British colonialism

The devious behaviour of the liberal mind

Another perfect example of the devious behaviour of the liberal mind.

For more than a hundred years the Swiss town of St Gallen carried the name of Krügerstrasse (Kruger Street), but because President Paul Kruger was evidently a “white racist”, the name had to change.

The Tagblatt actually went so far as to state that Paul Kruger was an “Apartheid pioneer”. It’s easy to make these outrages statements when the person has been dead for more than a hundred years. Who’s going to sue them?

Paul Kruger was the consumate anti-colonialist. He was also a brilliant military strategist against British marauders. He was loved by most black tribes in Southern Africa for these qualities, but Switzerland clearly does not care for historical fact.

From Reuters:

A street in the Swiss town of St Gallen, which for more than a hundred years bore the name of former South African president Paul Kruger, was renamed by local authorities yesterday.

Theo Buff, from the town’s planning department, said the name was being changed “because of racist associations”.

Kruger, who led the Boer resistance against the British during in the Second Boer War of 1899 to 1902, lived in St Gallen after fleeing Africa when the British advanced on Pretoria.

“In the context of the time, naming a street after Paul Kruger can be understood,” the St Gallen council said, “but today it can no longer be justified.”

The street will now be called Duerrenmatt Street, after Swiss author and dramatist Friedrich Duerrenmatt.

China now controls crucial section of SA’s English media

The coloured André Kriel replaced white socialist Terry Bell

Paul Trewhela says there are disturbing implications of the Sekunjalo consortium’s takeover of the Independent newspaper group. A Communist state has never had such enormous influence over a crucial section of English-language news media anywhere in the world, warns Trewhela, himself a former party member.

The Communist Party of China – the ruling party of a totalitarian state in the second biggest economic power in the world – has taken a 20 percent stake in the second biggest press corporation in South Africa.

According to a statement of the Competition Commission on 16 August last year, a first acquiring firm is Sekunjalo Independent Media (Pty) Ltd, a private firm incorporated in South Africa. A second acquiring firm, Newco, is “a newly formed entity to be incorporated in the Republic of Mauritius.” The announcement continues: “In the Shareholders Agreement entered between China International Television Corporation (“CITVC”) and China Africa Development fund (“CADF”), it is indicated that Newco shall be called Interacom Investment Holdings Limited.”

What the Competition Commission did not state – apparently this was of no concern to it – is that CITVC and CADF are wholly owned instruments of the Chinese state, which in turn is wholly controlled by a single political organisation, the Communist Party. No political parties are permitted in China, except the Communist Party, which exercises a one-party dictatorship over the media.

Sanctioned in October last year, the Chinese state carried through this deal in conjunction with the ANC government, which has taken 25 percent state ownership of the same company via the Public Investment Corporation. In the hands of an openly ANC-sympathetic company, Sekunjalo, this has facilitated ANC/Chinese state entry into most of the main morning newspapers published in English in the country.

The press corporation is now 45 percent owned by these two governments. The former Argus Company, was previously owned by the Anglo American Corporation, which it sold to the Independent News and Media Group, led by Sir Tony O’Reilly, in 1994. Cash-strapped, and having asset-stripped its South African acquisition, INM sold it to the consortium led by Sekunjalo, a Black Economic Empowerment company, last August.

With its 55 percent shareholding of the former O’Reilly press network in South Africa, Sekunjalo now controls 14 newspapers including the nationally circulated Sunday Independent; The Star and Pretoria News in Gauteng; the Cape Times, Cape Argus, Daily Voice and Weekend Argus in Cape Town; The Mercury, Post, Isolezwe, Daily News, Sunday Tribune and Independent on Saturday in Durban; as well as the Diamond Fields Advertiser in Kimberley.

The group’s titles are reported to account for 28 percent of the total advertising spend in paid newspapers in South Africa, 22 percent of all newspapers sold in the country, and 63 percent of the English language market. This makes it a powerful presence in the most widely-read language medium of print journalism in the country.

Never before has a Communist state been in such a position of influence over the press in South Africa. The English media has strictly always been in the hands of British colonial interests. While Mandela is seen as an icon in Britain and the US, they have both been strangely mum on Mandela’s Communist leanings.

The whole affair was masked in South Africa and internationally by a global wave of attention to the decline, death, and funeral of Nelson Mandela, as the pre-eminent icon of 21st century secular, global religious veneration, despite acknowledgement by the South African Communist Party on the day after his death that in the two years before he was arrested in August 1962 he had in fact been a member of SACP central committee.

No suggestion of this awkward fact was permitted to disturb the premiere of the film Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom in London – announced from the podium at the close of the film, on the evening of his death – or his commemoration last week in Westminster Abbey, both events attended by royalty.

The same awkward fact was missed also in no less than five biographies of Mandela written since his release from prison in 1990, most notably by the British author and journalist Anthony Sampson in his “authorised” biography of 1999, though established conclusively in general histories published in South Africa in the three years preceding Mandela’s death by British historian Stephen Ellis and Russian professor Irina Filatova, on the basis of interviews and research in the archives in South Africa, Moscow and Berlin.

Apart from a few perfunctory reports, and with no analysis, the immense implications of the transfer of the most important sector in English-language newspapers in South Africa to a company heavily backed by the Communist and ANC governments has received no attention in South Africa itself, and next to nothing elsewhere, apart from a well-grounded report in the Toronto Globe and Mail by Geoffrey York, writing from Nairobi on 12 October last year, headed “Why China is making a big play to control Africa’s media.”

Immediately following Mandela’s death, a purge of editorial staff in South Africa’s morning newspapers got under way, with shocking speed. Ms Alide Dasnois, exemplary editor of the venerable Cape Times – the first daily paper in southern Africa, founded in Cape Town in 1872 by Frederick York St Leger and modelled on The Times in London – was “relieved of her post” (as delicately phrased by her very experienced deputy, Tony Weaver, in a pained and appalled response) on the morning after Mandela died.

Recalling the massive effort of Cape Times staff on the night before she was sacked, Weaver described the newspaper’s memorial “Madiba wraparound” – affectionately using Mandela’s clan name – as “the best newspaper I have ever worked on.” It was voted by Time Magazine one of the 14 best front pages in the world. “History called, the Cape Times answered,” Weaver concluded. “Alide Dasnois was the editor. It was our last Madiba moment.”

Not so for Dr Iqbal Survé, the chairman of Sekunjalo, now front man for China’s news interests in the most developed economy in Africa, and media front man also for the regime of South Africa’s president Jacob Zuma:

“It is my considered view, and that of the senior executive team”, declared Dr Survé (in his previous career, Nelson Mandela’s medical doctor), in an attempt to justify his sacking of Dasnois, “that the failure of the Cape Times to lead with such a momentous event was an affront to the dignity of Madiba and a disservice to our readers”.

Well, no. More to the point, is Dr Survé’s announcement that his China-and-ANC-backed media empire will in future report more “positive aspects” of the country.

A month after the sacking of Dasnois, Terry Bell – a former political detainee under the apartheid regime, former exile and veteran Business Report columnist in the Independent group titles – was abruptly told that his “Inside Labour” column had been placed on “indefinite hold” while a “recalibration process” is underway.

Three weeks earlier, in his column, Bell had queried an extraordinary instruction which had been received by the Cape Times. According to Bell, this instruction had come from one Andre Kriel, general secretary of the clothing and textile workers’ union, Sactwu. Kriel, wrote Bell, claimed to have spoken to Iqbal Survé, who had agreed that Kriel should “facilitate” the matter of relations between the Cape Times and its new owners. (SACTWU has a share in the consortium.)

Bell reported that Kriel had also “launched attacks on the Cape Times, claiming that this newspaper ‘has not ever carried one positive story about the great struggles that workers have waged’.” Kriel clearly saw his role, continued Bell, “as one campaigning against ‘neo-liberalism’, something he apparently sees as epitomised by the Cape Times.”

In addition to being a council member of the South Africa-US Business Forum, Survé is also chairman of the South Africa-Saudi Arabia Business Council. Sekunjalo lists his senior executive team as: Khalid Abdulla (chief executive officer), Salim Young (lead independent non-executive director), Vukile Mehana (independent non-executive director) and Aziza Begum Amod (non-executive director). Related people are listed as: Mohamed Yusaf Kajee (executive director for Sekunjalo Investments) and Ferhad Khan.

With such powerful joint state financial influence over the Independent group, this is potentially one of the most dangerous attacks on press freedom in South Africa since the founding of the Cape Times as the first daily newspaper in the country in 1872, and a breach of the spirit of the Constitution.

Mandela: myths vs. facts

by Christo Landman

The ceremonies and media propaganda around the death of Nelson Mandela, cost millions of rands. Those rands were to a large extent paid by taxpayers of whom the large majority are white. By means of social grants, they also have to financially support 17 million people, the vast majority of whom are black.

The propaganda wave surrounding the life and death of the then President Mandela is a blend of myth and fact. Khehla Shubane of the Centre for Policy Studies verbalized the Mandela mythology on CNN, which hasnow become the official Mandela mythology.

But Shimon Peres, a former Prime Minister of Israel, once said of the Israeli and Palestinian disputes: “Personally, I have very little patience for history. I believe that to imagine is more important than to remember.” Myths are figments of the imagination, but to remember is the recollection of facts.

Imagination is the fertile ground in which myths flourish. Imagine what Mandela was thinking as he looked through the bars of his prison window overlooking Table Mountain. The myth developed that he had had a Damascene experience and converted from a man who planned violence as the only way to achieve his political objectives, to a man who rejects all forms of violence and instead embraces reconciliation, forgiveness, tolerance and accommodating interpersonal and group differences.

Imagination became perception, which grew into mythical proportions to be finally presented as historical fact. It is true that he was a skillful politician and a worthy opponent, who never allowed side issues to influence the core issues on the table. It was a fact that during his five-year tenure as the country’s first black president, he achieved more for peace and harmony in a deeply divided South Africa than Mbeki and Zuma, who succeeded him during the fifteen years thereafter. The success of his policy of accommodating differences between cultural groups during his reign supported the growing myth of the saintly Madiba.

But the historical facts that emerged since his retirement do not support the notion of Mandela’s fundamental sense of righteousness and moral values. During the fifteen years since his retirement he never ever pronounced his displeasure at the way the ANC had converted from a liberation movement to a plundering national mafia. Did he condone what his successors were doing? Did he condone their immoral return to outdated tribal customs in the face of the need for a unified South Africa, where one race group is not superior to another? Or did he merely lack the courage to defend his moral convictions such as Archbishop Tutu so often does?

That failure on his part drew a line through the Mandela myth and has exposed him as a shrewd political strategist and not the moralist he is made out to be. The world conveniently has conveniently forgotten about the last fifteen years of Mandela’s life on earth before catapulting him as a saint into future mythology.

It is therefore fitting to review the actual historical facts of South Africa in order to gain a perspective to evaluate the pre- and post-Mandela era.

It seems that mythmaking is a fact of life in the history of countries and peoples. South Africa is no exception.

Among Afrikaners the myth is accepted as fact that the Dutch came to RSA with the godly purpose to Christianize blacks. In fact, they came to the Cape of Good Hope to open a trade mission between Europe and India.
On the other hand, blacks believe sincerely that they were indigenous to RSA and that their land was stolen by whites. The fact is that the black tribes originated in the central parts of Africa and moved to the south in three great streams. In Southern Africa different language groups occupied different geographical areas. This is still so! The constitution of SA 1996 lists the following black language communities: Sepedi, Sesotho, Setswana, siSwazi, Tshivenga, Xitsonga, isiNdebele, isiXhoas and isiZulu. In the 1993/4 financial year the government spent R650 mill on 4 554 tribal leaders, which included 18 kings and queens.

The further fact is that the Dutch occupied land at the Cape which was deemed to be “no-man’s-land”. Here and there nomadic Khoi and San tribes were found but what was absent was a government over an identifiable territory with fixed borders and with its own administration.

Another severe problem is that the original history of the black peoples of Southern Africa is not a written one, but a verbal one — so that mythmaking is obviously at the order of the day. The history of the whites is a written one, of which the facts are verifiable. Some of these facts include the following:

Dutch temporary occupation was a business transaction and when the Free Burger farmers emerged and moved to the interior, the occupation of the Cape in international law obtained a permanent character.
The numbers of the Dutch were strengthened by the French Huguenots and by some Germans and later, after the first and second British occupation of the Cape, by some English and Scots.
White civilization over a period of 2 700 years grew through the following phases: organized agriculture, education, mining, technological innovations, industrialization and an electronic revolution. Differently said: through a pre-modern society to modernism and rationalism to post-modernism!
On the other hand, when the first contacts of the whites with blacks other than the Khoi and San “first peoples” took place in 1675, their agricultural tradition was not organized at all and land ownership was the collective property of the tribal king … as is still the case in many of the tribal communities today.
As a matter of fact, the land ownership at Qunu, where Nelson Mandela is buried, is owned by the Tembu King who is the trustee of land ownership. This is the case in many a Southern African country, such as Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Swaziland and others. In RSA there are strong forces at work to abolish private ownership of land.

Ideologically speaking, the divide between white and black is just as strong. British colonialism made a huge impact on Afrikaners and the black peoples. In the case of the Afrikaners British colonialism tried to impose the British way of life on them. Those Afrikaners and black elite groups who adopted the English life-style were in a limited way integrated. Hence, the British influence in RSA actually laid the foundation for a class system; which system is now, after the demise of a policy of ethnic diversity, dominant.

The Afrikaners, on the other hand, advocated the Republican system of government. British liberalism based on the advancement of individual rights, as manifested in Chapter 2 of the Constitution of SA 1996, had a great impact on Afrikaner political thinking. As a matter of fact, a dominant group of Afrikaners now vote for the Democratic Alliance, which Alliance adopts liberal democracy as the only viable alternative to ANC collectivism and the workings of social democracy.

Black political thinking in the leadership of the so-called liberation movements was heavily influenced and supported by the philosophy of Marxism and Soviet Communism whose ideological thinking was closer to the collectivism of the traditional social organization of the various black ethnic groups.

The political development of SA since 1652 developed in various phases:

Since 1652 the Dutch forefathers of the Afrikaners established themselves in the Cape as a permanent settlement.
This was followed by two occupations by the United Kingdom, which led to the advancement of the Voortrekkers to the interior.
It was during their move to the interior that the Vootrekkers encountered the AmaXhosa.
The British introduced segregation of the races to supplement the segregation of a social class system.
The Voortrekkers established themselves in two main Republics: of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State.
The gold rush to the Witwatersrand in the Transvaal Republic inspired British colonialism to occupy the Transvaal Republic as well as of the Orange Free State.
The British were defeated in the First War of Liberation.
During the second War of Liberation, British colonialism became famous for its concentration camp policy whereby 27 000 Afrikaner women and children (one third of all children in the Boer Republics) died of starvation and diseases.

In 1910 the Union of SA came into being which resulted in the amalgamation of four provinces and a large number of traditional tribal authorities. However, Lesotho, Swaziland and Botswana, although politically part of British SA and geographically part of Southern Africa, were given the option to remain outside the Union, which they did. In so doing they created three ethnic sovereign states. The other language communities found themselves in subordinate positions as part of the Union. In 1913 their territorial bases were acknowledged by law.

The underdeveloped status of the tribal authorities and the gold rush led to an unprecedented influx of blacks to the four (European-style) provinces. To such an extent that the European-style governments in the provinces introduced extraordinary measures to protect Western standards in policies which became known as “petty apartheid”.

In 1948, when the Afrikaners took over the power of government, they tried to unscramble the egg, made by British colonialism and imperialism. “Petty apartheid” then became only the object of a broader policy of territorially based nation states. In 1960 SA became a Republic outside the British Commonwealth. The so-called TBVC states (Transkei, Botswana, Venda and Ciskei) opted for independence, but lacked recognition by the international community. The role of the Marxist-inspired liberation movements, such as the African National Congress, as a tool of communist expansionism in the cold war, cannot be emphasized enough.

Eventually apartheid and Zionism were declared racist ideologies by the UN. The propaganda onslaught against the policy of separate but equal development became notorious. In the meantime SA was plagued by terrorist acts, such as the Rivonia case, in which outcome Nelson Mandela and others were given life sentences. The fact remains that the then government of SA was never defeated by acts of violence. In his later years the Mandela groups could have been released much earlier, if only they were prepared to renounce violence.

In the end both the ruling National Party of SA and the liberation groups had to negotiate a peaceful settlement. The settlement comprised the following:

34 constitutional principles for state formation, of which principle 12 read that collective self-determination be acknowledged.
An interim Constitution of 1993.
A final Constitution of 1996.

The 1993 Constitution provided for the Afrikaners a Volkstaat Council to investigate forms or models of self-determination. It also included a non-diminution clause for the protection of the Afrikaans language.

The 1996 Constitution included the following clauses to enhance the right of self-determination of (language) communities:

Internal autonomy for organs of civil society [s.31(1)(b)].
Constitutional councils for the protection and promotion of the collective rights of (language, religious, cultural and other) communities (s.185)
Territorial self-determination for blacks on their collectively owned tribal lands (s.211 and 212)
Territorial self-determination for communities other than communities based on customary law (s.235)
A (constitutional) Commission for the Promotion and the Protection of the Rights of Language, Religious, Cultural and other Communities (s.185)

In other words, to a large extent, the ANC is party to a constitution which recognizes many of the principles now post facto discredited as apartheid measures. However, the constitution says one thing, but in practice the ANC-government governs SA as if a negotiated settlement never occurred.

Economically speaking, the development of the so-called homelands is still stunted, due to the non-cooperation of the tribes with the economic system of border industries and industries in the tribal lands on an agency basis. It is also a best-kept secret that white South Africans simply had no rights within the tribal lands, but a lot of propaganda is being made regarding “petty apartheid” measures in the then four provinces.

In conclusion: because of the resistance of the liberation movements to adopting the policies of separate but equal development, the tribal lands are still underdeveloped and their people pre-modern in their outlook. What we see in SA after the failure of so-called apartheid is new colonialism of a special kind: namely the imposition of African collectivism on inter alia the white population with their European heritage. It is an invasion of masses of Africans, and the creation of innumerable so-called informal settlements in conditions of poverty around the cities. It is estimated that about 8 million illegal immigrants from other African countries invaded the liberated South African society. At the same time what we observe is a class of super-rich Blacks with their limos and then 17 million Blacks on social welfare. The real catastrophe facing SA is when the declining economy of the country becomes incapable of paying social grants; a condition which will start a fire that will burn down SA as well as all the myths on which the present de facto government is based.

The Mandela myth would then have failed to liberate the country, as it ignored the hard realities of a developing state with the need for an economy based on sound principles of modernity, competitiveness and hard work.

Dr. Christo Landman is a former South African diplomat and currently active in Afrikaner cultural organisations. His columns in Afrikaans may be read here.

Europeans and Americans, Afrikaners and English

by Dan Roodt

[followbutton username=’danroodt’ count=’true’ lang=’en’ theme=’light’]

Like Dan Roodt’s Facebook page

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.

[followbutton username=’danroodt’ count=’true’ lang=’en’ theme=’light’]

Like Dan Roodt’s Facebook page