Tag: Barbara Creecy

Dan Roodt: Anglicising Afrikaans schools will speed up the country’s decline

It is astonishing that Mary Metcalfe, whose educational legacy in Gauteng was characterised by one foolish, abandoned experiment after the other, should pontificate on the issue of Afrikaans schools (“War talk won’t end language row”, June 5). The very prowess of those schools and their exceptional results depended for years on avoiding, sometimes even surreptitiously, the more disastrous policies and decisions emanating from the provincial education minister’s office.

Metcalfe is also blindly ethnocentric, judging from the zeal with which she argues the case for ramming even more English down our throats. What she calls a “legal war of attrition” over the Afrikaans schools is, more fundamentally, a prolongation of the Anglo-Boer wars and the quest for total English supremacy and monoculture.

In many societies, such attempts at cultural and political domination of one group over another have led not to legal bellicosity, but to more literal war and ethnic conflict. Metcalfe refers to “challenges of perception”, among which is the “perception” (of white liberals with children in ­private English schools?) “that language exclusion operates as a proxy for racial exclusion”.

Before we argue about perceptions, there is a reality that Afrikaners are, by and large, politically and culturally excluded from the current system that is run by ex-terrorists, ­former exiles and an Anglomaniac elite that takes its own colonial Anglo-American or even Afro-American culture as a given. McDonald’s and KFC are in; boerewors and biltong are out.

The operative term here, and which Metcalfe in her Anglomaniac self-righteousness uses quite freely, is “imposition”: “the imposition of English as a parallel medium of instruction in Afrikaans-medium schools”. By what right do Metcalfe, Barbara Creecy and their puppet, Panyaza Lesufi, want to “impose” their killer language on us? English enjoys unheard-of dominance, funding (also by the Afrikaans taxpayer, who is financing English imperialism) and exclusive privilege on all levels of government, yet this is apparently not enough. The Afrikaans school must be stifled, given its final solution – all in the name of “diversity”, that nauseatingly politically correct concept. There are ­thousands of all-black schools all over South Africa without any white children, yet no one is bemoaning their “lack of diversity”.

It follows that the assault on Afrikaans schools has nothing to do with improving education, but more with the ethnic hatred of Afrikaners in some Anglophone, cultural-Marxist circles whose covert objective is not only to eradicate the Afrikaans language but also to rid the country of Afrikaners. Either we will be made to feel so unwelcome and hated that we will simply emigrate or there will be some more violent solution to the “Afrikaner problem”.

If the remaining 124 Afrikaans schools in Gauteng succumb to English political fanaticism, the country will lose many young engineers and scientists, further hastening its current decline. But those schools have a wider function too: in a violent, decadent society that is hostile to cultural minorities, they care for our children.

Afrikaans schools manage to give children from single-parent, lower middle-class homes a chance in life. They also represent the last havens of Afrikaans culture menaced by an Anglocentric state and corporate behemoths constantly imposing their monoculture on everyone.

It is not true that “from 1994, many historically Afrikaans schools have opted to offer parallel streams of English and Afrikaans in one school”. In all the cases I know of, there was some degree of threat or coercion from the provincial education department concerned.

The notion that Afrikaans schools “belong” to the state and not to the community that created them must also be challenged. Metcalfe and education MEC Lesufi are the landlords of public schools, lording it over their hapless tenants as they see fit. Most Afrikaans schools in Gauteng were financed by Afrikaner taxes and are maintained as semi-private institutions by fee-paying parents, often grappling with financial problems.

Ever since the British took control of South Africa in 1806, there has been a Dutch and Afrikaans taalstryd (language struggle), perhaps interrupted by 40 years of National Party rule, during which an Afrikaner government did not dare to force English schools to become Afrikaans medium.

After two centuries of language struggle, the very existence of Afrikaans and Afrikaans schools is still under threat from a hostile, fundamentalist, Anglomaniac government that makes British colonialists look tame by comparison.

First pulblished on 11 June 2015 in the Mail & Guardian, Johannesburg.

Clinton funds conflict in Syria, Baltimore and now South Africa

The Hillary Clinton Diaspora Foundation supports the homecomingrevolution.com in South Africa. Their spokesperson Angel Jones is a Board Member of Roedean School. This private English school, one of the oldest and most expensive Anglican institutions in South Africa, features prominently in the attacks against Afrikaans schools.

The previous white ANC education MEC, Barbara Creecy – also from Roedean – has served as the instigator of the ongoing schools conflict since 2009. Creecy was appointed as the new finance MEC in 2014.

She is currently “advising” Panyaza Lesufi, her follower and some say puppet, on the English take-over of Afrikaans schools.

Creecy says on her bio she “used her journalism skills in ANC underground structures”. The terrorist underground of the ANC waged a bombing campaign against civilians before they were unbanned.

Jones, a friend of Creecy’s, was invited to Morning Live on SABC2 on Wednesday where she repeated Creecy’s goals and openly stated that Afrikaans schools should be anglicized as soon as possible.

Jones makes the nonsense claim that she, as a British passport holder, belonged to the “African diaspora” in Britain. She also misspells “Hillary” as “Hilary” on the “fact sheet” of her organisation.

Hillary Clinton’s foundation funds “diaspora communities” to “offer the benefits of the ‘brain gain,’” Clinton said at the opening ceremony of the second annual Global Diaspora Forum in 2012.

The homecomingrevoltion.com in South Africa promotes the “African brain gain“.

Speaking to about 500 diaspora community leaders, advocates and senior US officials in 2012, Clinton cited the support of Syrian Americans and organizations as an example of how the Syrian diaspora serves as a link to support “opposition activists” in the war-torn Syria.

Most of the “opposition activists” in Syria today are members of ISIS, who behead “infidels”.

Clinton’s funding is hardly an advertisement for Creecy, Jones and their ilk. At the meeting in 2012 Clinton also praised the ways that immigrant communities have revitalized American cities like Baltimore, Md.

In only two short years Baltimore exploded into racial strife and animosity, raising fears that meddling by the Clintons may lead to open conflict.

Europeans and Americans, Afrikaners and English

roodt_dan_wikiby Dan Roodt

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I have just read an interesting article by Matthew Contessini, claiming that Europeans are “more pro-white than Americans”. The piece is full of speculative insights that may not ultimately survive scrutiny, but does identify some elements undermining Western/European culture and others supporting it.

I think Anglo-Saxon culture is to some extent a victim of its own success. Many people learn English and Third Worlders especially are attracted to it as a source of power and economic prowess. British colonialism anglicised India and most of Africa. In order to maintain itself, the Empire must ultimately assume the complexion, literally and figuratively, of its inhabitants. The whole chicken tikka masala debate started by Robin Cook in 2001 is relevant here. According to Cook, the ethnic homogeneity that Britain enjoyed in the Victorian era is an illusion and “(t)he diversity of modern Britain expressed through devolution and multiculturalism is more consistent with the historical experience of our islands”.

South Africa, even more than Britain, is a country in search of its own identity. Will there be any whites left in this country in fifty years’ time? Whites are legislated against by government and attacked by black criminals. Yet English-speaking whites mostly see a solution in “better law enforcement”, “better education” and “making multiculturalism work”. Taking their cue from “chicken tikka masala Britain”, they wish to be part of a global Anglo-Saxon empire where “diversity” is celebrated. The same goes for those Afrikaners who live in mostly English-speaking areas of South Africa, some of whom send their children to English private schools (although this phenomenon is also declining).

On the other hand, Afrikaners who remain true to their language and traditions see separatism, the pursuit of a so-called “volkstaat” or ethnic state as the sole solution to the problems of white survival. Over the past two years or so, most Afrikaner organisations, sometimes meeting secretly, have endorsed the pursuit of self-determination as the only viable survival strategy.

It seems that, ultimately, having a universal culture beamed to the whole world via Hollywood and global corporations, becomes a handicap as it creates the impression that you are a master of your own destiny whereas in fact you are not. To some extent, English in South Africa has become a black language because all English institutions such as universities, state schools, media, etc., have been taken over by blacks. Despite twenty years of affirmative action, forced integration, and so on, there are still many Afrikaans state schools that are 95% white, to the frustration of the authorities. Ironically, liberal whites such as Helen Zille or Barbara Creecy, the provincial education minister of Gauteng, are more hostile to these schools than blacks and are trying their utmost to have them declared illegal.

The point that Matthew Contessini makes about Europeans’ sense of kinship is important too. A year ago, a columnist for the London Financial Times, Simon Kuper, wrote scathingly about his visits to South Africa, saying:

One Christmas about 30 years ago we left Johannesburg on a bus trip to a safari park. All the other people in the bus were Afrikaners: big healthy white families in shorts. With their handful of surnames, and heavy Dutch faces utterly distinct from their African surroundings, they were a tribe.”

The “handful of surnames” he is referring to are the Dutch and French surnames that we have kept and that have been Afrikanerised over the centuries. We can tell immediately by surname if someone is “one of us” or not. As Kuper, who is generally not sympathetic to Afrikaners, admits, that makes us a “white tribe”.

On Thursday night I attended a poetry reading at my children’s high school. It breaks one’s heart to see all those talented, clever children emerging into adulthood, able to write, to compose, to think, to reason, but who have one handicap: they are white in a black world. What will become of them? Will they be overwhelmed with “diversity” and simply get assimilated, or will they survive as white Afrikaners, bearers of our language and culture?

I think Southern identity in the US has the same potential to unite at least some Americans around an ideal. Often defeat, as during the Civil War or our Anglo-Boer War, leads to loss of territory but can create a more enduring sense of identity even stronger and more valuable than territory which depends so much on demography and military power. I think as Western populations decline world-wide, we have to accept that we are going to lose vast tracts of land to others. The trick will be to keep our sense of who we are and where we come from. Teaching our children about European art history and philosophy is as important as teaching them our language and literature.

Not that territory is unimportant, but this is as much a struggle for identity as it is for anything else.

The most horrifying aspect of all is that American military might, created by a vast army of Western scientists and engineers, will ultimately fall into the hands of the imperial multiculturalists, a mixed-race America, who will use it to oppress and persecute whites globally. South Africa is a precedent for this, as the ANC is using the power of the formerly white state and its institutions, including its highly efficient revenue-gathering capability, to wage identity war against whites.

The future ownership of the US military-industrial complex is therefore of concern to us all. The sooner Europeans realise this too, the better.

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Hands off Afrikaans please

From culture to multicultural intimidation. Pictures from a 'cultural evening' at Fochville High School. Now the education department wants to deny the school its language and culture.

On behalf of the Pro-Afrikaans Action Group (Praag) and all Afrikaans speakers in the country, I strongly object to your sensationalist headline: “My child hates Afrikaans people” (City Press, May 5).

The rest of the article displays a distinct bias against Hoërskool Fochville and Afrikaans in general by selectively quoting from affidavits filed by an NGO run by Mark Heywood, who is British.

For 200 years now, language has been a bone of contention in South Africa, specifically the fraught relationship between English and Afrikaans. Your reporter would therefore do well to be more circumspect and objective in reporting on such an explosive issue.

Apart from swaggeringly throwing down the race card, the ace to trump all else, you also neglected to mention that Barbara Creecy, the Gauteng education MEC, had created the problem by unexpectedly busing in a whole class of so-called “English” children at the beginning of last year.

Hostile officials from the department then ordered the school to teach them in that language, for which they were not qualified.

The use of children as pawns in Creecy’s neocolonial language war on Afrikaans is distasteful. Instead of concentrating her funds and her energies on providing education in Gauteng, Creecy has launched an all-out attack on Fochville and other Afrikaans high schools, threatening an educational legacy that goes back more than 100 years.

According to newspaper reports, Creecy and her high-handed officials have also threatened Afrikaans high schools in Joburg to change their language policy. I wonder whether the same is being done at Zulu or Tswana schools?

Is it any wonder that the community around Hoërskool Fochville is defending themselves against the autocratic Gauteng education department in the courts? But what a waste of taxpayers’ funds!

Creecy is directly responsible for the implosion of maths teaching in Gauteng – with the matric average now at 20%. What are we gaining, educationally, from these vindictive state actions against Afrikaans schools?

Can the ANC not replace Creecy with a black MEC for education in Gauteng who will not have a colonial axe to grind with Afrikaans?

Dr Dan Roodt,
Director, Praag, Joburg

This letter was also published today in City Press.

Englishwoman wants to anglicise Afrikaans schools

Barbara Creecy, MEC for Education of Gauteng Province

Barbara Creecy, the MEC for Education in the Gauteng province of South Africa, has launched an all-out attack on Afrikaans high schools by threatening principals and busing in “English” (black) children to Fochville Hoërskool.

Ms. Creecy studied at the exclusive private English school with a British colonial culture, Roedean, in Johannesburg. In the tradition of Lords Somerset and Milner, as well as Kader Asmal who destroyed Afrikaans as a university language during his tenure as national minister of education, Creecy is intent on stamping out Afrikaans at high schools frequented by Afrikaans children. These schools are seen as “not multicultural enough” and transmitting a minority language and culture to children of which the province does not approve.

The province is littered with the mass graves of children who died in the concentration camps set up by Creecy’s forebears one hundred years ago. Then, the British colonial secretary for education, Sargent, said: “Our military police have gathered the vast majority of the children in these camps and I feel it is a golden opportunity to get them to speak English.” 27 000 children died in the camps and are buried in various sites in South Africa’s northern provinces.

The following information about Barbary Creecy is available on the departmental website:

Gauteng Education MEC Barbara Creecy grew up in Johannesburg where she attended the University of Witwatersrand and became involved in the student movement in the 1970s.

She was part of the South African Students’ Press Union and used her journalism skills in ANC underground structures.

She became active in supporting political detainees and this led to a permanent position in the offices of apartheid defense attorney Priscilla Jana.

During the 1980s she worked at the Civic Desk of the United Democratic Front. In the early 1990s, she was part of a non-governmental organisation that specialised in organisational development of trade unions and community-based entities, where her she gained experience in adult education, community fieldwork and organisational development.

Creecy was elected to the Gauteng Legislature in 1994 and two years later was appointed Chairperson of the Social Welfare Committee. From 1999 to 2000 she was Deputy Chief Whip and in 2001 took over chairpersonship of the Education Committee.

Since 1997, she has been a member of the ANC Executive Committee of Greater Johannesburg and was the party’s National Coordinator for the 2004 elections.

She currently serves on the Provincial Executive Committee, on which she was responsible for managing the Gauteng ANC’s 2009 general election campaign. She has a Masters Degree in Public Policy and Management from the University of London .

In 2004, she was appointed MEC for Sports, Recreation, Arts and Culture, and in 2009 was appointed MEC for Education.

Creecy is the mother of Geeta and Sean and her free time is spent walking, nurturing her garden, or focused on a good book.