Publishing a radical exhortation to sedition by a convicted black extremist like Assata Shakur in City Press (Listen up! The European is not your friend) is not only irresponsible, but demonstrates the double standards at work when it comes to freedom of expression in South Africa. If I had written a piece like that, telling white Afrikaners to “use force to break the shackles and obtain emancipation”, the police would have broken down my front door and I would have been charged with “high treason” like the Boeremag and might have been sent to prison for life.
Ostensibly her article is about Rhodes’s statue. However, it represents a blanket call to arms against whites or “Europeans” world-wide, especially South Africa’s beleaguered white minority of 8% that is already subject to official hostility, Nazi-style race laws and sustained criminal or ethnic attacks such as the gruesome plaasmoorde (farm murders).
A cursory internet search reveals the following about Shakur: She was born JoAnne Deborah Byron and sentenced for the murder of a white policeman or state trooper, Werner Foerster, in the USA. Not only is she still wanted there as an escaped convict, but she was classified as a “domestic terrorist” by the FBI in 2005 with a price of $1 million on her head.
How come that if you speak out on behalf of the oppressed Afrikaner minority you are marginalised and censored, but an extremist anti-white radical like Shakur has free reign in the mainstream media to stir up racial and ethnic passions?
Apart from the xenophobia playing out on our streets, we also have leukophobia (“fear of whites”) which Shakur openly wants to inflame, causing even more violence than we are already experiencing. Section 16(2) of the 1996 constitution is quite clear that “freedom of expression… does not extend to a. propaganda for war; b. incitement of imminent violence; or c. advocacy of hatred that is based on race, ethnicity, gender or religion, and that constitutes incitement to cause harm”.
Obviously, Shakur’s diatribe against us whites contravenes all three sub-sections prohibiting so-called “hate speech”. Many people thought that South Africa was an exception on the continent and that we would not experience African-style ethnic strife, followed by economic collapse as happened in Rwanda, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Angola, Zimbabwe, the DRC and so many other countries. But our leftist media, besotted as they are with concepts like “revolution” and “transformation”, are inciting the same kind of racial and ethnic hatred that has been the bane of Africa since independence. Like the Indians were expelled from Uganda and Malawi, or the Portuguese from Angola and Mozambique, we should ultimately be booted out of South Africa in a glorious act of “black emancipation”.
Some might argue that Shakur is nothing but a caricature of black radicalism, as described in a book from my student days, Tom Wolfe’s Radical Chic and Mau-mauing The Flak Catchers. A more sophisticated reader – I daresay “European”! sipping coffee in a café in Paris or Milan – might see it for what it is: a pathetic attempt at fomenting racial revolution from Cuba, one of the last outposts of Marxist dystopia on the planet.
But given that South Africa is already mired in racial and ethnic strife, with axes and knives brandished on our horror-movie streets, its citizens brainwashed with simplistic notions of “white privilege” and “black disadvantage”, Shakur’s discourse could easily lead to civil war. Is that really what City Press and the directors of Naspers, its owners, have in mind for us?
