Over the last few days, South Africa’s “minister of basic education” – yes, we have such a thing – announced a few statistics that people found alternately shocking or “hilarious”. Everything in South Africa is “hilarious”: even the vicious murders and rapes we read about every day. As a society, South Africa has lost its way and all it can say is: “It’s hilarious,” meaning you should laugh about it. Every true “New South African” as the species self-identifies, is a sadist.
Now, I can imagine that if the minister of “basic education” – or any other type of education – in another country announced that the average grade or mark in Grade 9 mathematics was 10%, there would be some kind of concern, if not an outcry. Even though we published the “hilarious” news on our website yesterday already, the national Business Day newspaper saw fit to carry it on its front page today. It gets worse: only 3% of Grade 9 pupils actually receive 50% or more for mathematics as we reported on Afrikaans praag. This is real progress, we are confidently assured.
As I commented previously, the provincial MEC for education in Kwazulu-Natal province actually ascribed poor academic prowess in maths to – you guessed it! – apartheid and poor old Dr. Verwoerd who was stabbed to death by Tsafendas:
Senzo Mchunu, MEC for Education in Kwazulu-Natal, declared in late July: “One of the points we found was a problem in Maths and Science. It was Verwoerd who made the subjects difficult because he thought blacks would be a threat to him.”
So there you have it: Dr. Verwoerd “made maths difficult”. That is why I think maths should be completely scrapped in most schools in South Africa and be replaced by courses in Marxism. As it is, knowledge of Karl Marx and the class struggle is what gets you into South African universities these days where the revolution has seen to it that all humanities faculties have been taken over by cultural and other Marxists, with the sciences not lagging far behind.
If you think I am making this stuff up, well, I hate to disillusion you. The worst of all is: if you dare question this kind of “logic”, you immediately get vilified as a “racist” or “white supremacist”, usually by other white people who have seen the light and also disdain anything male, European or mathematical.
Other school subjects preparing pupils for both undergraduate and graduate courses would be: whiteness and gender studies. Not only could you blame Verwoerd for “making maths difficult”, you could blame all dead white males for the calamity of inventing it in the first place: Leibniz, Fermat, Pascal, Von Neumann, Turing and others come to mind. Even Pythagoras and Euclid could be blamed for putting New-South African pupils through the stress of maths when they could be learning about Nelson Mandela and why being a man or a woman is just a “social construct”.
Get rid of calculus and replace it with class. And, of course, race: the ultimate obsession of the rabid cultural Marxists who are turning South Africa into a kind of B-movie version of Stalin’s Soviet Union in the 1930s. Except the Russians did not quite give up mathematics, and eventually developed a space programme.
South Africa also has a space programme of sorts: it consists of hurling projectiles into space, usually while standing on a freeway bridge with motorists passing underneath. Recently an Afrikaner woman, Irene Myburg, was killed by a rock hitting her full in the face in the passenger seat while being driven to Pretoria. In another incident just a few days ago, a rock was also thrown at ex-rugby player Hannes Strydom while driving down a deserted street in Pretoria. Unlike Irene Myburg, he survived the attack from our version of NASA “scientists”, equipped with large stones.
However, South Africa has lots of “talented” cartoonists, such as Zapiro, who could convey the basic tenets of cultural Marxism to school children in comic books, a bit like those “Marx for beginners” or “Lenin for beginners” books that used to be popular a few decades ago. Marcuse, Adorno and Horkheimer could be immortalized in ink drawings and a few anti-white and anti-male slogans, supplanting “Verwoerdian” difficult mathematics.
As it is, the most successful people in South Africa are the so-called “tenderpreneurs” who do business with the state and get contracts via their cronies in government. Being a staunch advocate of affirmative action counts for a lot more in those circles than any actual engineering or technical expertise, so it makes sense for any would-be rand billionaire to study Marxism instead of algebra.
The road to success is paved with comic-book Marxism. I am sure our esteemed minister of “higher education”, Dr. Blade Nzimande, already understands it better than I, “damaged” as I was by an “apartheid education” which included Afrikaans, French, Latin and mathematics, could remotely attempt to do.
