Nadine Gordimer – praag.org

Nadine Gordimer and kronor for our Red Terror

For a while now, I have been interested in the “Swedish connection”. The intriguing question for me is: What role did Nadine Gordimer play in securing the Swedish funding for the ANC and South African Communist Party? Without the Swedish millions or hundreds of millions, there would never have been a campaign of Red Terror with bombs and gruesome necklace murders, and South Africa might never have had a change of government.

I have even taken to learning some Swedish, sensing that somewhere in Stockholm must lie the secret to the calamity that has befallen my country, descending into violence, corruption, anarchy. Nadine Gordimer received the Nobel Prize for Literature from the Swedish Academy and one of the current members of that academy, Per Wästberg, played a singular role in making South Africa a political cause in Sweden. He was also a friend of the radically socialist prime minister, Olof Palme. Gordimer-Wästberg-Palme… that is how I suspect it went, and there exist both fact and fiction to back it up.

In the 1960s the South African Communist Party received only £30 000 per year from the Soviet embassy in London, which was obviously too little to fund the military takeover of South Africa about which the party fantasized. If any of the communists had prayed, one could say that their prayers were answered by Sweden.

In a country as violent as contemporary South Africa, I have often thought that someone should write a kind of satire based on Boccacio’s Decameron, where people escape to some remote farm somewhere to tell one another stories while the rest of the country endures the daily dose of rapes, murders and armed robberies.

This morning there was a news report about a four-year old girl who was shot near Cape Town. In a sense, then, someone like Nadine Gordimer dying at the ripe old age of 90 is almost a cause for celebration. She was attacked once in her Parktown home, and somehow managed to ascribe it to “unemployment”, not to the singular nihilism of our roving sadists who terrorise us all.

I suppose many people would find it inappropriate for me to speculate about her possible role in securing the huge amounts of Swedish crowns that financed the Red Terror campaign of the 1980s when car bombs went off in the street, as well as other explosive devices in shopping centres and restaurants. But in a country where the Grim Reaper lurks on every street corner and in every suburb, we have already bidden farewell to etiquette or quaint customs requiring us to offer only eulogies to the recently deceased.

Although most people call Nadine Gordimer a South African author, I daresay that few people bought her books in this country. I often heard bookshop managers complain that her works “don’t sell”. Of course, overseas, especially in the US and Great Britain, she was much more popular and decidedly more appreciated. In all the obituaries she is described as an “anti-apartheid author”, whatever that might mean in literary terms.

In a way, Gordimer took pride in her contempt for us, the born-and-bred South Africans, especially whites and Afrikaners. She belonged to the radical-chic set who took it upon themselves to vilify us from the safety of their homes in Johannesburg’s northern suburbs, where opulence and leftism have often vied with one another.

I first met Nadine Gordimer as an undergraduate student at the University of the Witwatersrand. At the time I remember I wrote some “cultural” pieces for Wits Student, the campus newspaper. Two of us made an appointment to see her. She was quite aloof in her treatment of us and as far as I recall, she did not offer us anything to drink. Or maybe that was just my Afrikaans upbringing and our famous sense of hospitality that made me notice that. And then we were students, hardly New York celebrities who could further her career or her international renown.

I recall something else from that visit: while she pretended to be some kind of intellectual, most of her opinions and remarks were quite shallow. One of us tried to draw her into a discussion on literary theory, but she shied away from that and just got more haughty, with an ill-disguised irritation filtering through to the conversation.

We were eventually shown the door and I can hardly even remember the article that was published afterwards.

The second time I more or less “bumped into her”, to put it colloquially, was chez les Goldblatt, meaning the house of Mr. and Mrs. David Goldblatt, the photographer. I was more or less friends with the Goldblatts’ son, with whom I studied political science. In those days, especially at Wits, political science meant Karl Marx. OK, so we also dipped into Hegel and a bit of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but that was about it in the second year.

The Goldblatts had quite an old-fashioned kitchen and may even have had one of those ancient coal stoves that became fashionable for their art deco extravagance at one point in the seventies. There was also a kitchen table and they were making coffee in an Italian espresso pot, real coffee, not the instant stuff that most people drank in those days. I was a sucker for real coffee, especially people who ground their own beans. I remember when my wife and I moved into a flat in Hillbrow a few years later, the first thing we bought was an extravagant designer coffee maker and coffee grinder. The Brazilian in Loveday Street sold us that, together with the beans for which we made regular pilgrimages into downtown Johannesburg. Yes, in those days it was still white, believe it or not.

Imagine my surprise then when Nadine Gordimer came casually strolling into the kitchen, clutching a copy of the afternoon’s Star, the terrible Johannesburg newspaper. You might retort that all Johannesburg newspapers have always been terrible and I would have to agree.

She did not recognise me from the time of the interview or if she did, she did not let on. I think we students excused ourselves, with or without coffee, and that was the end of that little vignette from my youth.

Or should I call it a piece of the puzzle? For, unlike most white South Africans who were not privy to the inner circles of Johannesburg radical chic – especially not Afrikaners who still have no clue about Marx and Hegel – I collected all these souvenirs in both senses of the word, from books and real-life encounters.

Not so long ago, I wrote a review in Afrikaans of Joe Slovo’s biography, Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the war against apartheid (Monthly Review Press). For those who do not know, Monthly Review Press is just about the most famous Marxist publisher in the United States, so it is only natural that they should publish Slovo’s biography.

That is another piece of the puzzle. Somewhere in another interview with a British newspaper, Gordimer referred to Joe Slovo and his wife Ruth as “those wonderful Slovos”. I gather that they were friends at some point.

Slovo was the mastermind behind the so-called “armed struggle” or urban terrorism campaign against South African in the 1970s and 1980s, assisted by the Soviets and East Germans, but financed by Sweden! Eventually the poor old National Party, which by that time was run by utter morons, capitulated to Slovo and the rest of the radicals, old and new, and today we are on our way to emulating the former Soviet Union, with extremist policies just round the corner, such as “land reform”. Even the oafish journalist, Max du Preez, wrote a few days ago that a real, Soviet- or Cuban-style revolution is looming ahead for us. In his parlance, Uhuru is weer op die tafel (Uhuru is on the table again).

On 27 April 2004, the then Swedish ambassador to South Africa announced on the Afrikaans radio station RSG that “without Sweden, the ANC would never have come to power in South Africa”. For all their other faults, Swedes are usually honest.

How did the “wonderful Slovos” get to the Swedish money? is the intriguing question. For that, one must read one of Nadine Gordimer’s early novels, A world of strangers. Here and there, the narrator breaks into a kind of political soliloquy, fulminating against the newly elected National Party government that was busy banning communism and threatening to move the multiracial slum area, Sophiatown, to a new place called Soweto. A world of strangers represents an ode to Sophiatown and its main character, a British journalist who comes to work on the mythical black magazine, Drum.

The novel is something of a roman à clef, because in real life the protagonist was Anthony Sampson, who also played a major role in making Mandela famous in the pages of The Observer, a London newspaper. I read his autobiography in which he paradoxically expresses his suprise that Mandela ever became a leading figure as he had found him dull and narcissistic, back in the nineteen-fifties.

Per Wästberg definitely publicised Nadine Gordimer’s writings in Sweden too. I suppose he must have had some hand in her nomination for the Nobel prize.

However, as my knowledge of “svenska” grows, I am increasingly able to piece together the role played by Per Wästberg in securing the funding bonanza for the radical movement that made possible the Red Terror that in turn brought the National Party to its knees.

Wästberg is himself an author and a journalist. All through the 1950s and the 1960s he had written many articles on South Africa in Sweden’s most influential newspaper, the Dagens Nyheter, owned by the Bonnier family. In 1960 he was apparently banned from both Rhodesia and South Africa, no doubt because he was writing very negative material on both countries. From what I can see, he published a book on his experiences in Southern Africa, På svarta listan (On the black list). During the crucial period from 1976 to 1983 when the international propaganda campaign against South Africa really got going, Wästberg was the editor of Dagens Nyheter. I can just imagine what kind of coverage he gave to South Africa at the time, with his intimate knowledge of what was going on behind the scenes, with the distribution of Swedish funds to the ANC and SACP, as well as the “New Radicals” within South Africa. A recent book by that title, written by one Glen Moss, claims that the ANC did not so much overthrow the old government, as a small group of radicalized Marxist or neo-Marxist students on the campus of the University of the Witwatersrand. Well at least I had the honour of rubbing shoulders with Moss, Barbara Hogan and other illustrious revolutionaries.

Did Gordimer also channel some Swedish government funds into South Africa to publish her own books here? I strongly suspect so, because the local edition of her dystopian short novel, July’s People, was brought out by an Afrikaner liberal imprint Taurus, with whom I had some contact at the time. Even calling Taurus “liberal” sounds wrong. They were more like sycophants, enthralled to Gordimer and her views. No-one would have told me at the time about the underground Swedish money fuelling the revolution in South Africa, so I have no direct evidence of such a transaction. But during the 1980s while my wife and I lived near the place de la République in Paris, I received a visit from Taurus’s bearded Afrikaner lay-out artist who had just been to, guess which country? Sweden. Now, at that time the degree of interest in Sweden among Afrikaner layout artists was at about the same level as Swedish winter temperatures, in the negatives.

In fact, the poor man could not stop telling us how Sweden and its “overly civilized people” had horrified him. He was something of a nature freak and therefore felt much more at home in the African bush, studying vultures through binoculars, than dealing with taciturn, politically correct Swedes whose social codes he probably understood as little as they did his. He had no reason to travel to Sweden, except as a minor part of the grand plan to overthrow the South African government, financed by Sweden and other Nordic states.

The Swedish connection was there alright. Without the friendship between Gordimer, the “wonderful Slovos” and Wästberg, as well as their shared leftist politics, the South African revolution might never have happened.

If only Afrikaners today could have had some Nordic sugar daddy, we could still have saved this country. Alas, and partly thanks to Per Wästberg’s propaganda in the Dagens Nyheter, that will never be the case.

We will have to find it in ourselves to not only survive in Africa but also to break down all the stereotypes and half-truths so copiously distributed through Nadine Gordimer’s novels and short stories.

Shortly before I went to Paris in 1985, there was a conference of the Afrikaanse Skrywersgilde in Johannesburg, in the sports centre of the University of the Witwatersrand. My intellectual irritation with Nadine Gordimer finally reached a critical point when she confounded structuralism and post-structuralism and did not understand that great Nietzschean strand of post-humanism running through so-called “French theory” at the time. The other day a caller reminded me of the minor philosophical clash I had with Gordimer that day.

In a sense, South Africa and not even Afrikaans have any real literature. There is some good Afrikaans poetry, and one or two novels from the first half of the twentieth century, but it more or less stops there. I do not know too much about Russian, but apparently 70 years of communist rule in Russia also produced a few good satires, such as Bulgakov’s The master and Margarita, but not much else. The greatest Russian novelist of the twentieth century, Vladimir Nabokov, was fiercely anticommunist and also claimed by the Americans as he wrote his later works in English.

Without the Afrikaans word apartheid, neither Gordimer nor JM Coetzee would ever have received the Nobel prize for literature. Being the antipodes of the world, a strange formerly Western country in Africa, South Africa lends itself to being violently misunderstood. These days, of course, the confident foreign equations between South African and American race problems are making way for a kind of muted horror that no-one will ever admit to. We have run out of master copies, a bit like Nadine Gordimer in her so-called “post-apartheid period”.

As I tried to intimate in my much-maligned novel set in the 1980s, we have been semantically carpet-bombed, a bit like Iraq’s entire infrastructure was destroyed by the USA during the second Gulf War. There is no meaning left in South Africa. We are even going to kill the last religion left, Democracy. As a country, South Africa has no beliefs, no principles left, apart from sadism, perhaps. The Marquis de Sade, not Nelson Mandela, is our patron saint.

In one of her rare moments of introspection, Nadine Gordimer spoke about the “Manichean poisons” she had to “imbibe” in order to make her prose “relevant”. It was more or less an admission that she practised a genre that would please the foreigners and her friends in the communist underground, but that would not speak to us, Afrikaners de souche. How I love that newly politically incorrect expression that has lately become popular in France!

Gordimer’s parting shot to me was a letter to International PEN in which she tried to oppose any form of Afrikaans literary society coming into being on South African soil. She partially succeeded in that the whole of Cape Town and Stellenbosch at one point banished me to a kind of Siberia. In making me persona non grata among the pen-pushers in my own language, Gordimer had a kind of last laugh on me.

Not that being persona non grata in Afrikaans literary circles is anything to regret. That was the way it was thirty years ago, and it will continue that way. If “Marx turned Hegel on his head”, our southern peninsula lives permanently upside down, blood running into our heads all the time, sometimes spurting in the streets or in restaurants where our Red Terror has hardly abated.

And if my comments should be seen as amiss, as a bit of an overly politicised obituary, I simply claim that political licence that Gordimer did in so many of her books, to launch into a proletkult tirade against the social conditions or government policies around her.

Nadine Gordimer dies at 90

Nobel laureate and writer Nadine Gordimer has died at the age of 90, reports said on Monday.

She died peacefully in her sleep at her Johannesburg home on Sunday, law firm Edward Nathan Sonnenbergs said in a statement on behalf of the Gordimer family.

This was according to EyeWitnessNews and Channel24.co.za.

Gordimer was born near Springs in 1923. She was a stauchly left-wing author and friend of Joe Slovo and Ruth First, two leading South African communists.

She wrote novels and short stories in which the narrator often launched into political tirades against white South Africans. She was awarded the Nobel prize in Literature in 1991.

Her novels did not sell well in her native country, but were appreciated in New York and London where critics lauded them for their political themes.

In one of her novels, July’s People, she predicted a dystopian future in which whites would be mercilessly slaughtered by blacks, including passenger planes that would be shot down with missiles. In the book a white family is protected and looked after by their former black servant, named July.

Queen Georgina and the Holocaust card

Georgina Guedes enjoying the Colonial Life

by Albert Brenner

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I must admit that I did not expect Georgina Guedes to do it. But then, maybe I underestimated the impact my column had on her. For her subsequent reaction speaks volumes about her desperate attempt to silence me… and all other Red October supporters once and for all.

Unfortunately it is, even in our day and age, still very easy to silence someone. All you have to do is pull the Holocaust card. This card still trumps all others. It is the Royal Flush of the moral poker of our Zeitgeist. Whoever pulls this card is guaranteed to win the game… solely by way of implicitly accusing his/her opponent of complicity (by association) in the horrors of Auschwitz.

And this is exactly what Georgina did in her critique of my column. Her play was narrative crudity at its best. She simply focused in on the Jewish genes of Nadine Gordimer. Something which I never even mentioned, simply because it was neither relevant in/to the context of my argument, nor does her, Gordimer`s, ethnicity/race interest me in the least. I specifically stated that Gordimer represents the interests of the British upper-class in Mandelatopia. Yet it provided Georgina with the golden opportunity to use the Holocaust card.

Why? Well, the Holocaust card still has the ability to blind all and sundry to the horrors that occurred before and after Auschwitz. It is the ultimate card played by Anglo-Saxon liberals when the Hillbilly-card and the race card have zero effect anymore. It is their way of telling the rest of humanity to simply shut up, for only they know best… what is best, for all.

And it is the moral weapon of choice of the British upper-class when it comes to deflecting all criticism from its unsavory role in history during the oh so glorious days of the British Empire — an epoch which saw the Brits invade nine out of every ten countries on the planet.

It suffices to say that the conquered did not appreciate their de facto enslavement by the Crown. Yet many Brits still yearn for those “glorious” days of old… when they, according to their moral rationale, “civilized” the world. Now obviously there were some positive aspects to British colonization, but woe beholds all non-Brits who use the exact same moral rationale to point to positive aspects of other forms of domination, like Apartheid, for example. For if you do so, the Brits automatically pull the Holocaust card.

Even more hypocritical is the fact that Cecil John Rhodes, one of the champions of the British Empire, was even more morally depraved than Hitler himself. According to Rhodes;

“I contend that we British are the finest race in the world and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race. Just fancy those parts that are at present inhabited by the most despicable specimens of human beings what an alteration there would be if they were brought under Anglo-Saxon influence.”

“… despicable specimens of human beings… ?” Did he mean Africans, or the French, or the Chinese, or the Boers? Whatever his depravity; one thing is for sure, Hitler, as we know, at least liked white people. Rhodes on the other hand, hated all those who were not British… including all other whites on the planet. Yet his name and fame live on as if he were a benign being at heart, a hero. We have a Rhodes University in Mandelatopia, and innumerable statues and street names honouring him. A Rhodes scholarship is one of the most prestigious in the country.

Now just imagine a Hitler University, or a Hitler Scholarship. Just imagine if, for example, the half-wit pseudo-intellectual hobby gay-porn writer Eusebius McKaiser had instead received a Hitler Scholarship to study philosophy at Oxford. Maybe then the British visa/customs authorities would have taken a closer look at McKaiser`s past, especially given that little girl’s skeleton in his closet. But then, the victor writes morality, and little lackeys like McKaiser tag along merrily.

Be that as it may; Guedes’s attempt to silence me and, by association, all Red October supporters, back-fired beautifully. For not only has support for this peaceful movement grown exponentially, but the true face of anti-Semitism in Mandelatopia has revealed itself at one of the very tertiary institutions founded by the ever-so-innocent British upper-class, Wits University.

During a recent performance by an Israeli artist at Wits University, members of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS) sang the Dubula iJuda (Shoot the Jew) song. Ha-ha… it used to be Shoot the Boer but now the wheel has turned — thanks to the ever-patronizing attitude of the British elite towards the locals of South Africa — the blacks, Coloureds and the Boer.

I wonder why Guedes did not pull the Holocaust card on these people, for they richly deserve it. But no; only the Boers are all aspiring Auschwitz camp guards, eternally. Little does the little MSM half-wit know that the Boers were the first to provide military assistance to the Jews fighting to ground their Heimat after their millennia-long Diaspora… which included their 350-year long expulsion from Britain.

But then; who cares that the Boer never harmed the Jew in South Africa? Who cares that the Boer was the best friend of the state of Israel? Who cares that the Jew became the richest group in South Africa during Apartheid? Who cares that the former Israeli Foreign Minister recently advised all Jews in Mandelatopia to flee to Israel? Who cares that England was the first European nation to require Jews to wear a marking badge? And who cares that the British upper-class physically banned Jews from Britain for a period seven times longer than the entire duration of Apartheid?

Nobody cares. Just blame the Boer. Just blame Dr Dan Roodt, Steve Hofmeyer, Sunette Bridges and all the Red October supporters. Just use the full might of Her Majesty’s MSM newspapers in Mandelatopia to hound them like an oh so sporting fox-hunt back on the sacred soil of the country upon which “God`s sun would never set”. Just keep on slaughtering those elderly Boer farmers like animals… they are all Hitler’s spawn anyway, period!

Who cares about the truth? Nobody in the Mandelatopian MSM, it would seem. Especially not those black journalists now working for Her Majesty.

All is just fine and dandy in the Queen’s backyard. Mandela`s inner-circle blacks have all been co-opted — as has the Afrikaner elite. The “dumb Dutchman” farmer Boers are still feeding the Great Unwashed… who have to slave away in Her Majesty`s gold, diamond and platinum mines in order to eke out a living in a world which Her money-mongers forced them into with Her hut and dog tax, in those glorious old days of the oh so benign British Empire.

Thank goodness the Natives are still not too restless, after even more than a century of bondage. No annus horribilis like in Zimbabwe… goodness me, have some more tea. Simply use MSM minions to silence the likes of Boer Albert Brenner and Bikoist Zolisa Socrates Soji. It’s all too easy…

Who cares that South Africa is a failed state in the making? The Queen’s cup still runneth over. Nothing to see here; just move along, as if nothing is awry — whilst blaming those “Jew-hating” Red October supporters. Just keep that stiff MSM moral upper lip. It is all so easy to keep the foot of the Queen on the neck of these people — Boer and Black. What military metal did a century ago, Anglo-Saxon morality is doing now. And if Her subjects dare rebel against their bondage, just say they are in league with Lucifer/Hitler.

For as long as the Holocaust card still trumps all others, all Good & Evil — past, present and future — remains the sole moral property of the Monarch of England.

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Britten’s indifference

One very positive side-effect of the Red October protest was that it aired the stale house of the MSM in Mandelatopia. This breath of fresh air made the usual suspects, and a few newbies, cough convulsively, as expected.

The loudest convulsion was a coarse phlegm-ejecting piece by the foul-mouthed Irish colonial reject Chris McEvoy. It is not worth reading. The second raffish algospasm was by Georgina Guedes. She tried, via an attempt at irony, to persuade her readers that it was oh so bleeding-heart symbolic of the freedom of democratic expression in Mandelatopia seeing a “dignified” black policeman escorting and “protecting” the white Red October marchers. She somehow conveniently forgot that the “dignified” policeman’s colleagues killed another peaceful protester, Mark Tatane, not so long ago – not even to speak of the Marikana massacre, the 1000-plus deaths per year in police custody since 1994, or the fact that both the ex-bosses of the “dignified” policeman are criminals.

The third bawdy paroxysm came from Lady Nicky Falkof, fresh from her 14-year sabbatical at the feet of Her Majesty the Queen of England. Her strident call for “progressive language” (e.g. rights, minorities, diversity, etc.) to remain the sole moral property of those who run Manor Mail & Guardian – at the behest of the Queen and her moneymongers – is only out-cramped by her near-autistic fixation with proper syntax and correct spelling. I’ll deal with Miss Commonwealth Spelling Bee 2013 in my next column.

The most interesting throe was thrown by the ever-so-swanky MSM darling, Sarah Britten. Her piece, albeit well-argued and neatly packaged, was pure sentiment. And it was precisely this appeal to emotion which prompted me to, once more, put my theory about white liberal irrationality to the test.

It only took six tweets of 140 letters/characters each to confirm said theory.This was how it was done. I simply asked her if she supported black lesbians protesting against “corrective” rape. She answered in the affirmative, of course. Then I pointed out that rape affects all women, not just black lesbians. Meaning that black lesbians form a sub-group protesting that which affects them specifically namely “corrective” rape. But, as mentioned before, rape affects all women, not just black lesbians.

From this it follows that it is logically and, even more importantly, morally inconsistent to laud one sub-group (black lesbians, in this case) for their “discriminatory” form of protest – i.e.they only protest against corrective rape, and not all rape – whilst demonising another (in this case, Red October whites) by accusing them of partaking in a “discriminatory” form of protest.. based on the fact that crime affects all, not just whites. Ergo, the rationale underpinning the protest by whites against their slaughter at the hands of blacks is no different to that of black lesbians protesting against corrective rape. Yet, the former is demonised while the latter is lauded and applauded by Britten and her MSM ilk.

It suffices to say that that which is good for the black lesbian goose is not good for the Red October white gander. This means that people like Britten discriminate on the basis of race – in terms of the above-mentioned biased sentiments expressed publicly. Given the above context, and what we know from all the standard definitions of racism, this would make Britten a racist.

Yet I doubt whether Britten could be classified as a racist, for she loves all those whites and blacks, et cetera, who agree with her. Meaning that her irrationality must be founded on something other than race-based zealotry. Or is it?

Britten is part and parcel of the upper-class British establishment in Mandelatopia. This group is the richest and (still) most influential collective in the country. They are just another appendage of her Majesty the Queen of England. And, as we know, England is the fons et origo of Pax Britannica. This (former) global empire was built by men like Cecil John Rhodes… whose moral motivations can best be summed up by the following quote; “

I contend that we British are the finest race in the world and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race. Just fancy those parts that are at present inhabited by the most despicable specimens of human beings what an alteration there would be if they were brought under Anglo-Saxon influence…

At first glance the above quote seems like the paragon of racism. Not even Verwoerd ever said anything remotely similar. But I think it goes deeper than that. Is it “hate”? I mean, you really need to dislike others quite a lot to refer to them as “despicable specimens of human beings”. In short: are upper-class Brits like Britten hateful racists, like their forebearers, like Rhodes?

I think not. They are simply indifferent to all others, other than themselves. If dislike were an adjective, hate would be its comparative… and indifference its superlative. I mean it is beyond hate to, for example, kill 33 000 women and children in concentration camps and coldly go about carrying out a scorched-earth policy which reduced a unique nation to the poorest white nation on the planet, just for the sake of gold and diamonds. Similarly, it is beyond hate to try and turn the whole population of one of the oldest civilisations on the planet, the Chinese, into opium drug addicts… simply because your love of/for tea caused a huge trade deficit at the time.

It is a cardinal mistake to think that this indifference has, somehow, mysteriously vacated the non-soul of the British upper-class. Just think about the following fact: England is the only country in the Western world which (still) has such a huge divide between the upper and middle class. This divide is rigorously enforced, by complete indifference to the wishes and aspirations of the British middle and lower classes.

And this indifference is still very much present in modern South Africa. Just listen to Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer – a representative of the British elite in this country:

Afrikaner women are lower than rats, closer related to plants, just fit enough to be raped in an act of genus preservation.

Lovely lady, ain’t she? She may have said “hate”, but it is clear from the magnitude of her hate that it is indifference. They only disguise their indifference as hate, so as to appear as if they actually give a continental toss… as if they actually still have one shred of humanity left.

Meaning that the imperial indifference that was once projected (and protected) by the military might of the old British Empire has simply morphed into an imperial indifference enforced by morality. In short; what the sword did for Rhodes, neo-liberalism (à la Pax Brittanica) is now doing for Gordimer, Britten and their useful idiots like Helen Zille, boy-man Fransie Cronje, Eusebius McKaiser, Piet Croucamp, Djonitin Jansen, Anton van Niekerk, Tim du Plessis, Max du Preez, Leopold Scholtz, Willie Esterhuyse, FW de Klerk and ilk.

Therefore never think that they actually care. They feel zilch for other nations, other peoples, cultures, traditions and their moral idiosyncrasies. They are completely indifferent to the plight of all others, especially poor blacks and the white farmers in this country.

The quickest way to rid this warm country of these cold bastards would be to unleash Raka in the form of a Mugabe-Malema on them. But that would lead to wanton slaughter; something the Afrikaner, unlike the British upper-class, has not got the stomach for, unfortunately. The Afrikaner hates wanton slaughter… that is why they organized the Red October protest.

The most humane way to ship their pitiless afters back to their crappy little mud-island with its Islam(ic) weather (partly Sunni, mostly Shiite) would therefore be to treat them with the exact same indifference they display towards all and sundry on the planet. Now that would be cricket, wouldn`t it, Sarah?

Joe Slovo and the roots of Afrikaner genocide

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More and more, the term “genocide” is entering our everyday vocabulary. Many people, including columnists, have already explained that it is not the absolute number of people killed that defines a genocide, but the motives and the manner in which they are slaughtered.

The atrocities committed on South African whites during farm murders, house robberies, car hijackings and the shooting of children, even toddlers such as Willemien Potgieter, point to a disturbing form of ethnic cleansing going on in the country.

In a current survey on our Afrikaans website and with more than 700 people participating, 93,9% of those polled declared: “I believe there is a white genocide taking place in South Africa.”

How did this Afrikaner genocide arise? Where did it come from? When did it start? Many people believe it is caused by racial tension. Although race does play a role in that the perpetrators are normally black and the victims white, race in itself does not account for the nature of this genocide which is as pervasive as it is officially denied and passed over in silence by the so-called mainstream media.

I believe the genocidal movement against Afrikaners started already in the 1940s. Early in the fifties there were the first incidents when whites were randomly attacked and butchered by black rioters, so there was already an inchoate form of ethnic violence even back then. In East London a nun doing charity work in the local black township was murdered and then set upon by the rioters who ate parts of her body. Such acts of cannibalism endure to this day, as was reported in Witchdoctor who cooked farmer’s testicles a few days ago. More importantly, however, the ideology of Afrikaner genocide was being formed at the time with mostly communists dreaming of a day when South Africa would be cleansed of its indigenous whites altogether.

Recently a biography by Alan Wieder, Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the war against apartheid was published. I have not read it, but it is certainly significant that an unreconstructed communist such as Slovo should be widely honoured today. [Postscript: I did read it after writing this and wrote a review in Afrikaans.] Although Slovo spent most of his adult life in London, he was by far the most influential revolutionary in South Africa during the twentieth century. Through his skillful use of both terrorist violence and propaganda, he was able to conquer the once seemingly invincible Afrikaner government with its strong military backed by a powerful industrial state.

It would be fair to say that a coterie of communist intellectuals from the 1940s introduced the notion that South Africa should either “return to the origin” of a putative, Edenic, unspoilt Africa before the coming of the evil white man or it should undergo a violent revolution that would create a completely new and strictly egalitarian society. Either way, a radically “new country” had to be constructed.

Commentators as diverse as Dr. Gregory Stanton of Genocide Watch and the French “new philosophers” (nouveaux philosophes) of the 1970s have argued that there is an intrinsic link between communism and genocide. Most genocides of the twentieth century, be they in Soviet Russia, China, Cambodia, Vietnam and elsewhere, have been committed by communists. At least sixty million people were murdered in what has become known as a “Red Holocaust” perpetrated under the leadership of figures such as Joseph Stalin, Kim Il Sung, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh and Pol Pot.

Communism is an absolutist ideology that brooks no dissent, therefore a causal link seems to exist between communism and genocide. Since the quasi-communist takeover of South Africa in 1994 and with the country since moving further and further to the Left, genocide has also started to appear as a fundamental characteristic of the so-called “new South Africa”.

Intolerance towards the Afrikaner ethnic group, the Afrikaans language, literature and culture have grown rapidly. Many communists regard the Afrikaans language in itself as “offensive” and therefore want it banned from the public domain. Afrikaans place names too have been systematically removed from towns, streets, buildings and other places.

A foreign African set alight by local South African blacks

At the same time the country is often shaken by xenophobic riots and killings, directed against foreign Africans. During 2009, 80 people were slain during a spate of xenophobic attacks, with hardly anyone charged with the murders.

In a sense, Afrikaners are also considered to be foreigners, being non-black and non-English. Having been excluded from political power, they are now caught between two chauvinisms, two forms of intolerance: racial and linguistic. Even though they have been in the country for 360 years, they are deemed “not to fit in” with the new, revolutionary culture which is Afro-Saxon, black and English.

However, neither all blacks nor all English-speakers display intolerance towards Afrikaners and Afrikaans. Millions of black people also speak Afrikaans as a second language and as a lingua franca in large parts of South Africa. Where does Afrikaner hatred come from then?

It comes from the revolutionary minority, of whom Joe Slovo is the progenitor. In a sense, Marxism is the ultimate uitlander ideology. After the discovery of gold in the Transvaal in 1886, about 50 000 foreign speculators descended upon Johannesburg. Despite being very tolerant and accomodating to them, the then Afrikaner or Boer government was not to their liking and a process of fomenting war and ethnic hatred towards Afrikaners was launched.

Many of the stereotypes and caricatures created by the uitlander press of Johannesburg are still with us today and have never been challenged. These have simply been adapted and amended to suit the ends of the Marxist revolutionaries. Whereas in the nineteenth century the Afrikaner was depicted as being “backward and uneducated” (even though many uitlanders crawled out of the slums of European cities), he is now seen as “conservative and racist”.

To Slovo and his followers, the Afrikaner’s love of his language and culture, his patriotic attachment to South Africa, his pride in his intellectual and economic achievements, are all signs of his incorrigible “fascism”. The continued existence of some Afrikaans schools, churches, cultural associations and so on, is seen as a reactionary refusal to bend to the will of the revolutionary Left that conquered the country in 1994. The Afrikaner must therefore be punished for his dissidence and his children preferably brainwashed into accepting the dissolution of their culture and identity, as well as their integration into a kind of mulatto multitude.

Slovo was not alone in his abhorrence of Afrikaners. In the writings of his close friend, the Nobel-prize winning author Nadine Gordimer, as well as the photographs of the acclaimed photographer, David Goldblatt, we find a similar treatment of Afrikaners as uncouth and even mentally retarded “white trash”. In emulation of Gordimer, the renegade Afrikaner author André Brink has created some even more extreme caricatures from Afrikaner history. Many of these left-wing cultural Marxists drew on American “Appalachian” stereotypes to portray Afrikaners to foreign audiences. Afrikaners are seen as “white trash”, despite the fact that as a group in South Africa they have produced more postgraduates, more accountants, more lawyers, more classical musicians, more scientists and mathematicians than any other. Until recently, more books had been published in Afrikaans in South Africa than in English.

But to the communist revolutionaries, we are “backward” and “mentally retarded”.

In fact, even the finest examples of modern Afrikaner architecture have been derided as expressions of the apartheid ideology and a kind of “degenerate art”. Ironically, those who object to the Nazi concept of Entartete Kunst or “degenerate art”, apply it themselves when looking at Afrikaans architecture, paintings, music, literature and so on.

The Rand Afrikaans University (now University of Johannesburg) as photographed by David Goldblatt (Museum of Modern Art, New York)

Like the French new philosophers such as André Glucksmann and Jean-François Revel have claimed, Marxism is a totalitarian ideology. It demands total revolution: a radical change in the whole world and all culture. But it may also stigmatise a culture as useless and even pernicious. If one cannot destroy the culture itself, its bearers may always be physically eliminated. Within the totalitarian mind, all of this is perfectly logical.

Volumes may be written about the betrayal of Afrikaners by their own ruling elite, especially by Mr. FW de Klerk. But one of the most tragic consequences of that betrayal has been the passing of the formerly nationalist media group, Naspers, over to the camp of the Slovoists. The politics of Naspers, as opposed to its more neutral foreign investment decisions, is determined by one or two political commissars serving on its board of directors.

Until recently, Prof. Jakes Gerwel, a self-confessed Marxist who had wept when the Berlin wall came down, had served on the Naspers board. Another radical cultural Marxist who is strongly hostile towards Afrikaners and their tradition, is Prof. Hein Willemse who still serves on the board.

Trotsky described Czarism “as belonging in the dustbin of history”. To the uitlander communist in South Africa, Afrikaners represent “white trash” that also belong in the “trash can of history”. Since 1994, both the mass media and government have conspired to produce a series of very negative images of Afrikaners.

They purveyors of hate produce the hate crimes, creating a climate in which killing Afrikaners is seen to be permissible, even desirable. But Afrikaner or white genocide can also be a joke, presumably because:

no-one cares;
whites should just accept whatever happens to them.

Writing on a blog for the left-wing Mail & Guardian newspaper, Sarah Britten explains why joking about so-called “corrective rape” for lesbians is horrific, but making fun of white genocide on Twitter is not. Even just recognising the phenomenon of white genocide, makes one a “right-wing extremist”:

“But joking about corrective rape is very different from joking about #whitegenocide. One is real, an act of violence against a very vulnerable section of society. The other is the perception of a politically motivated programme of murder, one that is deeply entwined with right-wing extremist narratives. One kind of joke reinforces existing power structures; the other subverts them.”

To the Left, whites need never fear, even when they are killed or told that they are going to be murdered.

A novel portraying Afrikaners as mentally retarded, racist, incestuous “white trash”, such as Triomf by Marlene van Niekerk, was acclaimed as the greatest work of literature ever to come out of South Africa, apart from Gordimer’s body of writing. On the state television and in the pages of the Naspers newspapers, such caricatures of Afrikaners were eagerly embraced.

Van Niekerk spent some time at the University of the Witwatersrand where she had imbibed the Slovoist view of Afrikaners as “degenerate whites”. The theme of incest in the novel and a subsequent film was a metaphor for the Afrikaner nation itself. By dating or marrying someone of your own kind, you are committing a form of incest, which can only produce degenerates. Of course, at a certain level, the cultural Marxists of South Africa want to claim that being white or of European ancestry is in itself a form of “genetic degeneracy”. History is on the side of the creole or the mulatto, as the Marxist intellectual and Naspers director, Prof. Hein Willemse, has often explained.

“Opting out” of creolization, be it linguistic, racial or otherwise, is therefore deemed to be an affront to the system. Afrikaners who wish to continue with their tradition, as well as the standard, Germanic form of their language that may be traced back to the seventeenth century and even to the European Middle Ages and Middle Dutch, are regarded as dissidents, even heretics. In 2005 I was invited to talk about my fairly innocuous novel Moltrein in a bookshop in Stellenbosch and was almost prevented from doing so by a group of Marxist academics. I was even threatened with violence.

This was my first direct experience of the anti-Afrikaner intolerance that manifests itself in censorship, ostracism and, of course, farm murders and other kinds of ethnic killings in South Africa. Many Naspers journalists are in favour of such censorship. The full extent of the horrors and atrocities currently being visited upon Afrikaners is carefully sanitised as “just crime which one finds everywhere”, when it is not completely ignored. Among journalists and academics, there is much tacit support for the ethnic cleansing of Afrikaners. Prof. Jonathan Jansen, the affirmative-action rector of the University of the Free State, has stated on more than one occasion that there was something wrong with people who dated or married members of their own race.

Uitlander communists and other South African revolutionaries are contemptuous of Afrikaans and Afrikaners because they are seen as “Eurocentric”, “too white”, “exclusive” (even though Afrikaners are routinely excluded from government and most institutions on racial grounds) and, of course, “racist”. In South Africa, we have really come full circle and the racism of the anti-racists is far worse than any traditional ethnic chauvinism of the “nationalist” type.

“Mixing the races” is seen as imperative in South Africa, because Afrikaners need to be assimilated and coerced into “being part of one, big multicultural nation”. In the words of Leopold Scholtz, one of the Naspers ideologues, “the Afrikaner must be fused with the brown (mulatto or Coloured) people”.

But for some assimilation is too slow. Killing is so much quicker and more effective. Hence the “final solution to the Afrikaner problem” that is taking shape in South Africa.

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The Left wouldn’t mind seeing South Africa destroyed

by Dan Roodt

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In my last column, I went to the trouble of explaining what happened on 16 June 1976 and that none of the six rioting Soweto high schools had actually been forced to learn anything in Afrikaans, whereas a seventh studied only the subject of history by medium of Afrikaans.

However, the motley collection of so-called English-liberal whites do not like to be “bored with the facts”. Just today I read on the website of the leftist Mail & Guardian: “The issue of language has been a sensitive one since June 16 1976, when Soweto pupils rose up against Afrikaans as a primary language in schools.” No, the issue of language has been moot since 1806 when the British permanently set foot in South Africa and embarked on a drawn-out attempt to stamp out, first Dutch, and then its inveterate spoken variety, Afrikaans, a policy that continues to this day under the ANC regime.

There always seems to be one newspaper in Johannesburg that is vehemently anti-Afrikaans. A century ago it was The Star. When the first Afrikaans high school opened in the city in 1921 (my old school called Helpmekaar), The Star opined: “There is something rotten in the state of Denmark.” In the 1960s and early 1970s it was the Rand Daily Mail where Helen Zille cut her teeth. The late journalist Chris Louw once overheard the editor of that paper, Alistair Sparks, during an aeroplane flight raging against the “sub-human” Afrikaners and how South Africa would have been better off if Britian had “finished the job in 1902 and killed them all”. The Rand Daily Mail ultimately closed down, with its business section continuing as the current Business Day. The present Mail & Guardian was in fact started as a replacement Rand Daily Mail. It regularly vilifies Afrikaners and tells us how ugly our language is, how reactionary we are, how we should disappear forever and just how backward our music, literature and art are. For good measure it keeps a few renegade Afrikaners – mainly because they are prepared to work for lower salaries – who now and again write about their identity crises and how they felt much better when they managed to forget their Afrikaans, including their horrible conservative upbringings.

However, some of the Mail & Guardian journalists have absconded to set up an online rag or electronic wet wipe known as The Daily Maverick. This is a complete misnomer as it should have been called The Daily Conformist. After all, the term “maverick” denotes, especially in American usage, exactly the opposite of a conformist. I could copy and paste a definition from any number of online dictionaries, but let me climb onto my little wooden step ladder and fetch the Shorter Oxford Dictionary off the top shelf.

According to the dictionary, the term may be traced to one Samuel A. Maverick, a “Texas engineer who owned but did not brand cattle”. Hence its two meanings: “1. An unbranded calf or yearling. 2. An unorthodox or independent-minded person, an individualist, US, a politician who will not affiliate with a regular political party.”

Obviously, there is nothing maverick about The Daily Maverick. It keeps us corralled or herded within the enclosures of South Africa’s tedious, second-hand and stupid leftist tradition. Every academic in South Africa, as well as many a journalist, especially the kind that writes for The Daily Maverick, dreams of becoming a British Marxist and being able to kiss Terry Eagleton or E.P. Thompson’s boots. Well, E.P. Thompson is dead now, but any old pommie commie would do.

The thing to understand about English-South African leftists, is that they are something like T.S. Eliot’s “hollow men”, a notion which may be traced back, appropriately, to the character Mister Kurz in Joseph Conrad’s great novella about Africa, Heart of Darkness. You probably recall the first lines of Eliot’s poem:

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

Since 1994, with all the cultural Marxists in control of the media and the universities in South Africa, there is almost no debate possible. Just repeat all the tired clichés and propaganda after us.

However, as Oscar Wilde would say, there is one thing worse than a left-wing snot who fancies himself a journalist and that is a snot who writes about cricket. South Africa is a bit like Nero’s Rome: the worse it gets, the more fanatical people become about games, nonchalantly stepping over all the casualties that we learn about daily. Not sports casualties and not in The Daily Conformist a.ka. Maverick either. Just the men and women dying by the thousands every month, the human sacrifices to the god of political correctness.

Kenneth Borland is a cricket correspondent for a provincial paper, The Natal Witness, who also writes for The Daily Maverick, it appears. They are not keeping him properly corralled, for he seems to stray off the pitch sometimes, but then he keeps his comments firmly within the quasi-Soviet style of labelling any dissident or heretic on the misty horizon as a “Nazi, fascist, racist” or other imaginative terms. Oh, I left out “homophobe” and “white supremacist”.

Just yesterday Mr. Borland called me a “white supremacist” in the following passage from The Daily Maverick‘s comment section:

“As opposed to your evil, divisive, hate-filled propaganda Dan?

“As a member of the white middle-class I can safely say I am not under attack by the state, however appalled I am by Zuma, the corrupt political elite and the worrying signs of a return of oppression through state security apparatus.

“You and your shameful ilk are the biggest cause of ethnic conflict in this country. Your statement elsewhere that white South Africans are the nicest people in the world is laughable. I, for one, am extremely grateful that the majority in this country, oppressed for so long, have been able to show such magnanimous ubuntu that I do still believe there is hope for South Africa.

“You are nothing short of a white supremacist and you should be living somewhere like Nazi Germany rather than a country that is still striving for reconciliation and meaningful democracy.”

I do not intend entering into a literary analysis of this passage, which is hardly on a par with T.S. Eliot or Joseph Conrad. Nevertheless, I find it quite telling that the author admits that South Africa “is still striving for reconciliation and meaningful democracy” as no-one in his right mind would describe the current one-party state with non-existent boundaries between party and state as a “democracy” in the Western sense.

He also acknowledges that there is some kind of “ethnic conflict” going on in the country. When our “good democrats” are not assaulting or killing foreign Africans (a little “xenophobia” here and there), they are elsewhere engaged in farm murders, house robberies, hold-ups, rapes and other mayhem. Sometimes the police force join in too, in full uniform! Recently there was a case in Naboomspruit where two black policemen committed a robbery in full uniform, using their service pistols. They are out on bail but have not been suspended. Their weapons having been retained as court evidence, they have simply been issued with other pistols and are back at the station.

This is South Africa, the leftist utopia. Anything goes. From gay unions to policemen moonlighting as armed robbers.

But according to Borland – and he probably speaks for the entire pack of hounds yapping away every day at The Daily Conformist, in their pompous imitations of British-Marxist cool – “me and my shameful ilk” are somehow responsible for all the violence and lawlessness in the country, apart from relegating me to “Nazi Germany”.

I have news for these mauve Brits or would-be Brits, merrily uploading their daily wet wipe which wouldn’t even clean my screen without leaving an opaque layer of obfuscation. I don’t need to time-travel back to Germany in the thirties. This is Nazi Germany already! Except that we Afrikaners are being treated like Jews. If we are not being attacked by your daily Einsatzgruppen, torturing, killing or raping us, we are vilified, smeared, labelled and blamed as scapegoats for the mess known as the “New South Africa”, or Mbeki’s “youngest black republic”. This is a failed state and its failure was planned so that it would either drive us out of here or we would simply be eliminated during a protracted uhuru, realising Alistair Sparks’s dream of a final solution for us.

Afrikaners, as educators, engineers, administrators, farmers and founders of industries such as Sasol over which the Rand Daily Mail and “its ilk” once guffawed as “sheltered employment for stupid Afrikaners”, have always tried to bring development and stability to South Africa. Not so the destructive, know-it-all uitlander opportunist and pompous purveyor of revolution, “transformation” and other radical concepts.

The present Zimbabwe is entirely the result of Briitsh foreign policy that saw Ian Smith as just another intractable white patriot to be eliminated. Regime change was needed. Ten years later a reforming South Africa was seen as a threat to the Marxist-revolutionary ambitions of the ANC and the South African Communist Party. So we got regime change too. After us it was Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Egypt and other countries of the so-called Arab Spring where the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood was deemed preferable to the more secular, modernist but autocratic Arab regimes. We now have civil war in Syria, another country destroyed by Anglo-American foreign policy and support for Al Kaida-type “rebels”. Among other things, the British-supported “rebels” are destroying churches, portending an end to religious freedom in Syria.

South African leftism, of which The Daily Maverick is but one of the many mouthpieces that have mushroomed and grown like weeds since the South African revolution, is also a form of fundamentalism. Its creed, like every strain of communism during the twentieth century, is “equality at all costs”. Except the very people who propagate this utterly totalitarian idea do not themselves believe that they are equal to anyone else. In Orwell’s famous phrase: “Some animals are more equal than others.”

It follows that even a low-life cricket commentator like Kenneth Borland believes himself to be far above the average middle-class Afrikaner, concerned about his children’s education and the safety of his family while revolution rages about him. Borland and his coreligionists are part of a British-Marxist nomenklatura egging their ANC storm troopers on. Go kill some Boers, go take their land! Go rape their daughters and teach them not to be “racist” in their choice of a sexual partner. After all, in Soweto “forced sex” is not considered wrong, according to opinion polls among the enlightened youth of that conurbation, so why should we conservative, Calvinist, “Nazi” Afrikaners object? “Corrective rape” already exists for lesbians in South Africa, so why not introduce it for “white-supremacist women and girls” too?

I could expatiate on the peculiar, almost racial (Nazi?!) sense of superiority that one encounters in Natal with its virulent anti-Afrikaans chauvinism. Despite Natal, or KZN as it is now known, being one of the poorest provinces in the country, its inhabitants believe that somehow the British Empire is not dead. As long as Britain can still bomb a few Iraqi children or supply weapons to Syrian Islamists, I suppose there is life in it yet. Small wonder then, that the ANC and the SA Communist Party have recruited some of their most pliable white “cadres” from that most English of South African provinces, who will serve the Bantu Empire with a zeal once reserved for the British one.

The Natal Witness cricket commentator, Kenneth Borland, hails from Pietermaritzburg, the smaller of the two KZN cities. Need one say more? Hence the pregnant “you and your shameful ilk”, implying that to be descended from the Dutch, French Huguenots, Germans and Scots as we are, is somehow beyond the pale.

Reading an e-wipe like The Daily Maverick, I sometimes get the impression that this whole tragic, violent revolution slowly consuming our country, is based not on Karl Marx – although he is in there somewhere – but on some imitation or simulacrum of English snobbery. I imagine that Baron David Owen or Lord Carrington condemned Rhodesia to death over gin and tonic while boasting about his new Jaguar. Likewise, South Africa’s demise was concocted as some act of upper-class insouciance. People were just tired of PW Botha’s hat that he wore sometimes at a time when it was no longer fashionable, whereas now it would have been perfectly à la mode.

I think author Nadine Gordimer – she got her anti-Afrikaans attitude from Lithuania, not from Natal – summed it up when she said in an interview: ““We were naive, because we focused on removing the apartheid government and never thought deeply enough about what would follow.”

Gordimer makes it sound as if she cares. However, none of the South African leftists care about this country. If it had to descend into a Zimbabwean abyss of hyperinflation and famine tomorrow, they would simply pack up and leave, with a shrug.

Besides smugness, they are also motivated by Schadenfreude. The notion that they are powerful enough to destroy and dilapidate all that Afrikaners managed to create in 360 years, gives them a tremendous sense of satisfaction.

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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

Nadine Gordimer describes South African education system as a ‘wreck’

Nobel literature prize winner Nadine Gordimer poured scorn on South Africa’s education system on Tuesday as “a wreck” over the failure to deliver textbooks to thousands of public schools.

The scandal has caused a national furore after leaving more than 5,000 rural schools without textbooks for more than six months of the academic year in a damning measure of South Africa’s schooling 18 years into democracy.

“Our education system is a wreck. It’s a shamble. I can’t believe that three-quarters of the year have gone by and so many of our schools, especially in the rural areas, have been without textbooks,” said Gordimer, 88, on SAFM public radio news.

“It is the (education) minister’s responsibility to see that the books are ordered in time and delivered. How can you teach people to read if there are no books to read from?”

President Jacob Zuma is facing increasing calls to fire Education Minister Angie Motshekga. On Monday, he said he was waiting for a final report from a team he appointed to investigate the debacle.

The education department was found to have violated students’ rights to education after being taken to court and was ordered to remedy the situation.

But a probe revealed that 22 percent of schools in the northern Limpopo region were still without learning materials earlier this month despite a scramble by authorities to get the missing books to schools.

The criticism by Gordimer, who had several works banned by the apartheid regime, comes after peace laureate Desmond Tutu said democratic icon Nelson Mandela would be reduced to tears if he knew the poor state of public schools.

Education is South Africa’s single biggest budget item, but schools are hobbled by poor management and low standards. – SAPA