apartheid – Page 7

Europeans must leave South Africa

For ages, the country today known as South Africa was no more than a loose band of separate communities. The Nguni tribes, which settled on the Southern tip of Africa around the 10th century, neither considered themselves a single nation, nor did they consider the Khoisan people already inhibiting the area part of their collective, writes Brad Cibane in the Mail&Guardian.

The Dutch settlers, who committed to transforming the Cape from a refreshment station to a settlement in the 1670s, also did not envision forming a nation with the Khoisan or the Nguni tribes. The same is apparent for the English colonists who settled in the 1820s.

The settlers and the colonists divided the country among themselves into four separate states: the Colony of Natal, the Cape Colony and the Boer Republic (Orange Free State and Transvaal). The situation persisted until the early 1900s when, after a bloody war, the Volksraad and the British embarked on negotiations, which culminated in the South African Union Act of 1909. On May 31 1910 the Union of South Africa was formed as a British dominion.

The new Union of South Africa excluded non-Europeans from its constitutional structures. The exclusion awoke the natives to the reality of their status, and drew them closer together. The loose band of tribes united to speak in unison when the South African Natives Congress was transformed into the African National Congress in 1912.

The unjust marginalisation of natives (Ngunis and Khoisan) was codified in 1913 when the government enacted a law reserving more than 87% of land for the exclusive use of whites. The government coveted ultimately to dispel all non-Europeans, and to create a “Little Europe” in Africa.

The vision started to take shape in 1948 when the National Party came into power. The National Party’s policy of “separate developments” (or “apartheid”) anaesthetised the distinction between the English and the Afrikaners. Government rhetoric opted instead for the more generic term “Europeans”. It sought to unite all whites under the “European” banner. South Africa was for (white) Europeans.

The biggest hurdle that faced the new united nation was that European South Africa and black South Africa were very different. Thabo Mbeki characterised the differences vividly in his “two nations” speech. Thus, the task of building a single nation was prodigious and it befell not just the new “black government” but all South Africans.

The characteristic terms “black” and “European” were discarded, leaving a single South Africa occupied by Africans of all races. White South Africans who had been beneficiaries of a system that pillaged and oppressed on their behalf relinquished their “European” status and citizenship. Those aggrieved by the demolition of “Little Europe” packed their bags and headed elsewhere.

It appears, however, that there are citizens of “Little Europe” (or European-South Africans) remaining in South Africa today. The problem with these people is that they do not consider themselves South African (other than “Little Europeans”). They harbour the most regressive elements.

The corollary of a South African citizenship is that it entails not just the right to co-exist with other South Africans, but also the concomitant obligations of contributing to the betterment of the nation. Citizenship in the new South Africa entails discarding racial and cultural prejudices. For the citizens of former “Little Europe”, a citizenship in the new South African also entails giving up a privilege built on many years of domination.

The nuisance with citizens of “Little Europe” currently inhibiting South Africa is that they sit elevated on a platform of perceived betterness. They harp and lash harshly at government without rolling up their own sleeves to fight the good fight. They speak with nostalgia about the good old days when their citizenship did not entail obligations towards black folk. They speak of the black inclination towards crime but make no recognition of the root causes (poverty, illiteracy and inequality).

An apt example of a citizen of “Little Europe” is a (white) man who tells foreign media that the (“black”) government is responsible for his (white) son shooting his (white) girlfriend. He makes no mention of the gun culture in which he raised his son.

South Africa faces Herculean challenges and all South Africans must battle together. The first step toward winning the battle is taking ownership of all problems by all South Africans, black or white, rich or poor. Poverty, crime and and iliteracy should concern all residents the country with similar urgency.

South Africa belongs to South Africans, citizens of “Little Europe” must leave. “Little Europe” no longer exists.

Cibane, however, likes Afrikaans. He says it’s is a beautiful language, even though it’s rather heavy. People are often curious about the difference between Afrikaans and Dutch. Except for the semantic difference, Afrikaans is much lighter, although the accent is rather heavy. Unfortunately, Afrikaans is burdened by the Soweto uprising, Skhothens, Captonian thugs and, well, the National Party.

Many young South Africans refuse to speak the language. But, if you’ve seen 7de Laan, you’ll know that it is not impossible to make love to the South African variant of Dutch.

For a non-speaker, Afrikaans gets a plus because it is exotic. Many none speaker, who at least understand the language, will appreciate hearing, “jy is pragtig” instead of “you are beautiful.”

Cibane thinks Afrikaans does not handle vulgarity well, however.

Israel launches racially segregated buses

From Monday Palestinians travelling to day jobs into central Israel from the West Bank will be urged to board special buses at a checkpoint instead of the regular services used by Israelis.

The scheme was drawn up by the Israeli transport ministry after residents in two Jewish settlements complained that Palestinians travellers on the Trans-Samaria road – also known as Highway 5 – between the West Bank and Tel Aviv were a potential threat.

There were also reports of overcrowding and fights between Israeli and Palestinian passengers.

The transport ministry insisted the move was “designed to improve the service for Palestinians entering Israel”.

But some human rights groups called it “blatant racism” that resembled South African-style apartheid.

“They are institutionalising segregated services for Jews and non-Jews,” said Ofra Yeshua-Lyth, an activist with Women For Civil Disobedience, an Israeli-Palestinian campaign group. “Many people don’t class the Israeli situation as apartheid because for a long time, Israel refrained from the characteristics of petty apartheid, like separate roads, cafés and buses. This bus situation is a step in the direction of petty apartheid because people are being segregated in their daily activities.”

Avner Ovadia, a transport ministry spokesperson, said there was no official ban on Palestinian workers travelling on public buses.

“Furthermore, the transport ministry is not authorised to stop any passenger travelling on these bus routes,” he said.

But drivers with the Afikim bus company, which operates the Trans-Samaria route, said Palestinians attempting to use the regular services would be pointed towards a different bus.

“We are not allowed to refuse service and we will not order anyone to get off the bus, but from what we were told … there will be checks at

the checkpoint, and Palestinians will be asked to board their own buses,” one driver told Ynet, an Israeli news website.

Flyers in Arabic advertising the new service have been distributed at bus stops near Palestinian villages in the West Bank.

Yirsael Maidad, a spokesman for the Jewish Settlers Council, said Israelis felt justified in refusing to share buses with Palestinians because of Israel’s experience with suicide bombers.

“Since we ride buses with Arabs every day in Israel, it’s not a racist thing but for some strange reason, Arabs blow themselves up in buses and Israelis find that very unnerving,” he said. “If you were to ask some bright young radical, he would say forcing Arabs to ride Israeli uses would be a form of colonialism. Having their own buses should be very much welcomed as part of a state-building process.”

Campaigners say troops began ordering Palestinians with Israeli work permits off buses after settlers made complaints last November.

After witnessing one such incident, Ms Yeshua-Lyth lodged a report with Makhsom Watch, an Israeli group that monitors check point incidents. She described how soldiers herded around 30 Palestinian workers from a bus travelling from Tel Aviv to the West Bank.

“The soldier/officer roars: “Udrub!” (Move!) And then: “Sit on your butts! On your butts!,” she wrote. “They are then marched to the terminal fence and made to stand along it in a line, then to sit on the cold ground and wait.”

When the men asked why they had been taken from the bus, they were told “You’re not allowed to be on Highway 5” and “You’re not allowed to use public transportation at all”.

Palestinians say they have been forced to walk several miles to their homes or use expensive taxi services since the policy of removing them from buses began. An estimated 29,000 Palestinians travel to jobs in Israel every day, according to official figures. – http://www.telegraph.co.uk

Israel ignores UN human rights review

Israel has boycotted the UN human rights forum over fears of scrutiny of its treatment of residents of the occupied territories. Israel is now the first state in history to win a deferment of the periodical review of its human rights record.

Tel Aviv has refused to send a delegation on Tuesday to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva for the Universal Periodic Review procedure where UN member states have their human rights record evaluated every four years.

Israel’s cooperation with the council stopped last March after the UN set up a committee to inspect the effects of the Israeli settlements on Palestinians.

Israel which earlier accused the United Nations of anti-Israel bias reiterated its stance, recalling that the council has passed more resolutions against Israel than all other countries combined.

“After a series of votes and statements and incidents we have decided to suspend our working relations with that body,” Yigal Palmor, Israeli foreign ministry spokesman, told the Financial Times. “I can confirm that there is no change in that policy.”

“There have been more resolutions condemning Israel than the rest of the world put together,” an Israeli government official said on Tuesday. “It’s not a fair game – it’s not even a game.”

Following the Israeli decision, the council has decided to postpone its review until no later than November.

The Council president has also called on the body to adopt a draft response to an unprecedented move by Israel.

Egypt’s representative meanwhile has warned that a “soft” approach would create a dangerous precedent and leave “a wide-open door for more cases of non-cooperation,” the AFP quoted.

Activist groups lash out against Israel’s disregard for international law.

“By not participating in its own review, Israel is setting a dangerous precedent,” Eilis Ni Chaithnia, an advocacy officer with al-Haq, a human rights organisation based in Ramallah has told the FT. “This is the first time any country has made a determined effort not to attend.”

Others thought that the council’s decision to delay gives Tel Aviv the opportunity to make amends. Eight Israeli human rights organizations issued a statement saying, “Israel now has a golden opportunity to reverse its decision not to participate,” adding “it is legitimate for Israel to express criticism of the work of the Council and its recommendations, but Israel should do so through engagement with the Universal Periodic Review, as it has done in previous sessions,” JTA quotes.

The investigation into Israel’s Human Rights record began in 2007, but last year the UN started to pay particular attention to Israel’s activities in the West Bank.

The probe at the time prompted an angry response from the country’s leader.

“This is a hypocritical council with an automatic majority against Israel,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said.

Senior Israeli officials announced last month that Israel does not intend to cancel plans to accelerate settlement construction.

Netanyahu himself said in an interview with Israeli Channel 2 last month that the disputed area “is not occupied territory” and that he “does not care” what the UN thinks about it.

Around 500,000 Israelis and 2.4 million Palestinians live in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, areas that, along with Gaza, the Palestinians want for a future state.

The United Nations regards all Israeli settlements in the West Bank as illegal. Tel Aviv last attended the human rights review in 2008. Israel is not a member of the Council, which is comprised of 47 UN member states. – RT

More back to apartheid education: teacher training colleges to reopen

groenkloof-aerial-large — Groenkloof teacher training college, one of many built by the Afrikaner government, but abolished by the ANC and their British Commonwealth education advisers, plunging South Africa into a teacher supply crisis

Plans to re-introduce teacher training colleges were underway with one former college scheduled to re-open next week, Minister of Higher Education Blade Nzimande said on Thursday.

Speaking at a New Age business briefing in Johannesburg, he said the first school to open would be the Ndebele College Campus in Siyabuswa, Mpumalanga.

Training at the college would be facilitated by the University of Johannesburg.

Three more colleges would be opened next year in KwaZulu-Natal, Limpopo and the Eastern Cape.

Between 1994 and 2000 the government shut down teacher training colleges and merged them with other institutions. The move was aimed at “overcoming the educational inequalities of apartheid and reducing an identified oversupply of primary [school] teachers”.

In 2012, Nzimande said the higher education department had noted an increase in the number of people enrolling for full-time education programmes. Almost 38,000 enrolled for teaching courses in 2009 and over 41,000 in 2010.

Nzimande said the new colleges needed to focus on the development of teachers for the foundation phase.

With scores of new tertiary entrants students failing to pass most of their first year subjects, Nzimande dismissed claims that the lowering of the matric pass mark had played a role.

He said those who qualified for university degrees had usually obtained very high marks.

Nzimande said the fact that South Africa had 12 years of lower education probably played a role in pupils’ lack of readiness for tertiary level.

“We are one of the few countries with 12 years of schooling and about three years needed for a degree… Other countries have 13 years of schooling and four-year degrees.”

More mentoring and tutoring programmes were needed to help first-year students deal with the pressure of tertiary education. He said some institutions offered a foundation year for students not quite ready to begin tertiary courses. – Sapa

Oxfam: Inequality rises after Apartheid

The world’s 100 richest people earned a stunning total of $240 billion in 2012 – enough money to end extreme poverty worldwide four times over, Oxfam has revealed, adding that the global economic crisis is further enriching the super-rich.

“The richest 1 percent has increased its income by 60 percent in the last 20 years with the financial crisis accelerating rather than slowing the process,” while the income of the top 0.01 percent has seen even greater growth, a new Oxfam report said.

For example, the luxury goods market has seen double-digit growth every year since the crisis hit, the report stated. And while the world’s 100 richest people earned $240 billion last year, people in “extreme poverty” lived on less than $1.25 a day.

Oxfam is a leading international philanthropy organization. Its new report, ‘The Cost of Inequality: How Wealth and Income Extremes Hurt us All,’ argues that the extreme concentration of wealth actually hinders the world’s ability to reduce poverty.

The report was published before the World Economic Forum in Davos next week, and calls on world leaders to “end extreme wealth by 2025, and reverse the rapid increase in inequality seen in the majority of countries in the last 20 years.”

Oxfam’s report argues that extreme wealth is unethical, economically inefficient, politically corrosive, socially divisive and environmentally destructive.

The report proposes a new global deal to world leaders to curb extreme poverty to 1990s levels by:

– closing tax havens, yielding $189bn in additional tax revenues

– reversing regressive forms of taxation

– introducing a global minimum corporation tax rate

– boosting wages proportional to capital returns

– increasing investment in free public services

The problem is a global one, Oxfam said: “In the UK inequality is rapidly returning to levels not seen since the time of Charles Dickens. In China the top 10 percent now take home nearly 60 percent of the income. Chinese inequality levels are now similar to those in South Africa, which is now the most unequal country on Earth and significantly more [inequality] than at the end of apartheid.”

In the US, the richest 1 percent’s share of income has doubled since 1980 from 10 to 20 percent, according to the report. For the top 0.01 percent, their share of national income quadrupled, reaching levels never seen before.

“We can no longer pretend that the creation of wealth for a few will inevitably benefit the many – too often the reverse is true,” Executive Director of Oxfam International Jeremy Hobbs said.

Hobbs explained that concentration of wealth in the hands of the top few minimizes economic activity, making it harder for others to participate: “From tax havens to weak employment laws, the richest benefit from a global economic system which is rigged in their favor.”

The report highlights that even politics has become controlled by the super-wealthy, which leads to policies “benefitting the richest few and not the poor majority, even in democracies.”

“It is time our leaders reformed the system so that it works in the interests of the whole of humanity rather than a global elite,” the report said.

The four-day World Economic Forum will be held in Davos starting next Wednesday. World financial leaders will gather for an annual meeting that will focus on reviving the global economy, the eurozone crisis and the conflicts in Syria and Mali. – RT

Apartheid is not to blame for mine violence, Cynthia Carroll

The recent comments by Anglo American CEO Cynthia Carroll represent an insult to everyone who still harbours some South African pride, despite our country’s slide into third-world squalor and corruption.

As reported by Sapa, Carroll said: “The violence we have seen in the mining sector this year has its seeds in the legacy of apartheid and the underlying social problems that remain.”

Now, when the National Party came to power in 1948, the entire system of migrant labour had already been in existence for decades. Since the discovery of gold, the colonial mining companies had constantly been clamouring for labour, the cheaper the better. The result was our chaotic urbanisation and immigration, with workers recruited from all over Southern Africa.

Since the nineteenth century, tens of thousands of people have died in mining accidents, the human cost of enriching a few British capitalists. Apparently Ms. Carroll has recently brought the fatality rate down in her mines, but her temerity in lecturing us about apartheid when the mines killed ten times as many people as our police riot squads in forty years is simply breath-taking.

During the 1922 strike, Smuts who by that time had become something of a British puppet, bombed miners from the air and practised a shoot-to-kill policy, killing 200 miners and injuring hundreds more.

Whereas the National Party through investments in Eskom, Transnet, Sasol, Iscor, the CSIR, HSRC, and the creation of more than twenty universities had tried to reduce our dependence on minerals, the mining companies in turn fought back by financing radical movements and propaganda.

Since the days of Rhodes and Milner, the mines have sown discord in South Africa, cynically exploiting our ethnic and political differences.

We must remember that the roots of British business may be traced back to the island’s tradition of piracy and the so-called “privateers” that received carte blanche from English monarchs to plunder the ships of other nations. The English were also the biggest slave traders in Africa, bar the Portuguese.

South Africa has hardly benefited from her mineral wealth, given that most of the profits accrue overseas. As in Joseph Conrad’s allegorical novel, Nostromo, the mines represent a curse to us, causing cycles of conflict and disaster, from the Anglo-Boer war to the current struggle between trade unions for dominance. ANC factions are likewise fighting over BEE deals involving the mines, with political assassinations in Kwazulu-Natal now almost commonplace.

As Mamphela Ramphele has suggested, the mines keep us chained to the nineteenth century and colonial forms of labour exploitation. If we stopped mining altogether and simply traded metals on world markets we would derive more benefit from platinum and gold than we do at present.

Anglo American CEO blames ‘apartheid’ for mine violence

Violence witnessed in the mining sector this year stems from apartheid, outgoing Anglo American CEO Cynthia Carroll said on Tuesday.

“The violence we have seen in the mining sector this year has its seeds in the legacy of apartheid and the underlying social problems that remain,” she said during a discussion at the Gordon Institute of Business Science in Johannesburg.

“The curse of unemployment means that mine workers often have many other people who are economically dependent on them.”

Carroll said the history of the migrant labour system loosened the bonds of family life and dislocated communities.

“The brutalisation of human relationships that occurred under apartheid… all of these factors can be seen in the turmoil and tragedy we have experienced this year.”

Carroll said whatever the challenges the country faced, there were “truths” which had to be faced.

The first was that there was no future for any society without law and order.

“Public order is the bedrock without which civilisation collapses. This year we have seen violence and unrest across the mining industry and in several other sectors.”

Another truth the nation had to face was that anarchy in the workplace benefited no one.

Businesses that could not generate adequate returns ultimately collapsed and died.

“It is the responsibility of management, not just to shareholders, but also to employees, to ensure that companies remain economically competitive.”

The maintenance of law and order and the restoration of stable labour relations were critical to perceptions of South Africa as a place to do business.

“They [international investors] will make their judgements on the basis of the reality they can see.”

She said the mining sector was at the heart of the South African economy, generating 18.7 percent of the country’s GDP and directly employing 13.5 million people.

“It [mining] has a critical role to play in supporting the aspirations of the New Growth Path and the objectives of the National Development Plan.”

Carroll said discussions on the regulation of the mining sector had been going on for a long time.

“The spectre of nationalisation has been laid to rest. But the need to guard against damaging regulatory changes remains.” – Sapa

Verwoerd’s hated legacy

NEWS FLASH FROM 50 YEARS AGO
• Safmarine buys two refrigerated cargo ships of 10 000 tonnes each to transport export fruit to Europe for R2 million.
• South Africa takes the lead with 100 000 bales of cotton spun every year on 230 000 spindles and 3 500 looms, creating 10 000 jobs.
• South Africa is the largest exporter of fish in the southern hemisphere and sixth in the world with exports valued at R40 million.
• Great Britain report that on average 250 applications for emigration to South Africa are received daily, especially from skilled artisans.
• Maree, Minister for Education, establishes the Board for bantu Education, aimed at improving black education to the same level as education for whites.
• 2000 white refugees from Kenya’s uhuru uprising are relocated in Natal where they are helped to produce tea, coffee and sisal.
• Local governments for the coloured community in the Free State established by MEC Haveman.
• SA Railways and Harbours orders 100 new electric locomotives at a cost of R13 million and with the provision that 68% material from South Africa be used in the manufacturing process.
• A hand-spinning and weaving factory for fabrics erected in Umtata, Transkei to create jobs for blacks by the Bantu Investment Corporation.
• The cape Hospitals Department spend R23 million on new hospitals, including the new University of Stellenbosch Teaching Hospital.
• A two-storey hotel for blacks erected in Daveyton, Springs for use by black sportsmen and VIP’s handed over to black entrepreneurs by Benoni Town Council.
• Dr FW Quass says that of the 2060 welfare organisations in the country, 2000 are aimed at the black population.
• The Department of Statistics releases figures of an 18% increase in employment. Monthly income for the year rose to R111,4 million compared to the previous year’s R102 million.
• Some coloured townships, including Haarlem in the Langkloof, exempted from the Group Areas Act and put under own administration.
• Between 1959 and 1962 a total of 91 631 houses for blacks were built at a cost of R38 million in urban areas, while 474 sub-economic units were built for whites at a cost of R1 million.
• South Africa has 300 000 miners employed at gold mines and 250 000 in coal mines. The fatality figures stands at 1,29 per thousand workers.
• Foreign investment grew from R142 million in 1961 to R503,6 million according to Trust Bank.
• The government announces plans to make it possible for 35 000 Xhosas in Western Transvaal to bring out special votes during the Transkei elections.
• Chief Pilane of the Tswana says he foresees the establishment of an independent Tswana state where his people and whites “can live in peace as we have always done”.
• PW Botha, Minister of Housing, announces plans to build 2000 houses in Klerksdorp and 2000 in Port Elizabeth to make provision for new immigrant employees.

WSU speaker wants racial separation

More than 200 people visited Towson University to hear Jared Taylor, a self-described “racial realist.”

A prospective White Student Union at Towson University added to its own controversial history when it brought an advocate for white interests to speak Tuesday at the group’s first meeting.

Jared Taylor, editor of the “racial realism” online news site American Renaissance, said he hoped to spread a message about the importance of racial separateness.

“I believe in complete freedom of association, and when given that choice most people prefer the company of people of their own race,” said Taylor, when reached by phone Wednesday. “We’re always being told to celebrate diversity and I think diversity is a source of tension.”

Many people, including a Patch reporter and other media, were denied admission to the Tuesday night event by campus security after the venue, which holds about 200, filled to capacity. Still, about 50 individuals stood outside the doors as Taylor spoke.

Taylor said his presentation centered around his support for the White Student Union and speaking out against diversity. He acknowledged that the audience reception was lukewarm—”some liked it, some didn’t.”

The White Student Union began recruiting members at Towson University a few months ago.This occurred shortly after Youth for Western Civilization, a group headed by current White Student Union President Matthew Heimbach, disbanded following allegations that its members scrawled “white pride” in chalk at locations around campus.

Youth for Western Civilization’s faculty advisor Richard Vatz, who is also a Patch blogger, resigned from his post after the chalk-writing incident, noting in his resignation letter that he “cannot in good conscience advise a group that attacks people or groups personally or tactlessly or does not recognize their dignity and the value of dignified argument in the marketplace of ideas.”

Heimbach, who did not return calls for comment on this article, previously said both groups were about celebrating white heritage and advocating for white interests, not supremacy.

“It’s a spectacular double standard that only whites are singled out and told they can’t have a race-based organization,” said Taylor, who argued that the group is necessary as demographics change making whites a minority.

Taylor said he presented evidence showing problems raised by diversity, such as data indicating that approximately 100,000 job grievances are related to racial matters. He also pointed to racial riots that occur in prisons. Taylor empathized with whites who felt the need to join gangs in prison because he said there are many black and Hispanic gangs existing outside of prison whose networks extend to jails.

But he did admit there was one benefit to diversity.

“I do enjoy ethnic food,” he said.

Many attendees were not impressed with Taylor’s presentation.

During his speech, Taylor said several people sneaked inside the venue through a fire escape and shouted an obscenity at him. Gay Pinder, a Towson University spokeswoman who was in attendance, said she just heard one person yell at the end of the presentation. She said the individual left through the rear door immediately after making the proclamation.

“It was generally a well-behaved crowd,” Pinder said.

Raymond Winbush, the director of The Institute for Urban Research at Morgan State University, said the presentation was deceptive.

“[Taylor’s] lying,” said Winbush, who is black. “He’s good at manipulating words and says he’s not racist. It’s like the white collar Ku Klux Klan.”

Towson University senior Ignacio Evans, who is also black, thought Taylor was well-spoken but called his speech “absolutely disgusting.”

“He was eloquent, put together, but inherently racist,” Evans said. “He was very anti-diversity and made assertions that people of color are inferior.”

Taylor dismissed the claims of racism as “name-calling.”

“[Calling someone racist is] something someone will say when they don’t have an argument,” he said.

Frankie Knight, a white senior family science student who didn’t know much about the White Student Union, came to the meeting after hearing about it from her professor.

“I thought it was very negative and very offensive,” she said.

Knight and Evans both noted that Taylor said blacks are genetically inferior. He denied making the statement.

“I have said the races are different….there are unquestionable differences,” Taylor said.

And Taylor was not without supporters. Johns Hopkins University engineering professor Dennis Nagle, who is white, said he believes there is truth to Taylor’s teachings.

“He’s got some interesting views on diversity that aren’t popular,” said Nagle, who was not able to get inside the event. “But he’s got evidence and documentation to back it up.”

The White Student Union is not a university-recognized student organization, but the group’s leaders are working to make it approved. Because they don’t yet have that status, the White Student Union had to book the Towson University venue for the presentation as an outside entity. – TowsonPatch

Black man longs for his homeland

Mafikeng’s incorporation into the then homeland [bantustan] of Bophuthatswana in 1980, made it a great place, says a black town member. Mpho Moshe Matheolane bemoans how the ANC allowed the well-functioning town of Mafikeng to deteriorate into the sad state it is now.

The then president Chief Lucas Mangope, who had succeeded in outdoing chief Tidimane Pilane for the position of the first (and only) chief minister in 1972 following the inaugural meeting of the Bophuthatswana Legislative Assembly, found himself in what can only be described as a quagmire of note in the period leading up to South Africa’s first democratic elections. Unable to relinquish power, he put his faith in the AWB in the hopes that his “country” would resist incorporation back into South Africa.

Despite Mangope’s blunders and the clearly unwelcome position by many anti-apartheid political movements, that Bophuthatswana like all the other homelands was a step in the wrong direction regarding the collective struggle of the native peoples of South Africa, Bophuthatswana went on to become the best run and most successful of the homelands. The argument has been made before; under the Bophuthatswana black-run government many positive things were achieved, even in the face of relying on apartheid South Africa for backing and the subsequently unfortunate endorsement of the policy of racially based separate development.

Infrastructure such as an airport, a broadcasting centre (Bophuthatswana Broadcasting Corporation, or BBC), a quality university (UniBo) and internationally equipped and state of the art recording studio, to name but a few, were put in place. A strong sense of identity both culturally and socially was entrenched in many of the homeland’s inhabitants. It was required that one be as fluent and literate in their mother tongue as they were in English or Afrikaans.

Of course, this is not to say that the Bophuthatswana days were the halcyon days as the rest of the country continued to go through the motions of a land forcefully coming to terms with its destiny. Even within its borders, a constant awareness of the stark contrast of life outside permeated the minds of many. But the significance of this historical context becomes relevant when one looks at what the former Bophuthatswana homeland became after a democratic dispensation was achieved. Under the current ANC leadership and since 1994, Mafikeng as the apparent synecdoche of Bophuthatswana and its entire functioning infrastructure all but came to a tragic halt and dare one say, deliberate near-destruction.

Logic arguably dictates that given much of the work that had already been accomplished in Mafikeng, all that the ANC had to do was to build on top of it. But this was never the case. The former BBC which, according to some sources, already had the capacity to provide a number of national channels several times over its now embarrassingly incompetent parent body, the SABC, quickly deteriorated. The international recording studios, which were used for part of the award winning Lion King musical production, were put under lock and key, while the airport, which is still in the list of longest runways in the world, was passed on for some private use despite the brief SAA connecting flights that were operated from it.

Mafikeng as it stands does not have a town gallery even though many a talent came and continue to come out of it. The town museum is a dishevelled institution which currently sees its parking lot being utilised by the provincial department of public works. In any given year, a new shopping mall can spring up a mere five minutes from the next one, creating in turn, ghostly complexes whose interiors are filled with to-let signs and emptiness. These are but only a few of the many things that are now administratively wrong with Mafikeng.

The sprawling rural land that was tamed into a town as sensitively depicted in the photographic work of Paul Alberts, The Borders of Apartheid, is now nothing but a shadow of its former self. Thanks to black rule.

Zuma blames apartheid

South Africa’s president says the mining unrest that captured international attention following the police killing of 34 striking miners will be resolved through negotiation.

President Jacob Zuma told the Associated Press that the Aug. 16 killings at the Lonmin PLC platinum mine in Marikana should not be viewed as “the kind of incident that will be a common occurrence” or “that things have gone out of control in South Africa.”

He said the strikes which spread to other, mostly gold, mines were a direct consequence of the strike at Marikana and that they too would be resolved through negotiation.

Zuma denied that the strikes revealed startling inequalities in post-apartheid South Africa, saying it was not a problem that has “arisen now,” blaming the problem on the legacy of apartheid. – AP

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.

Follow me on Twitter.

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.