Mugabe is a great man who has done more to rub the noses of white liberals worldwide, in the realities of black Africa, than any white leader on this continent has ever succeeded in doing.
Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe says South Africa is failing to lead the economic development of countries in the African Union (AU) because its economy is in the hands of the white minority.
Speaking at a function attended by African diplomats stationed in Beijing, China, on Monday where Sierra Leone ambassador Victor Bockarie Foh and Liberia’s McKinley Thomas heaped praise on him, Mugabe said South Africa was in a compromised situation.
“We would love to see South Africa taking the lead. But the country’s economy is still controlled by the white community, making it difficult [for blacks] to take charge.”
His address took place on his recent two-week tour of China to seek funds for Zimbabwe’s ailing economy.
In response, ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe told Voice of America’s Studio 7 on Wednesday that South Africa would not “drive whites into the sea” in a manner that would look like Zimbabwe’s chaotic black empowerment programme.
He said South Africa would not draw inspiration from Zimbabwe in redistributing national resources.
Last year, in a televised interview with Dali Tambo, Mugabe took a dig at Nelson Mandela for being too “friendly” with whites. “Mandela has gone a bit too far in doing good to the non-black communities, really in some cases at the expense of blacks,” said Mugabe.
Since taking over as chair of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) earlier this month, Mugabe has pushed for South Africa to help other African countries, especially those in the region, instead of using them as a “dumping ground” for surplus products.
He told journalists at the end of the SADC summit: “We also appeal to South Africa, which is highly industrialised, to lead us in this, and to work with us and cooperate with us and not just to regard the rest of our countries as open markets for products from South Africa.”
Before this address, Mugabe had been let down by South Africa which, with Namibia, had refused to sign the Protocol on Trade in Services. It provides for a mandate to progressively negotiate the removal of barriers to the free movement of services.
Zimbabwe’s dictator Robert Mugabe unleashed a storm of brutal, genocidal violence after losing the 2008 elections — and now we know that it was funded by western hedge-funds and banks, led by Och-Ziff Capital Management, the largest publicly traded fund, with assistance from Blackrock, GLG Partners, and Credit Suisse, who raised $100M for Mugabe’s weapons and torture-chambers in exchange for a sweetheart deal on the country’s platinum mines.
Daniel Och’s Och-Ziff manages $45.7B, including funds from the California Public Employees’ Retirement System. Och’s protege, Michael Cohen, led the charge to fund Mugabe’s pogrom; while an Israeli diamond trader called Dan Gertler helped broker a joint deal with OCH to invest in mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo, another nation whose state is complicit in horrific terror-campaigns that include child soldiery and rape camps.
Och-Ziff is under investigation for its deals in Zimbabwe and DRC, including allegations that it deliberately and illegally disguised its involvmeent. Cohen left Och-Ziff in 2013, shortly after buying a $22M country estate outside London: “Ewhurst Park, the more than 900-acre spread includes a sprawling main house, cottages, a church, a large lake with ducks, a boathouse, bridges, wooded areas, fountains, and formal gardens.” Cohen wouldn’t provide a comment to Businessweek on the deals.
Four days later, Camec announced it was using the money it raised to purchase a joint venture with the Zimbabwe Mining Development Corp., or ZMDC, Mugabe’s state-owned mining company. The joint venture owned the platinum stakes on the Great Dyke that had been taken back just a few weeks earlier from Anglo American. The price included $5 million in cash; Camec issued shares to partners whose identities were shielded by a shell company based in the British Virgin Islands; and $100 million to Mugabe’s government. Camec said the $100 million was a cash loan “to comply with its contractual obligations to the government of Zimbabwe” for the platinum claims. It said the money would be repaid out of ZMDC’s share of future platinum earnings. Camec’s balance sheets for the period make clear that funding for the platinum rights came from the private transactions involving Och-Ziff.
On the day Camec announced the deal with Mugabe’s government, two of McGee’s embassy employees were in the countryside gathering intelligence on Mugabe’s efforts to ensure his win. A lieutenant colonel in the president’s army told embassy staffers that soldiers, militia members, and ruling party backers loyal to Mugabe were training to conduct what he called a “reorientation campaign,” according to McGee and embassy cables. The lieutenant colonel also said 400 vehicles were being deployed to facilitate the operation.
Violence intensified throughout May. Soldiers drove opposition supporters out of their rural villages or urban neighborhoods. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, more than 33,000 people were driven from their homes by month’s end. Hundreds turned up at the gates of the American Embassy. “These people were literally running for their lives,” McGee says.
Zimbabwe’s economy is ‘regressing with deindustrialisation or informalisation; 84% of the economy is now informal’.
While liberal media in the West, such as the New York Times, have been lauding Zimbabwe’s antiwhite “land reform” and confiscation of white assets as a “success”, its government is currently unable to pay salaries.
According to reports, the Zimbabwean government “may be heading for a shutdown after it announced that it cannot guarantee pay dates for the civil service as the cash crunch bites deeper and with no solution in sight”.
Like many African countries, Zimbabwe has a vast army of government bureacrats constituting the “growing middle class” of the country who produce very little but receive 90% of the government budget. Since the ANC takeover of South Africa, government’s salary bill has also skyrocketed, with investment in infrastructure or maintenance of state assets slumping.
Zimbabwe’s Deputy Minister of Public Service, Labour and Social Welfare Tongai Muzenda told Senate last week that government “won’t guarantee any fixed pay dates”.
“We do not want to make false promises as the (Civil Service) Commission does not put the dates on the pay slips and that is going to be the case for some time until our economy has stabilised,” he said.
Analysts yesterday said that the admission by government poses a serious threat to the economy considering that salaries take a huge chunk of the recurrent expenditure.
“We are in shutdown,” an analyst said. “The budget is 90% recurrent and the bulk of that is in salaries”.
The last country to experience a government shutdown was the United States after Congress failed to enact legislation appropriating funds for fiscal year 2014. It lasted for 16 days.
During the US shutdown at least 800 000 federal employees were indefinitely furloughed (leave of absence) and 1,3 million reported for work without known payment dates.
Analysts say the civil service was the most secure borrower through Salaries Services Bureau and a payslip was a blank cheque to micro credit, which is driving the informal economy.
“That has been decimated. Once that is not there, banks won’t be able to lend. It means the lending platform has come to a halt,” an analyst said.
The civil service enjoys salary-based loans on the basis that government pays salaries on time.
Banks have stopped lending to companies due to rising defaults with statistics from the central bank showing that the ratio of non-performing loans to total loans had increased to 16,96% as at March 31 2014, up from 15,92%.
An NPL is when payments of interest and principal are past due by 90 days or more, or at least 90 days of interest payments have been capitalised, refinanced or delayed by agreement.
An executive with a commercial bank said measurement of economic policies was not on the basis of its nobility or objective but on the consequences.
“The consequence of announcing that there is no fixed date [for civil servants’ salaries] is that the economy has shut down,” he said.
Analysts say the only symbolism which was giving the economy a semblance of life was the fact that civil servants were being paid.
Government is the largest single employer and had until now provided fixed pay dates for its workers while other companies were defaulting.
“That symbolism has now come to an end by the removal of fixed dates and signifies government’s acceptance of default,” he said.
American actor and comedian Larry Fine once remarked that “the pain goes away on payday”, a feat that was only enjoyed by the civil service because the money was coming on time.
For the majority of Zimbabwean workforce that pain has become a permanent feature as payday becomes a moving target. For the unlucky ones, it has appeared only in dreams as companies took a battering from the harsh prevailing economic environment.
Statistics from the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) shows that 15 companies retrenched 2 491 in the first half of the year.
The Employers’ Confederation of Zimbabwe (EMCOZ) attributed the challenges in paying salaries on time to “a shortage of cash in the economy for various reasons which include minimum injection of new cash into the economy to grow the formal sector and inefficiencies inherent in an economic environment that is growing very slowly with some companies closing”.
“What is then happening is that producers of goods are having difficulties collecting cash from their sales and their suppliers are always sitting at their gates wanting to be paid for services rendered,” EMCOZ president Jack Murehwa said.
“When the company eventually gets a bit of cash from the overdue debtors, it then has to prioritise and decide how much goes to service providers, inputs, maintenance, salaries and many other costs.”
He said as a result of the limited cash, the company has to decide where to apply the cash — net salaries, pension, PAYE and other levies to be paid.
“As would be expected, in most cases, one or more of the commitments will suffer and obviously in instances where the extent of the unfunded commitments continues to grow, the formal business winds up,” he said.
Murehwa said under the current circumstances, employees who are still getting their salaries, although delayed, are in fact “in a better shape compared to those who have stopped thinking of ever getting a salary because the operation wound up or is as good as non-existent”.
Labour and Economic Development Research Institute of Zimbabwe director Godfrey Kanyenze said the private sector was a victim of the environment and government has to address the doing business aspect to help companies.
“How do you compete when you don’t have electricity? Government should address the cost of capital through re-engagement with multilaterals because no one will bring the money cheap, they demand a premium,” Kanyenze said.
Kanyenze said the economy was regressing with deindustrialisation or informalisation. He said 84% of the economy was now informal.
In his 2014 national budget presentation, Finance minister Patrick Chinamasa said the old economy was dead and a new one, based on the informal sector, had been born, urging financial institutions to cater for the small to medium sized enterprises.
But Kanyenze said informality was problematic as it did not contribute to taxes.
“You can’t celebrate informality. Everything informal is hidden. Much of the work is organised around sustenance,” Kanyenze said.
“There is nothing to celebrate unless there is a transition to formality.”
Kanyenze said the situation was dire and government alone could not resolve the crisis. He said it was now necessary to have a convergence of minds among all stakeholders so that everybody could put their hands on the plough.
Figures from the national statistical agency, Zimstat, show that imports in the first half of the year have been reduced to US$2,99 billion from US$3,92 billion in the comparable period last year. Exports went down to US$1,22 billion from US$1,54 billion.
A large portion of Zimbabwe’s foreign currency receipts come from migrant workers who have crossed the border to South Africa, mostly illegally. In Johannesburg the majority of restaurant and café waiters, maids and gardeners now come from Zimbabwe.
Western, mostly British, aid agencies are also active in Zimbabwe, propping up Mugabe’s regime which was installed by Britain in 1980 when Fleet Street gushed about “that brilliant Marxist-intellectual leader, Robert Mugabe”.
In the wake of collapsing companies, analysts say the low imports signify that the liquidity crunch is biting.
Ever since Nelson Mandela died, but even before, one was utterly flabbergasted before the intensity of media fervour pouring out en hommage to the Big Man. In Africa, of course, there are all kinds of theories about Big Men, some more politically correct than others. The tribal elder meets the Soviet personality cult, and we get Idi Amin Dada. Or Charles Taylor. Or Robert Mugabe.
If there is one thing I can stand even less than African Big Men, it is British journalists convulsing on the ground in effusive praise of them. Who still remembers the blasts of praise from Fleet Street when Mugabe assumed power in the ex-Rhodesia? For much of the past ten days while South Africa lit the long-awaited Big Candle, visible from outer space without a doubt, we had to endure near-hysterical outpourings exalting the deceased ex-terrorist. One such scribe from the island north of the Continent – I forget which, there were so many this week – wrote: “Mandela could have been president for life but he chose to stay a single term, for the sake of democracy in Africa!”
Democracy in Africa. Oh, yes. If Mandela’s successor at the helm of this decaying country, Thabo Mbeki, were to be believed, democracy was invented in Africa. No less. The point is that there is now such an Afrocentric phantasmagoria, cultivated in Britain and the United States, that anything is now possible, even Mbeki’s “African century”. The notion that Africa will come to dominate the globe economically, politically and militarily, was first articulated by another African Big Man, born Joseph-Desiré Mobutu but whose full regal appellation afterwards became Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu wa Za Banga.
Novelist V.S. Naipaul wrote somewhat ironically about Mobutu’s dreams of impoverished Europeans beseeching African countries for much-needed aid in 2000. Yet the notion of Nelson Mandela being “the greatest leader of the twentieth century” and voted as the most respected global leader in at least one poll. must inspire some doubt in Naipaul himself. Contemplating the “transformed” inner city of Johannesburg in our postapartheid paradise, Naipaul wrote in The masque of Africa:
It sent my mind back to other places of dereliction and ruin I had seen: the wartime rubble of East Berlin kept as a monument in the communist days. But it seemed easier even in the bad days for that part of East Berlin to be rebuilt than it would be for the half-life of this part of Johannesburg to be restored to something like its original meaning. Where would one begin? One would have to begin with the idea of the city, the idea of civilisation; and already, before one had even begun, one would be swamped by protest.
There were further discoveries to be made within that new slum. A sturdy old warehouse had been given over to new merchandise, which would have been like a parody of what had been here. It was a market of witchdoctors’ goods, and it was extensive. These were the muti goods that witchdoctors required their customers to get, to be used by the witchdoctor as he pleased, usually to make medicines, which the unfortunate bewitched man or woman had to drink.
I have often thought that Mandela had bewitched a good portion of the Anglo-American ruling class that in turn infected the stupid Europeans who are progressively losing the capacity for independent thought. All this talk of “Madiba magic” might be code for some supernatural, Harry Potter-like influence.
As everone knows, some forms of muti are taken as a cure for an evil spell, while others are used precisely to bewitch the victim. A black man who has designs on a woman who is rejecting him could buy some muti from a sangoma to ensure that she falls in love with him.
In Europe, Nietzsche and others wrote about the “twilight of the idols”. However, in Africa the idols are thriving, with the messianic Mandela being the biggest idol of them all. It seems only a few cantankerous Christians still refuse to bow to him, but not the Clintons, the king of the Netherlands or Barack Obama. Even George W. Bush came as a pilgrim to South Africa this week.
During his speech at Soccer City on the outskirts of black Soweto, Obama cast himself in the role of Mandela’s understudy, a humble disciple to the famous Xhosa.
I suppose in the days of the Roman Empire, people were also nonplussed about the seemingly inexorable rise of a strange new cult, Christianity. In the face of global grief over Mandela’s “exchanging the temporary for the eternal”, as the local Afrikaans saying goes, most mainstream conservatives have joined in eulogizing Mandela. British PM David Cameron, who had wanted to “hang Mandela”, together with other Young Conservatives, reacted to Mandela’s death with:
A great light has gone out in the world. Nelson Mandela was a hero of our time.
The normally truculent George W. Bush who had unleashed a war on other terrorists had only kind words for the man who had co-authorized the Church Street and Amanzimtoti bombs:
President Mandela was one of the great forces for freedom and equality of our time. He bore his burdens with dignity and grace, and our world is better off because of his example.
How do we explain such empathy, nay admiration, for a card-carrying member of the South African Communist Party in so-called Western conservative leaders? After all, I cannot recall similar expressions of sorrow when Georges Marchais of the French Communist Party or the East German stalwart, Erich Honecker, expired in 1997 and 1994, respectively.
The answer is that, unlike the venerable European leftists Marchais and Honecker, who had also waged a life-long struggle against fascism and racism – both leaders were among Mandela’s staunchest allies – Comrade Mandela assuages white guilt.
Susan Sontag’s notorious adage, that “the white race is the cancer of human history”, has become almost an official doctrine in the United States and Great Britain, eagerly emulated by the hapless Europeans. Few people have written about this phenomenon, except French “new philosopher” Pascal Bruckner who published two books about it, aptly entitled The tears of the white man: compassion as contempt and The tyranny of guilt: an essay on Western masochism.
Throughout the past week, here in South Africa and elsewhere, whites indulged in moral self-flagellation. A Dutch journalist, resident in South Africa, declared apropos of Mandela as symbol: “We had 40 years of apartheid, but 400 years of colonialism.” I daresay, four hundred years will not be enough to atone for the sins of colonialism and apartheid.
Probably I have referred to this process before, but one of the most repulsive aspects of white, Western guilt, is how South African whites in general, and Afrikaners in particular, have been made into literal scapegoats for it. Every time one of us gets murdered, raped or tortured under the mayhem that Mandela’s ANC regime has brought to South Africa, the West’s burden is proportionately leavened.
For all the odes to Mandela’s “wisdom”, sense of politics and so on, most of his public pronouncements consist of commonplaces and homilies befitting a school boy of very young age. His listeners melt away in awe when he says: “Let bygones be bygones.” His theatrical, even cheap and calculated trick of putting on the Springbok rugby jersey in 1995 is praised as a stroke of genius.
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Many Afrikaners have experienced this from Western whites. To them, nothing that we can say, write or compose is even remotely interesting. The handful of modern Afrikaner composers are arguably among the most creative and interesting in the world, yet their music is almost completely unknown. Afrikaans poetry is arguably among the best, even compared to that in much larger languages, yet besides Afrikaners and a few Flemings, no-one has ever taken cognisance of its existence. White guilt excludes the recognition of white talent, especially in the ranks of other “guilty” whites.
Once a young, blonde woman from here recounted to me how she was sent to a European country on a scholarship, together with a black counterpart. Although attractive, intelligent and educated, her European hosts evinced a degree of disinterest in her bordering on rudeness. Despite having been born and bred in Africa, she was white and therefore deemed to be just some displaced European like themselves. The exact opposite behaviour was de rigueur when it came to her fellow black student. She was seen as an object of immense fascination and hidden wisdom, almost like Mandela. Every white European in her presence smiled broadly, addressed her in overly polite terms and posed unending questions about her past and her upbringing. In the same way, the fact that Mandela had herded cattle as a boy according to Xhosa custom arouses far more curiosity than the pedestrian upbringing of some white in Pretoria who learned the cello and read Greek myths and Grimm’s fairytales as a child.
It is as if whites have taken on the behaviour of blacks described by black revolutionary, Frantz Fanon in Black skin, white mask:
The black man has two dimensions. One with his fellows, the other with the white man. A Negro behaves differently with a white man and with another Negro. That this self-division is a direct result of colonialist subjugation is beyond question…
After his organisation had placed bombs on city sidewalks, in bars and restaurants and killed thousands of blacks in internecine power struggles, including by the infamous necklace method, Mandela was praised for preaching moderation and “reconciliation”. Mandela presided over hordes of sadists wantonly looting, burning and killing their fellows. Such incidence of violence and destruction was, as usual, reinterpreted and recoded by guilt-complexed white journalists and pundits as being pleas for democracy and togetherness. Or free housing, affirmative action and racial quotas in sport, all of which South African blacks deserve in copious amounts, as liberals and leftists clamorously assure us. Of course, riots, violence and sadism continue unabated in South Africa, but because there is now a black government and the perpetrators of such violence are black too, any criticism of such behaviour is expressed in muted tones, if at all.
The Western world expected of South African whites to commit political suicide, which they meekly did. De Klerk and his National Party’s vague dreams of power-sharing came to nought and the former so-called Afrikaner leaders are too embarrassed to admit their abject failure in securing any kind of reasonable future for their constituents.
The corollary of white surrender in South Africa has been the sudden birth of a ready-made black state, a kind of African dream. Whites have been simply pushed aside and most of the state, industrial and mining apparatus taken over by blacks and those communist whites having clearly demonstrated their loyalty to the ANC and SACP through participation in terror and sabotage.
Through the sheer effects of the vast propaganda campaign conducted around Mandela and the apartheid stereotype, many people assume that prior to 1994 South Africa had been as backward as Burkina Faso or Malawi where locals subsist on slightly more than a dollar a day. It is routinely supposed by outsiders that under white rule there were hardly any schools or universities, except ones reserved for whites where they were taught some form of Nazi/racist doctrine. Presumably the roads, multi-storey buildings, concrete bridges and highways, hospitals and more than twenty universities were constructed by Mandela himself or those in his immediate entourage. After all, as the BBC journalists and others in the know assure us, he was the “father of modern South Africa”. A miracle worker, indeed.
Many whites in Europe and North America feel extremely uncomfortable about the fact that Africa is so backward and poor – “underdeveloped” – compared to other continents and regions of the world. European colonialism is usually blamed for this state of affairs, except that it has endured under African rule since the early nineteen-sixties. Also, countries like Haiti, Liberia and Ethiopia that have been independent of white rule for centuries, have not fared any better. Both Liberia and Ethiopia are classified among the poorest countries in the world, with Haiti – “the world’s first black republic” as Thabo Mbeki called it – being not only among the world’s poorest, but also the poorest country in the western hemisphere. Eighty percent of Haitians live under the poverty line and fifty-four percent in abject poverty. According to the Red Cross, seven out of Haitians survive on less than US$2 per day.
However, thanks to the “miracle” brought by Mandela and his backers in the ex-Warsaw Pact countries, as well as the UK, the USA, Sweden, Norway and the Netherlands, everyone may now point to a successful “black state”, the Republic of South Africa. Even the names of towns and cities founded by Afrikaner pioneers are changed to Bantu ones to make them “more African”, completing the illusion of black engineering, scientific, architectural, financial and economic success.
It is no wonder that FW de Klerk is so popular in the West and was cheered in Soweto this week. He had his own people subjugated and their hard-earned assets taken away so that not only South African blacks could feel better about themselves, but in order that the white man shedding tears over his guilt in Western Europe and North America could breathe a sigh of relief.
In a real sense, Mandela and his myth are the muti of the West. But his fame and glory come at a terrible price: the disenfranchisement of the white minority, the hijacking of their public and private assets, as well as their ultimate expulsion from their fatherland as in the Zimbabwean example.
Unless South African whites are able to shake off the stupor in which they find themselves as a result of their decades-long brainwashing into left-extremist illusions by the viciously lying Western media, their ultimate fate will be far more tragic than that of their Zimbabwean counterparts. as many more will be killed than are already dying in the ubiquitous farm murders and suburban house attacks.
The indigenous Afrikaners are now seen as foreigners in the country they had built, together with – ironically – the illegal immigrants from other African countries who are also randomly massacred by South African blacks in so-called “xenophobic attacks”.
All those Africans elsewhere on the continent who cheer Mandela for his “victory over the hated whites” should be aware that Mandela’s followers would kill you too, if ever you set foot here.
While the West and its media perverts will maintain its silence over such atrocities.
Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe described Nelson Mandela as a “great friend” and “a man of real principle”.
Mugabe was among many world leaders who attended the memorial service for Mandela at the FNB Stadium, in Johannesburg on Tuesday. On Wednesday he went to the Union Buildings, in Pretoria, to view Mandela’s body lying in state, Timeslive reported.
Mugabe denied that there had been differences between himself and Mandela. “I don’t know about any feud,” Mugabe said on his return to Harare.
“If anything, there was an alliance. We worked very well with him when he came out of prison. We gave him support.
“We established the principle of national reconciliation at independence in 1980. [South Africa] took it over and used it as a basis to create what [it now has, the] rainbow nation.
In the seven years leading to 1987 Mugabe had ordered the deaths of thousands of innocent Zimbabweans through a “special” brigade that reported directly to him. That unit, named the fifth brigade, trained by experts hired from North Korea, murdered thousands of Zimbabweans under the watch and directives of Robert Mugabe.
Robert Mugabe like Mandela – a tribal Xhosa – are minority leaders who prey on the peaceful nature and reluctance of people to live under chaos and violence.
The terrible wounds the Fifth Brigade inflicted on Matabeleland in the early 1980s still show. The countryside is under-populated, there is even less employment in the towns than there is in the rest of Zimbabwe, and people are scared to talk.
But ample evidence of some of the massacres carried out there between 1982 and 1986 exist. Followers of Mugabe’s rival, Joshua Nkomo, were killed in their thousands.
The Fifth Brigade, like Mr Mugabe’s government and administration, was mostly Shona-speaking. Matabeleland is populated mostly by Ndebeles, the descendants of Zulus who came to the area in the 1830s.
Many in Matabeleland describe the campaign of murder as genocide.
Joseph Buchena Nkatazo co-ordinated an investigation carried out some years ago by the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace.
Mr Nkatazo says in the areas where they had been able to investigate, they had found evidence of more than 20,000 deaths. He was sure there must have been many more elsewhere.
Mandela knew about the massacres at the time, but never spoke out against them.
Mugabe only had praise for Mandela on Thursday. “From our point of view, we have lost a great friend, a revolutionary and a man of real principle. That’s why we went to give him a send-off so that we would be satisfied that the love we had for him, the historical alliance that we created in the fight against imperialism and colonialism, will not have been historically lost by our being absent,” Mugabe said.
Mugabe, who turns 90 in February, secured a seventh term in office in July.
The Zimbabwean leader received an applause on Tuesday at the Mandela memorial service, whereas President Jacob Zuma was booed.
Mugabe will not travel to Qunu, in Eastern Cape, for the burial at the weekend.
State media in Zimbabwe largely ignored Mandela’s death. On Zimbabwe’s only television channel – the state-controlled Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation – Mandela’s death was not given any prominence.
The station focused on the late Brigadier General Misheck Tanyanyiwa, who has been declared a national hero.
President Robert Mugabe sent his condolences however, in which he hailed “the great icon of African liberation, freedom fighter, a beacon of excellence and a humble and compassionate leader”, despite many Zimbabweans declaring that Mandela was not a hero.
Mugabe was clearly referring to Mandela’s legacy of terror and violence, but Zimbabweans in general were less forgiving.
“The problems South Africa is facing today are originating from the time when he was the president. He is a famous prisoner who sacrificed the dream of his people on the alter of expedience,” one said scathingly.
Mandela’s death stirred debate in Zimbabwe as the former terrorist is often compared to Mugabe.
Mandela was 95 and Mugabe is 90, and both spent long periods in jail in their quest for independence – Mugabe spent more than 10 years held by the Ian Smith regime against Mandela’s 27.
They clashed publicly in 1998 when Mandela over the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) following a rebel offensive in that country.
Mandela as chairperson of the Southern African Development Community opposed bailing out Laurent Kabila when Mugabe wanted military intervention. Zimbabwe sent its forces to back Kabila.
Mandela’s most scathing attack on the Zimbabwean leader came in June 2008 when he spoke at a dinner in London against Mugabe. Mugabe had just lost the first round of elections against Morgan Tsvangirai from the opposition MDC.
Mandela then spoke of “the tragic failure of leadership in our neighbouring Zimbabwe”.
Mugabe also lambasted Mandela for going out of his way to please white South Africans.
“They [whites] will praise you only if you are doing things that please them. Mandela has gone a bit too far in doing good to the non-black communities, really in some cases at the expense of [blacks],” Mugabe said. “That is being too saintly, too good, too much of a saint.”
Rights activist, Ben Freeth, have laid a complaint of crimes against humanity against several high ranking Zimbabwean officials.
The action stems from alleged human rights abuses by the Zimbabwean government against farm workers, commercial farmers and the opposition. They want the police to investigate the claims and eventually have the perpetrators prosecuted for crimes against mankind.
Enough evidence exists for police to start investigations. Some 33 affidavits of Zimbabwean farmers and ordinary citizens have been collected to support their claims.
Zimbabwean Human Rights Activist Ben Freeth says: “The attack has gotten worse, almost all those farmers and farm workers have been left without anything at all.”
AfriForum Legal Representative Willie Spies says: “It is important to bring the actual perpetrators to justice. Our legal system do allow for that. SA is party to the statute of Rome. In terms of our international legal obligation, SA is obliged to investigate complains that have been laid by victims.”
The Zimbabwean embassy declined to comment on the matter. Unisa International Law Professor, Gus Waschefort says, “The decision by the Zimbabwean embassy not to comment is driven by a political dimension. The crimes were committed by individuals, not the state.”
The action was prompted by the Supreme Court of Appeal that ordered the NPA to investigate crimes against humanity and human rights abuses according to the Rome Statute.
Tony Blair, the former British prime minister denied on Wednesday that he put pressure South Africa while he was in office to remove Zimbabwe leader Robert Mugabe in a military operation.
Thabo Mbeki, South Africa’s ex-president, said in an interview that Britain wanted to topple Mugabe during the political and economic crisis of the late 2000s.
A spokesperson for Blair’s denied the charge.
“Tony Blair has long believed that Zimbabwe would be much better off without Robert Mugabe and always argued for a tougher stance against him, but he never asked anyone to plan or take part in any such military intervention,” he told AFP in London. Blair stepped down in 2007.
This was not the account Mbeki gave to Al-Jazeera news channel, in the interview published on November 23
Mbeki said: “Tony Blair… was saying to the chief of the British armed forces: ’You must work out a military plan so that we can physically remove Robert Mugabe’. We knew that because we had come under the same pressure, that we need to cooperate in some scheme. It was a regime-change scheme even to the point of using military force.”
Mbeki’s spokesperson Mukoni Ratshitanga told AFP the ex-president stood by his words.
Mbeki, who led South Africa from 1999 to 2008, was the head mediator between Mugabe and his arch-rival Morgan Tsvangirai after violent attacks followed disputed polls in 2008.
Mugabe and rival Morgan Tsvangirai formed a power-sharing government which ended with Mugabe’s election victory on July 31 this year.
Mbeki had always called for a negotiated solution, resisting neo-colonialism.
“Why does it become a British responsibility to decide who leads the people of Zimbabwe?” he told Al-Jazeera.
In November 2007 Zimbabwe put its military on high alert after retired UK army chief Lord Charles Guthrie said London had discussed invading its former colony during Tony Blair’s premiership.
Mugabe, 89, has governed since former Rhodesia won its independence in 1980.
Relations with Britain turned sour after land reform programmes seized farms from white farmers without compensation — the majority of them of British descent — to give to black farmers.
On the same day stories of an affair between Blair and Wendy Deng, the Chinese wife of press mogul Rupert Murdoch, also surfaced again. Sources close to Murdoch in London claim that Blair, 60, and Deng, 44, had ‘multiple encounters’ without 82-year-old Murdoch’s knowledge.
Blair denied an affair with Deng. A ‘terminal’ rift has severed relations between Murdoch and Blair however over reports of Blair’s friendship with the entrepreneur’s wife.
A friend of Murdoch said: “Rupert Murdoch will have nothing more to do with Tony Blair. Not ever.”
Across Zimbabwe, dozens of factories lie idle with peeling paint, rusting machines and broken roofs in once bustling industrial districts, symbols of the huge economic challenge facing President Robert Mugabe and his ZANU-PF party.
On the surface, things look rosy after Mugabe’s landslide election victory in July: growth forecasts are looking more positive as agriculture recovers, inflation has been tamed and the stock market is starting to buzz again after some listless post-election trading.
But look behind the headlines and the landlocked southern African nation’s manufacturing heartlands, which accounted for a quarter of the economy a generation ago, are now wastelands – and some fear the decay is permanent.
From Harare in the north to the second city of Bulawayo in the south, companies are working at a third of capacity, down from 55 percent a year ago, according to the Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries (CZI).
“Businesses are collapsing, and the economy will need a real big push-start to get going again,” said an accountant winding down tube-making firm BMA Fasteners and Tube and Pipe in Harare. He declined to be named for professional reasons.
“At this rate, it’s frightening to think what the future holds,” the 42-year-old said, scratching his head. “I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say it might just be hell.”
Although they are careful not to blame politics, industry bosses say business confidence has fallen since the 89-year-old Mugabe was declared the overwhelming victor in the July 31 election, which the opposition MDC rejected as rigged.
New finance minister Patrick Chinamasa expects the economy to grow 6.1 percent in 2014 from 3.4 percent this year but that will make no dent in unemployment estimated at over 80 percent.
Zimbabwe’s economy shrank by 45 percent during a decade-long crisis blamed on ZANU-PF, but bounced back in 2009 after Mugabe was forced to share power with arch rival Morgan Tsvangirai after violent and disputed elections the previous year.
The July election put paid to that coalition, and with it what some critics saw as the MDC’s moderating influence on Mugabe and ZANU-PF nationalism.
FOREIGN INVESTMENT
In its most blatant form, that nationalism was manifest in Mugabe’s “indigenisation” push, under which foreign-owned firms have been forced to sell majority stakes to local blacks.
However, with the economy so desperate for capital – some estimates put domestic credit demand at $12 billion, more than double total bank deposits – Mugabe may be forced to soften his anti-foreigner stance.
“We are likely to see a more pragmatic approach by the politicians,” said Grant Flanagan of Amigo Partners, which manages a Zimbabwe-focused investment fund, noting some faint signs of a softening of policy.
Most notably, in his new cabinet, Mugabe swapped combative indigenisation minister Saviour Kasukuwere for a mild-mannered technocrat who has already suggested the government is open to discussion about the extent and timing of black ownership.
However, there are no details and when asked by Reuters about indigenisation, another member of the government, Industry and Commerce minister Mike Bimha, declined to discuss something he said was outside his remit.
Without a decent period of clarity and consistency, investors are unlikely to be writing any cheques.
“ZANU-PF must realise they are in trouble over the economy,” independent economic commentator John Robertson said. “Investors, particularly in mining, where they have an opportunity, will want to see whether there really is any softening. If there is, then definitely the economy stands some chance.”
DAUNTING CHALLENGE
Even then, turning the ship round will be difficult.
The African Development Bank estimates that fixing the infrastructure needs $14 billion, a sum that in reality can only be met by the World Bank and IMF, which stopped lending to Harare in 1999 because of unpaid debts.
Private investors will then have to address a manufacturing vacuum filled by cheap imports, mostly from China.
Nowhere is the evidence more glaring than at David Whitehead, a large textile firm that used to employ 2,500 people in Chegutu, 100 km (60 miles) southwest of Harare, but which collapsed two years ago and stands empty today.
A handful of people are contracted to maintain machinery. Most of the time, only a couple of guards are on patrol.
Elsewhere, the factory sector built during the years of isolation imposed on white-minority Rhodesia has lost makers of everything from shoes to medicines, carpets to building materials and chemicals to food.
In 1986 manufacturing contributed 26 percent of GDP. Today it is just over 2 percent.
The industrial graveyard includes Ziscosteel, once the largest integrated steel works in the region, which shut in 2008 due to what analysts said was gross mismanagement and a failure by the state-owned firm to upgrade its equipment.
The government has been struggling to revive it with a number of foreign firms, including lately Essar from India.
“There is a long way to go and the starting point for our companies is retooling. There is no other way. There is idealism, and then there is reality,” says economist Prosper Chitambara, a leading private economic consultant.
WAIT AND SEE
The Harare tube firm, which used to employ 300 people, says it was a victim of a range of factors – price controls, foreign currency problems, power cuts, and then cheaper imports from India and China.
“Everything that could go wrong went wrong,” said the accountant in charge of its burial rites.
For ZANU-PF, the absence of the MDC as a coalition partner means it has no-one to blame and nowhere to hide.
Robert Mugabe taking a nap
After the July election, it launched a Zimbabwe Agenda for Sustainable Social Economic Transformation, although the document was culled from the black empowerment parts of its manifesto, leading many to see it as more of the same from a party well-known for its empty economic blueprints.
However, aides say Mugabe himself is taking greater interest in the economy in a bid to rebuild a legacy tarnished by the hardships and hyperinflation of the last 13 years.
A glimmer of hope lies in tobacco farming, where state and private support for small-scale farmers is expected to push production to 200,000 tonnes from 45,000 in 2008, the pit of a slump blamed on Mugabe’s seizures of white commercial farms.
Many also see huge potential in mining and diamonds if the government can assuage concerns over forced sales of stakes to locals.
“We have to wait and see,” said the security guard manning the entrance to the David Whitehead factory in Chegutu, echoing a refrain heard in boardrooms from Harare to Johannesburg, London and New York. – Reuters
(Additional reporting by Pascal Fletcher in Johannesburg; Editing by Ed Cropley and Giles Elgood)
In a recent article in the Sunday Independent, Gillian Schutte mistakenly blames so-called “white conservative narratives” for the appalling sexual violence that is sweeping South Africa at present. As rape is notoriously underreported, most estimates put the number of such crimes at more than a million per year or approximately three thousand per day.
The macabre forms of dehumanising torture during farm murders provide another clue to the societal breakdown that is occurring in our country. Even calling it “our country” might be a malapropism in that Afrikaners like myself are no longer considered full citizens in an Afro-Saxon state that is slouching towards some incarnation of Mugabe’s Zimbabwe or, better still, Charles Taylor’s Liberia. This week, Taylor’s conviction as a war criminal was confirmed by an international court, the first head of state to be jailed for such crimes committed in Sierra Leone while he was in office.
South Africa has become a sadists’ apocalypse. No amount of “reframing”, circumlocution or leftist pseudo-intellectualism can disguise it any longer. Nor can the seemingly desperate massaging of the crime statistics. In the age of social media, people communicate their horror and despair at being captives in this, our “paradise of cruelty”. Policing our language as in the cowardly attack upon Louise Mabille is a poor substitute for the lack of policing elsewhere.
As the twentieth century has shown, utopias are always dangerous, be they fascist or communist. Every utopia has turned into its mirror image, a dystopia replete with genocide. South Africa’s pursuit of a racial biopolitics known as “transformation”, as well as extreme forms of cultural relativism, have unleashed hitherto unknown social consequences. In the domain of sexual violence at least, the country has earned the dubious title of “rape capital of the world” and it regularly tops international murder tables too.
Understanding the causes of this immense violence, unknown in peacetime, represents a rare analytical challenge. None of the usual explanations actually fit. The same people denouncing “colonialism” are the most accomplished colonialists in their slavish subordination to US or British racial discourse and political correctness.
However, neither Britain nor America has absorbed any significant African cultural influence so it is of no use applying the sociology of New York or London to an outbreak of sadistic violence in Limpopo province. It is risible to see ostensibly educated people constantly blaming either “apartheid” or “poverty” for the horrors and cruelties afflicting this society.
The retreat of Afrikaner power in South Africa has been coterminous with the resurgence of African belief systems, including witchcraft and ritual murders. In the early nineties South Africa experienced hundreds of killings associated with witchcraft and occult beliefs, leading to the Commission of Inquiry into Witchcraft Violence and Ritual Murders. We still do not understand the role that occult beliefs played during the revolution, especially in establishing hegemonic black politics and racial nationalism. The necklace, that symbol of revolution, is pregnant with ethnographic and cultural meaning. There is also evidence that young “comrades” intimidated traditional healers to extract money from clients and that the accusation of being a witch was used to eliminate political opponents.
Mrs. Winnie Madikizala-Mandela, that international heroine and former wife of Nelson Mandela, subscribed to the Maoist doctrine – ‘kill one, scare a thousand’ – that support is gained through terror and horror. She notoriously stated in 1986:
…with our boxes of matches and our necklaces we shall liberate this country.
A necklace killing whereby a tyre is placed around the victim’s neck, filled with petrol and then set alight
Child and even baby rape is another ghastly phenomenon indicating that South Africa has navigated to a new, alien moral code. Stating that white men sometimes do it in some other country too, hardly mitigates the particular horror that it has assumed here.
The British Guardian ran an article on 12 March 2009 entitled, “Raped and killed for being a lesbian: South Africa ignores ‘corrective’ attacks“. The Guardian’s website contains an accompanying video interview with lesbian rape victims, as well as young black men who are outspoken in their support of “corrective rape”. One of them says:
Me, I have no time to rape them, but if there are some of the other guys who want to teach them the way, they must rape them, they must rock them.
But perhaps white conservatives are a bigger problem: they might go to church or caution their children against drugs and sexual promiscuity, which would undermine the libertine morals that so many have advocated for so long in South Africa. In Hillbrow, as recounted to me by a former policeman, young white female drug addicts are employed as prostitutes by Nigerian gangsters. When they are no longer useful to their pimps, they simply get injected with heroine and pushed off highrise buildings in what gets officially recorded by the police as “suicides”. In South Africa, the crime reality show is so much better than the fiction.
The country’s academics are all but ignoring the scourge of rape, including infant rape, judging from the paucity of published articles in the field. To some extent they have acculturated to the witch-hunting culture in persecuting dissidents in their own ranks. Otherwise they engage in repetitive denunciations of “patriarchy” as if there were still a father left somewhere that has not been killed.
South Africa’s “transformed” universities have been turned into the “armed brothels” Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn spoke about when he said:
Rousseau is the grandfather of the concentration camps and also of those armed brothels that we continue to call universities. We have with us on one hand the Old Left, a finished product of L’éducation sentimentale, with its bent for social engineering and its tendency to identify its own plans and policies with the volonté générale; on the other the New Left which has taken up the slogan Retournons à la nature! exemplified in the rabble of unwashed, unkempt, debauched, unbridled ignoble savages who look to the Third World of the underdeveloped for inspiration. Its heroes are Chairman Mao with his Little Red Book, Ché Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, Holden Roberto, the Harlem criminals and the pistol-packing priests.*
That is why leftist university intellectuals find any form of criticism of traditional African culture to be inherently “racist” and eschew references to practices such as ukuthwala(the kidnapping and forced marriage of young maidens). Recent legislation has placed about 18 million black South Africans under so-called customary law in which such practices are legal.
Everybody in South Africa, whether white or black, fears a witch-hunt in some or other form. Especially the kind of witch-hunt whereby you are called a “racist”, lose your tenured university job and spend the rest of your life in ignominy. Therefore white academics are completely silent on ukuthwalaor the so-called “virgin cleansing myth” if the professors do not actually deny in writing that such phenomena exist!
Here and there information filters through the iron curtain of political correctness. The only academic article worth reading on the “virgin cleansing myth” is that by Suzanne Leclerc-Madlala which appeared in The African Journal of AIDS Research in 2002 under the title, “On The Virgin Cleansing Myth: Gendered Bodies, AIDS and Ethnomedicine“. It provides a fascinating glimpse into the psycho-sexual paradigm in which, as she puts it, “virgin cleansing is believed to have both a therapeutic and a prophylactic effect” (against HIV-AIDS). Raping a child or a disabled person is therefore seen as a form of AIDS prevention or cure.
But even the virgin cleansing myth obliquely alluded to by Dr. Mabille in her critique of insipid Western feminism does not go far enough in explaining South Africa’s journey upriver into the heart of darkness. We really lack the concepts to understand the enormity of what we are faced with.
Much of what passes for analysis of sex and culture in South Africa consists of rehashed hippie or New Left thinking from 1960s America. Get liberated, man, is more or less the gist of it. Call it Marcuse on Durban Poison. Repression or any form of “holding back” is invariably seen as “bad”. But sometimes repression might be desirable, even imperative. Freud was old-fashioned enough to advocate a balance between the pleasure principle and the reality principle.
The old Afrikaner government, while encouraging African ethnic identities, saw fit to suppress witchcraft and ritual murder by making it a criminal offence. Prior to becoming the first president of a united South African republic, Charles Robberts Swart introduced the Suppression of Witchcraft Act 3 of 1957. To the principled cultural relativist, the act – which is still on the statute books – is an affront and he would probably agree with the Marquis de Sade that “morality is just geography misapplied”, meaning that a crime in one culture is a harmless pastime in another.
One could even argue that the very structure of the South African political system is tending towards sado-masochism. Last Sunday the new CEO of the liberal Institute of Race Relations, Dr Frans Cronjé, argued in Rapport that whites should assume a far more submissive role in South Africa, lest they expose themselves to some form of collective revenge during a Second Revolution. According to Cronjé, such a revolution will be
…a violent, racist and destructive transition from a reconciling democratic state to a hostile, black nationalist state… After the Second Revolution, white South Africans will lose their homes, their jobs and their businesses.
Apart from exhortations to submissiveness, white guilt and even “vows of silence” à la Samantha Vice of Rhodes University, South Africa’s academic sycophants contribute little to our grasp of contemporary violence. In this respect, French literature is more instructive. Sade’s amoral theory of nature, of course. But also his notion of the sovereignty of sexual instincts that should not be tamed by any man-made law or religious scruple.
The Marquis de Sade had a disciple in the surrealist author Georges Bataille who espoused a theory of “transgression”. He took an interest in violence, punishment and eroticism. Bataille also collected photographs of Chinese executions which included horrific torture.
South Africa’s army of sadists regularly commit acts that shock a weaker Eurocentric sensibility. At the same time they are creating a world without limits, revelling in a new-found innocence that to them must represent the perfect freedom, the sovereignty of Sade’s libertine who pursues excess in celebration of pristine nature, a nature that punishes the weak and rewards the strong. To impose one’s will on a woman is also a gift of nature to all men. As Sade writes in Philosophy in the Bedroom:
If then it becomes incontestable that we have received from Nature the right indiscriminately to express our wishes to all women, it likewise becomes incontestable that we have the right to compel their submission, not exclusively, for I should then be contradicting myself, but temporarily. It cannot be denied that we have the right to decree laws that compel woman to yield to the flames of him who would have her; violence itself being one of that right’s effects, we can employ it lawfully. Indeed! has Nature not proven that we have that right, by bestowing upon us the strength to bend women to our will?**
Human rights or even a puritanical code such as feminism is not incompatible with sadism. As Bataille would argue, morality is needed for transgression to take place.
Sylvia Plath wrote in her poem “Daddy” that “Every woman adores a Fascist”. She was wrong. Every woman adores a sadist. Especially if she happens to be a feminist.
* Erik van Kuehnelt-Leddihn. “The Western Dilemma: Calvin or Rousseau?” in Modern Age, Winter 1971, p. 55.
** The Marquis de Sade. The complete Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom and other writings, transl. RIchard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse. New York: Grove Press, 1965, p. 319.
South Africa’s multiracial and multicultural society is exploding into a never-ending Kulturkampf or American-style culture war. Anti-racists are the new racists, spreading intolerance and even violence ahead of them with a megaphone, figuratively speaking. During the court appearance of a wine farmer, Mr Johnny Burger, the crowd in the Cape had been swept up into a lynch mob threatening to kill him on the spot. Police had to use pepper spray and a stun grenade to disperse them. Shades of the Ku Klux Klan? Except here the Klansmen are anti-racists.
Anti-racist intolerance is growing in leaps and bounds. In another recent incident, it led to the unfortunate resignation from Pretoria University of one of our praag columnists after Dr Piet Croucamp from the University of Johannesburg had accused her of hate speech. As I have commented elsewhere in an Afrikaans column:
“The media group Naspers and a small group of academics acting in bad faith and attacking others in the name of race, mostly for personal reasons, represent a danger to freedom of speech in South Africa.”
This afternoon I got an email from a friend saying that Mr Burger’s case reminded him of the notorius “Black Circuit” of the early nineteenth century. At the time a 1000 Cape farmers had to appear before a roving court to answer to trumped-up charges of murder, rape and assault. In the end, no-one was convicted and it was found that colonial English missionaries had colluded with local Khoi-San tribesmen to falsely accuse farmers of heinous crimes.
Contrary to our law, Mr Burger, accused of assaulting a Coloured child, was presumed guilty until his innocence could be proven. Two days ago, the Cape Times newspaper wrote about the case of Flippie Engelbrecht, the child concerned: “Those who brought the case to court charged that after the assault Engelbrecht had lost his sight, had epileptic fits, and because of this had rolled into a fire and suffered terrible burns, losing his hands.” In yesterday’s Cape Times, headlined Questions surround Flippie’s assault, “new evidence” came to light in the form of medical records showing that Flippie Engelbrecht had reported a “swelling on the side of his face”, which may have been a tumour, causing his epileptic fits and other medical problems. The same medical records contradict some of the dates advanced by the victim. However, in the meantime the wine farmer had committed suicide after his life and his business had been ruined by hysterical anti-racists pursuing him in the media, both traditional and social, led by the radical, Afrikaner-hating ex-lawyer (who was struck off the record as an attorney after dubious business deals and bankruptcy), Carina Papenfus.
So here we have two incidences of whites being subjected to histrionic public campaigns by so-called “liberal” anti-racists whose objectives have more in common with the Spanish Inquisition than with advancing the precepts of liberalism. Freedom of speech and even academic freedom in South Africa have been casualties of these campaigns, not to mention the two white victims, one committing suicide and another resigning her post and leaving the country, presumably for fear of being further persecuted.
Our universities are no longer places of learning but over-politicised shrines to political correctness and obtuse hatreds that are seemingly ignited by throwing a switch.
Volumes have been written on the cultural, linguistic, racial, anthropological, ethnic, ideological and religious divisions of South African society and I do not wish to dwell on the obvious. What concerns me more, is the apparent descent of people with nominal university qualifications into this kind of racial street fighting. They wield race and the word “racist” like a Cape Flats gangster brandishes his knife. Not so long ago, twelve schools had to be closed in that area as a result of gang activity and Mrs Helen Zille, the premier of the Western Cape, was calling for the army to be brought in to stabilise Manenberg.
Yet, ostensibly, we have more to fear from the pseudo-intellectual gangsters than from the drug-dealing, turf-warring criminals of the Cape Flats. Their influence on public discourse is far more insidious and destructive of the last vestiges of civilisation that remain in South Africa. They are intolerant zealots such as are to be found throughout history, wherever religious wars or ethnic conflicts have ignited and blazed.
Except for the Sunday paper Rapport, no-one seems to take Papenfus seriously. She waged a slanderous email and Twitter campaign against the hapless winemaker, apparently threatening and cajoling his customers into ceasing to order from him, with the intention of ruining his business and his life. Ms. Papenfus is a kind of cyber thug that replicates the intimidation tactics of petty gangsters in the public sphere. After all, as any mafioso or racketeer knows, a small business may be ruined by hitting one or two of its weak spots. Although she must have studied at one time for a degree or diploma, she has no intellectual pretensions. Her creed is simple: harass the whites. And being white and Afrikaans herself, but an ANC member, it is a case of être plus royaliste que le roi.
Papenfus is dangerous, but easily understood. The other two zealots who pounced upon the soft-spoken Pretoria woman philosopher, occupy positions of institutional power. Croucamp is a lecturer at the University of Johannesburg in political science and frequently appears on talk shows, both on radio and on television, wearing his trademark blue bandana. Schutte writes a column in the Mail & Guardian newspaper which is also avidly read by the “tenured radicals” at South Africa’s more than twenty universities.
Schutte was due to debate Croucamp’s victim on the topic: “‘Do white people have an obligation to withdraw from the public sphere?’ But as she stated in a subsequent column: “I am obviously not going to validate Louise Mabille’s hate speech by actually debating with her. Rather I will end by saying that she has presented a shining example of how whites should not participate in the public arena. It is a good thing that Louise Mabille has handed in her resignation and that the University of Pretoria has accepted it.”
From Rhodes University, we have already had an opinion by Dr Samantha Vice that all whites, i.e. everyone of European descent, should take some form of vow to remain silent in public. So white guilt leads to the ultimate form of self-censorship, public silence.
Elsewhere, Ms Gillian Schutte describes herself, somewhat pretentiously, as a “feminist-neopagan-post-structuralist-deconstructionist-socialist” and she apparently has a Master’s degree in creative writing from the University of the Witwatersrand.
The one thing we can already deduce is that the mob outside the Cape courtroom who wanted to lynch Mr Burger at least believed in some form of dialogue. They were screaming, hurling abuse and gesticulating. With police intervention and protection, one could still call it communication.
Croucamp and Schutte want to reduce us to silence, however. Theirs is the monologue of totalitarianism, of censorship, of “There is only one truth and it is mine”. They pontificate in the name of power, the corrupt power that is ruling, nay, pillaging, South Africa.
It is therefore ironic that Schutte should describe herself as a “post-structuralist-deconstructionist”. Does she even know what she is referring to? The very basis of any “deconstruction” is the existence of more than one meaning, even the uncertainty, indetermination and radical plurality of meanings. Just over ten years ago a small group of us Afrikaner thinkers had a private seminar with Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction, at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales on the boulevard de Raspail in Paris. I remember Derrida as a modest, soft-spoken, amiable figure who reminisced about his single visit to South Africa. He liked Potchefstroom and even told me that “Heidegger would have felt at home there”. Derrida was full of gentle irony, self-doubt and respect for others, even the Other, as he so often termed it in his more political writings.
Schutte, by contrast, is a third-world ideologue, possessed by a terrible certainty. She has more in common with Robert Mugabe or Idi Amin than Jacques Derrida. Like so many others strutting about our campuses today, she has no real culture but the fad of the moment. The more politically correct such fads are, the better. Her meretricious pseudo-intellectualism has all the charm of Winnie Mandela’s expensive sunglasses and jewellery, being the brash expression of a corrupt and power-hungry soul. Ideas are but slogans, brands, to market yourself to another kind of mob to the one that wanted to lynch the Cape winemaker.
I have often thought that South Africa today has much in common with Nero’s Rome. Our country has become murderous, corrupt and decadent. Innocence has died. Approximately a thousand children are raped every day, including babies, and nobody says a word. Or if they broach the subject, they are immediately reduced to silence, given the ritual knife for disembowelling themselves. Schutte’s smug satisfaction (“It is a good thing that Louise Mabille has handed in her resignation and that the University of Pretoria has accepted it”) may be deconstructed to reveal two things: Schadenfreude and a paradoxical expectation of honour in others.
There is no English word for Schadenfreude, hence the German loanword that is universally used. However, the Afrikaans (and Dutch) term leedvermaak expresses the same thing, with a few more connotations (“signifieds” for post-structuralists) thrown in. The other day I tweeted in Afrikaans, something to the effect that leedvermaak is the apotheosis of journalism in South Africa. Vermaak also means entertainment, hence the misery of others, their travails amid hysterical accusations, calumny and vilification provide entertainment. Anti-racist Blitzkrieg, either on the vineyards of the Cape or on the campus of Pretoria University, therefore feeds the sensationalist mainstream media machine, sated on the blood of murder victims.
Celebrity “businessman” Kenny Kunene
Due to the surfeit of murders in South Africa, people are becoming bored with news of another killing, no matter how ruthless and macabre. Celebrity murder, such as the Oscar Pistorius case, is still news, but not even serial killings elicit much attention. In a society as utterly cruel and corrupt as ours, we are in desperate need of frivolity, such as the camp antics of that incorrigible clown in drag, Pieter-Dirk Uys, or Kenny Kunene’s parties where guests eat sushi off the bodies of bikini-clad ladies.
South Africa is profoundly amoral. It lacks a moral or ethical code to define right and wrong. Someone like Baudrillard would say that this “lack”, in a psychoanalytical sense, creates a need for a kind of pseudo-ethics, a moral simulacrum.
This is where anti-racism comes in. Anti-racism is the simulacrum of our lost moral code. It is no coincidence that the objectionable sentence in Louise Mabille’s column contained references to both Calvinism and baby rape, the former marking the overtly Christian morality of the old South Africa and the latter epitomising the radical “freedom from all scruples” that characterises the new South Africa.
In this respect, Gillian Schutte, despite her evidently defective grasp of some basic philosophical and literary concepts, understands the “new amorality” well. In one of her “feminist” videos, a rape victim explains that the “cure” for the shame attached to having been raped, is to join the so-called “slutwalk”, ardently recommended by Ms. Schutte. By self-identifying as a slut, a woman is freed from the fear of rape and “forced sex” as it is euphemistically called. Miracle cures are to be found everywhere in South Africa, peddled by immigrant Nigerian pastors and indigenous witchdoctors alike. Not to forget the infamous “virgin cleansing myth” by which one may be cured of HIV-Aids by raping a virgin, including an infant, and which Louise Mabille alluded to in her column.
Gillian Schutte is also a champion of the word “cunt” which, according to her, should become part of our everyday discourse. As she puts it,
“When women finally reclaim and speak this word, its full potential will be released and women will repossess their collective cunt-power and rise up against misogyny and patriarchy with the absolute intent of ending it.”
Amid the universal amorality and Neronic decadence of South Africa, Schutte is clutching at ethical straws, more precisely: pubic hairs. Instead of simply affirming and enjoying the slutwalk, she opts for the simulacrum of the good, which has now turned out to be the “collective cunt-power” of women.
But there is no “good” anymore. South Africa is really living according to the famous maxim from Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov: “If there is no God, then everything is permitted.” As I intimated the other day, SA really stands for “Sadists’ Apocalypse”. Eighteenth-century French literature, specifically the writings of the Marquis de Sade, is all that we have to remotely begin to understand our baby rapists and farm murderers.
Apart from Gillian Schutte’s “cunt-power”, the other pseudo-morality that people desperately cling to is anti-racism. In our sadistic universe where nothing is wrong, some people imagine that racism is the one remaining sin. You may kill, rape, bribe, lie and steal, more or less with impunity, but uttering the word “Bantu” will earn you the opprobrium of polite society, that society which is now reappropriating the magical power of four-letter words.
The simulacrum of sin is transgression of anti-racist etiquette. That alone awakens some form of long-lost moral response which is delivered with predictable ecclesiastical ritual: denunciation, excommunication, prohibition, censorship. From the TV studio did Schutte, the high priestess of atavistic cunt-power and pagan ritual, deliver her sermon against what Orwell called thoughtcrime: “racist” thoughts and suspicions, including the mere mention of “baby rape”, which is a proven and documented phenomenon in this country.
Did Johnny Burger, the Cape winemaker, commit suicide to save his honour? In a country where “trial by media” and populist passions have come to influence courts and the judicial system, Burger probably correctly surmised that he would not receive a fair trial. His suicide reminds me of the death of the patrician Latin author Petronius who, having got wind of Nero’s henchmen being sent to kill him, preferred taking his own life while drinking wine and having musicians perform for him.
Thanks to Carina Papenfus’s hate campaign, no-one will ever drink Burger’s wine again.
Similarly to Burger, Louise Mabille fell upon her own sword and resigned. Understandably, there is despair and pessimism among the remaining class of thinking people in South Africa. We are outnumbered and outscreamed by those who are playing for the gallery.
However, notwithstanding samurai customs, there are other ways of saving one’s honour. On these shores, we have the example of the bittereinder, of someone fighting to the very, bitter end, against all odds.
Are we ready for that thankless struggle, knowing full well that we shall face calumny all the way? If reason be dead, can thought or the mind still withstand the mob, baying for our blood?
When Zimbabwe’s veteran President Robert Mugabe suavely hosted journalists at State House on the eve of last month’s election, there was only one question that caught him off guard.
Asked if the presence of Defence Minister Emmerson Mnangagwa by his side meant he was his chosen successor, Mugabe paused awkwardly amid laughter and then replied unconvincingly that Mnangagwa had just dropped by to see him.
Three weeks after Mugabe’s re-election in a disputed vote called a fraud by his main rival but accepted by his African neighbours, there are no doubts Africa’s oldest leader is holding firmly on to the presidency after 33 years in power.
But the question of whether, at 89, he can serve out all of his new five-year term – and who will succeed him if he steps down or dies – would have hung uncomfortably over his re-installation as Zimbabwe’s head of state last Thursday.
It will also be crucial for the future of the nation, which is rich in minerals but still emerging from a decade-long recession brought on by political violence and government-backed land seizures.
Mugabe faces few immediate threats. Rival Morgan Tsvangirai has been stunned by the enormity of his defeat in an election he says was rigged from start to finish; last week he dropped a challenge to Mugabe’s re-election that his Movement for Democratic Change had filed in the Constitutional Court. The court confirmed Mugabe’s win was “free, fair and credible” and had reflected the “will of the people”.
Faced with broad endorsement of the result by regional and continental bodies, Western governments must now decide whether to shun the man they have reviled as a ruthless dictator for years, or attempt a rapprochement in the interests of practical diplomacy.
Mugabe’s non-committal answer on the succession is typical of a wily and inscrutable guerrilla politician who fought a liberation war leading to independence in 1980, crushed a revolt once in power and has outfoxed rivals in and outside his fractious Zanu-PF.
“Mugabe and Tsvangirai have fought their last elections… one way or another. Whether it was stolen or not, this was a historic election that prefigures change,” Stephen Chan, professor of international relations at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, said.
Adding to Zimbabwe’s uncertain outlook is the perception that another Mugabe term will intensify a succession battle within the ruling party. Zanu-PF has a history of feuds and splits dating back to its bush war against white minority rule in what was then Rhodesia.
Defence Minister Mnangagwa, 66, a guerrilla war veteran and Mugabe’s main security enforcer, is widely seen as a succession contender, along with vice-president Joice Mujuru and State Security Minister Sydney Sekeramayi.
Mnangagwa, earned a hardline reputation as security minister in the 1980s for his role in suppressing rebels in Matabeleland.
Mnangagwa, Mujuru and Sekeramayi have been members of Mugabe’s cabinet since 1980, and played a major role in Zanu-PF’s re-election machine.
During campaigning, Mujuru addressed rallies, Mnangagwa acted as Mugabe’s presidential election agent and Sekeramayi was the ruling party’s point man for the legislative elections in which Zanu-PF was declared the winner.
On the face of it, Mujuru, 58, another liberation war veteran whose nom de guerre was Teurai Ropa (“Spill the Blood”) appears to hold an advantage in the succession stakes because as first party vice-president she acts for Mugabe when he is away.
But under a new constitution adopted earlier this year, Zanu-PF would choose a new president if Mugabe stepped down or were to die before the end of his term. Many fear this could lead to a scramble for power among ambitious aspirants.
This week Mujuru attacked party rivals and presented herself as the moderate leader Zanu-PF needs after Mugabe, local media reported.
“We know that the president will soon be 90 and God might decide to call him … I am best placed to succeed Mugabe if he departs whether by natural wastage or voluntary retirement,” she said.
Far from mellowing his rhetoric, Mugabe has told his post-election critics to “go hang” and promised to increase the pace of “indigenisation” policies forcing foreign-owned firms to sell majority stakes to black Zimbabweans. – Reuters
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