The question of whether Oscar Pistorius is a murderer or not will now be argued in the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) following the successful application by the State to have his culpable homicide conviction reviewed.
Judge Thokozile Masipa handed down her ruling in the High Court in Pretoria on Wednesday.
Pistorius was sentenced to five years in prison for the Valentine’s Day shooting of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp.
But the State just can’t explain why DA-darling Xhosa King Buyelekhaya Dalindyebo has for five years managed to avoid a 15-year jail sentence for culpable homicide, while the State dithers over what to do about him.
SCA sources have confirmed that no appeal papers were filed by either side in the case. As there’s no appeal, Dalindyebo should have started serving his 15-year sentence, but he remains free.
“We are still dealing with the matter. We are unable to divulge any details at this point,” Nathi Mncube, national spokesman for the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA), said last week.
“It will be resolved soon.”
The Star had asked again why Dalindyebo wasn’t in jail, following the collapse of an appeal in the matter in early August.
He was convicted in 2009 of culpable homicide, assault with intent to do grievous bodily harm, arson, kidnapping and attempting to defeat the ends of justice, relating to disciplinary actions he ordered against his subjects in 1995 and 1996.
He was sentenced to an effective 15 years in jail.
Dalindyebo never filed appeal papers with the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA), and in early August, the Department of Justice said the appeal had lapsed as he was now out of time.
He was expected to go to jail, but didn’t.
At the same time, the NPA explained the lack of action against Dalindyebo by saying it had also appealed against the culpable homicide conviction. But the NPA also never filed any appeal papers.
Dalindyebo openly admits to smoking dagga and has been accused of assaults, including on relatives.
Clearly the prosecutor in the Pistorius case loved the international media attention he was getting by attacking the famous white athlete. Gerrie Nel complained that the mercy shown Oscar Pistorius was “over-exaggerated”.
Nel called the sentence “shockingly inappropriate”, openly playing to the race-baiters.
“It’s like taking someone charged with murder and then convicting him on, say, public violence. It cannot be,” Nel ranted, while appealing the acquittal on murder of Pistorius.
South Africa’s state prosecutors will appeal the culpable homicide conviction and five-year jail sentence handed down last week on Olympic and Paralympic track star Oscar Pistorius, the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) said on Monday.
“Oscar Pistorius judgement, NPA will be appealing both the conviction and sentence,” NPA spokesman Nathi Mncube said on his Twitter feed.
Pistorius, whose lower legs were amputated as a baby but who ran on carbon fibre prosthetic limbs, was convicted of culpable homicide last month for the shooting of Reeva Steenkamp, a 29-year-old law graduate and model, at his luxury Pretoria home.
Prosecutors failed to prove murder after the athlete said he fired in the mistaken belief an intruder was hiding behind the door, a defence that struck a chord with many people in a country with one of the world’s highest rates of violent crime.
However, Judge Thokozile Masipa’s decision drew criticism from some legal experts who said she had made an error in her interpretation of the legal concept of ‘dolus eventualis’, whereby a person is held accountable for the foreseeable consequences of their actions.
Other lawyers said her verdict was sound.
In South Africa, an appeal by the state against a verdict can only be made on a matter of law, and does not involve a retrial or the submission of any new evidence.
Regarding convicted murderer Oscar Pistorius, almost everyone has had “an egg to lay”, as the Afrikaans expression goes. I purposefully tried to avoid his trial and its attendant hype, as it displayed once more the painful and colonial stupidity of South African society, with its stereotypical concerns that make the average TV soap opera look like Dostoevsky.
Hordes of local and foreign journalists swarmed around the court room, tweeting incessantly. More than one book rolled off the presses, in which the orgiastic display of superficiality, Schadenfreude and political correctness was apparently canonised. I say, “apparently”, as I have not read any of these tomes and probably never will.
The only comment worth making about Oscar Pistorius is that he is not an Afrikaner. Despite his surname which, incidentally, is of Dutch origin, being a Latinisation of “baker” (“pistor” means “baker” in Latin), he was raised as English and attended English schools. So if one’s culture makes one commit murder or shoot your girlfriend through the bathroom door, English must be lethal.
However, I strongly suspect that even if Pistorius had been a “Smith” or a “Jones” – the two most common surnames in Great Britain – he would still have been crucified by the media vampires as a kind of “Afrikaner by association”. So every journalist or commentator vaguely able to spell “sociology” or “psychology” launched into quasi-learned “explanations” of Pistorius’s behaviour which was mostly attributed to being a white, middle-class and “Afrikaner” male.
Alex Perry even wrote an early piece for Time magazine, in which he fell back on the ultimate English-South African cliché, the laager, retaining the antiquated Dutch spelling that Afrikaners never use:
The ultimate example of this private crime control is the security estate. The ancestors of the white Afrikaners, 19th century Dutch settlers, had their own response to overwhelming danger: circling their wagons in an impenetrable laager. The most celebrated laager was at the Battle of Blood River in 1838, in which 470 Dutchmen killed 3,000 Zulu warriors while sustaining light wounds to just three of their own. The security estate–a walled-off cluster of houses protected by razor wire, electric fences, motion detectors and guards–is the 21st century laager. Its purpose is the same: separation from what Afrikaners call the swart gevaar or “black threat.” The security estate is a private, individual, exclusive solution to that fear. And Silver Woods in Pretoria, where Pistorius lives behind electrified 8-ft.-high (2.5 m) security walls watched over by the estate’s dedicated security force, is one of the most exclusive guarded communities in the country.
Our crime statistics are, as everyone knows, “off the charts” as they say in America, and post-1994 South Africa has the dubious distinction of having both the highest incidence of rape in the world and almost the highest murder rate. OK, so Honduras and Venezuela beat us in the number of murders per 100 000 members of the population, but in absolute terms an extraordinary 16914 people got murdered last year. Probably Pistorius’s crime will be classified as a “culpable homicide” of which there were 11257 in 2013. If you add the two together, you get 28171 people killed in one year. On average, 43 people are murdered every day, 77 if you include the culpable homicides. That means our daily number of murders exceeds the annual body count in places like Denmark (47 murders per year), Switzerland (46 per year) and New Zealand (41 murders per year).
I specifically mention Switzerland, as it is well-known that the Swiss army system, a citizens’ militia, entails that every man aged 55 and under has a government-issue assault rifle at home. As the adage goes, guns don’t kill people… and Switzerland is the living proof of that.
So the avalanche of clichés in the media on “Afrikaner gun culture”, “whiteness”, “masculinity”, the “laager”, “black peril”, etc., merely represents the self-referential black box of libtardism and its incapacity to grasp or describe even the stuff of so-called “genre fiction”: murder.
One of the first and most obvious aspects of the Oscar Pistorius story is that it is a singularity. Here is a man without legs who ran in the Olympics and then shot his girlfriend through the bathroom door for some peculiar personal reason which may have been tantamount to a crime passionel. It will never happen again. We all know how lawyers train their witnesses to say certain things in court to make the evidence fit a certain legal outcome. The entire narrative around Pistorius’s “fear of crime” may have been the figment of Barry Roux’s imagination, for all we know. Yet Steinberg and his fellow libtards see in this statement a corroboration of their “white/Afrikaner paranoia theory”.
Within the delirious fantasy world of the libtard where whites are always violent and evil, as opposed to blacks who are congenitally innocent, but sometimes “pushed” into crime or violence by white racism or socioeconomic conditions, Oscar Pistorius was the ultimate “proof” of white, male and Afrikaans wickedness. Security estates, or “gated communities” in American parlance, of which there are literally thousands in South Africa, are an expression of “white paranoia” and have nothing to do with defending oneself against the ambient social war raging on the streets of South Africa.
I have referred before to the English-South African need for imitation and colonial deference to Britain. For the elites of Johannesburg and Cape Town, white or black, London will always be our real capital, and Washington to a lesser extent. Anglo-American political correctness is also the national creed, and woe betide anyone who deviates from it. South African “intellectualism” consists of simulating or conforming to such British or American PC views, regardless of local culture or conditions.
Even where a “muti” or “medicine murder” takes place in the age-old African tradition, it will be explained in terms of “apartheid” and things like “white patriarchy” or “masculinity”. The resulting anachronism, logical absurdity and sheer dishonesty of such explanations are cavalierly disregarded by libtard genii whose racial fixation trumps all other interpretations or even facts. Naturally, every libtard is a genius who regularly sneers haughtily at any conservative, rational or logical criticism of his or her prejudices, as being “stupid” or “dumb” in a revealing demonstration of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Even though the Pistorius murder case was a clear-cut interpersonal crime between two people with an intimate relationship, white-on-white as they say, the libtard mainstream media (MSM) immediately set about racialising it. Even where any form of racial motive shines in its utter absence, it has to be imagined or filled in, because otherwise they would have nothing left to say.
Op my ou ramkiekie met net een snaar, we say in Afrikaans to convey someone’s one-dimensional conversation or ideas. Libtardism is indeed a musical instrument with a single string: race. Without a racial monotone, the libtard reaches the end of his little universe where, as Wittgenstein said:
“What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.”
One day even maths and physics, or the origins of the universe, will be described in terms of a libtardist, racial paradigm.
Forgetting for a moment about Oscar Pistorius’s notoriety even before his murder trial, the hullabaloo over the trial was indicative of a kind of cognitive and semantic crisis at the heart of political correctness. Conditions in South Africa being what they are, with rampant crime and violence, including the killing and rape of children, even babies, the most confident libtard must sense imminent mind-control failure. No matter how powerful the Anglo-Saxon media machine and “neurolinguistic programming” in this country, sooner or later the average citizen is “mugged by reality”, as the expression goes. Or rather, the fortunate ones get mugged, the unfortunate ones become rape or murder statistics.
From within the newsrooms and the inner sanctums of academe where an even more convoluted jargon circumlocutes the generalised sociopathy, or sadism, of South Africa, the ramkiekie is sounding more and more like a crackling short-wave radio somewhere in the Congolese jungle. London is calling, but she is no longer getting through.
Some of the most pitiful imitations of politically correct cultural-Marxist or feminist “discourse” – a word more commonly used in French, but that became strangely fashionable in English – are to be found among South African blacks. Political correctness for blacks has the added advantage of also being profitable, in that it justifies affirmative action, BEE (black economic empowerment) and the other Orwellian policies pursued by our government. As I have also stated elsewhere, South Africa is the only country in the world where an ethnic majority with unfettered political, military, police and economic power – if its share of the state-owned economy is taken into account – has to be protected from a dwindling, disenfranchised and powerless minority.
It follows that, not only does a white “perp” like legless Oscar represent a valuable pawn in the ongoing semantic war against Afrikaners/whites by the PC horde, but he also has great economic and political value. Like Penelope’s face launched a thousand ships, the abject figure of Oscar the white “Afrikanerised” criminal will launch a thousand tenders. As “white male evil incarnate”, he will assuage the pangs of conscience in looting our state down to the last, devalued rand, if ever there were such pangs. The ultimate objective of revolution in South Africa was not to “liberate us” but to fall upon the state and municipal coffers in a feeding frenzy of sleaze and corruption that puts the Caribbean piracy of yore to shame.
But let me get back to the “feminist” interpretation of Oscar, alluded to a paragraph or two ago. A black male and a deputy director-general in the Presidency at that, Mr. Busani Ngcaweni, has alerted me on Twitter to his “analysis” of Oscar under the ominous title, White masculinity since 1994, published in the Sunday Independent yesterday.
The astute reader will by now have realised that, in South Africa, we do not really have a problem with rapists or murderers committing all these heinous crimes, but with abstract nouns. As rape is notoriously under-reported, it is estimated that up to a million women get raped every year, not by real, live rapists, but by abstract nouns such as “masculinity” and “patriarchy”. In the libtard media and in academic journals, there is a whole industry devoted to blaming “masculinity” and “patriarchy” for rape and murder and “femicide”, with the underlying suggestion that white, middle-class males are somehow also involved in the rape and murder epidemic. Anyone questioning this is immediately censored, or fired.
However, even a casual perusal of the South African Police’s own statistics, will demonstrate that violent crime, including rape and murder, is not reported at police stations like Randburg or Bellville where middle-class white males cluster, but in areas like Soweto or the Cape Flats where few, if any, whites live. Now, unless the victims of crime in white middle-class areas, pursued by white male accountants, lawyers and members of middle management, drive across Johannesburg or Cape Town to go and report their crimes in black or Coloured areas, we may safely assume that those crimes had indeed been committed within or near the police precincts where they were first reported. Unlike what Jonny Steinberg claims, there is no “culture of violence” in predominantly white, Afrikaner suburbs and legal gun owners do not shoot up the neighbourhood, as a rule.
So while sundry white libtard-feminist harpies like Gillian Schutte or Christi van der Westhuizen rail against abstract nouns such as “whiteness” or “masculinity” or “patriarchy”, no-one has ever tendered any concrete evidence that white South African males commit any more crime than ones in Denmark, Switzerland or New Zealand, our already-mentioned three low-crime countries.
Oscar Pistorius’s singular murder is therefore not representative of anything, let alone “a source of racial shame” as Steinberg in his libtard zeal pontificated shortly after his sentencing:
…I get the sense that the feelings of vengeance are much stronger among whites than blacks. Pistorius has offended a sense of racial pride, and a lot of white people are hungry for his blood.
Wandering around the eastern Free State and Gauteng these past couple of weeks, I get the sense that many people in the townships don’t care one way or another about Pistorius. Another rich person received soft justice. So what? It happens all the time.
The vitriol spewing across the airwaves has been disproportionately white, as far as I can tell.
Are libtards capable of “sense”? As someone said, journalism is a low-paid job where most of the job satisfaction comes from fraternising with important people and regularly smearing them. So it does not really attract the mathematically gifted or people with analytical, logical skills.
On Twitter last night, Busani Ngcaweni suggested that Steinberg had even gone so far as to claim that Afrikaners had “initiated” pristine, innocent blacks into violence during the ninenteenth century:
Even though libtards are capable of the most extreme and outlandish statements, I would be surprised to see such a quote, even from a Boerehaat author such as Steinberg, but then in South Africa, anything is possible.
South Africa’s one saving grace is that we are a member of BRICS, with the ultimate hope that either Russia or China will assume a neo-colonial role in this country, to staunch the destructive excesses of Anglo-American, racialised political correctness. However, Ngcaweni does not offer me any hope, as he sounds just like some indoctrinated 2nd-year social-science student from Wits or UCT, although he claims never to have been to university. He merely recapitulates the groundless speculations of Steinberg et al when he concludes his piece on Oscar by saying:
It is the fascinating peep into a particular world that this trial gave us: the life of guns, sport cars and blondes, the new cultural signifiers of Afrikaner masculinity in post-apartheid South Africa.
If anything, the non-Afrikaner Oscar’s evidently shallow and flashy Hollywood-lifestyle is more indicative of the dominant “global” culture than anything remotely Afrikaans or Afrikaner. Being Calvinists, with a strong patrician bond to the land, the plebeian display of material wealth and symbols of consumption has never been part of the Afrikaner make-up. Around Johannesburg, I see more black males in expensive, million-rand plus sports cars than white ones. Most Afrikaners drive utilitarian bakkies or pick-ups as many are self-employed and have to transport stock or equipment in their struggle for survival against a hostile, anti-white system.
One of the many paradoxes of our self-proclaimed “genius” pundits is that, apart from mixing metaphors and facts so often, they also have no sense of logical consistency. When using modish, postmodern language from a few decades ago, you should at least be aware that, by implication, you are rejecting the very notion of “representation” in favour of complexity, paradox, multiplicity, singularity, and so on. That is Postmodernism 101.
Not only has representative government failed us in South Africa, but the libtard in search of his “representative” white male perpetrator has become even more risible than some of our politicians.
South African judge Thokozile Masipa has cleared Olympic and paralympic athlete Oscar Pistorius of all murder charges, Reuters said.
“Clearly he did not subjectively foresee this as a possibility that he would kill the person behind the door, let alone the deceased as he thought she was in the bedroom,” Masipa told a court and Pistorius, who broke down in tears.
He could still be found guilty of culpable homicide, the equivalent of manslaughter, if Masipa believes the athlete was negligent in shooting dead his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp last year.
The judge earlier said the state had failed to prove that Pistorius was guilty of premeditated murder.
The tragedy happened on February 14, 2013, when Reeva Steenkamp’s body was found in Pistorius’s toilet room.
Pistorius woke up at night and heard sounds from the bathroom. Thinking it was a robber, he shot several times at the closed door. When he opened it, he saw his bleeding girlfriend who died shortly afterward.
South Africa has one of the highest crime rates in the world and armed robberies are common.
On February 19, 2013 Pretoria Prosecutor Gerrie Nel charged Pistorius with the premeditated murder. Later in February, the athlete was released on bail for a million South African rands.
In March 2013, Pistorius’s lawyers appealed the court’s decision not to let him out of the country, and the appeal was granted. Pistorius was ordered to present a detailed plan of his journeys no later than a week before leaving the country.
Pistorius is a double amputee runner and a six-time Paralympic champion who has also taken part in able-bodied competitions. He won a silver medal in the 4×400 meter relay at the 2011 world championship.
Judge Thokozile Masipa was arrested in 1970s when taking part in protests against the detention of journalists during Apartheid. In 1998, she became the second black woman in South Africa to be appointed a judge.
In this interview, two South African authors have a conversation about important issues affecting the country, the USA and society generally. They both grew up in and around Johannesburg and, thanks to the internet, discovered each other’s work a few years ago. Ilana Mercer lives in Washington State, in the north-western corner of America.
ILANA MERCER: There’s an elephant in the courtroom in which Oscar Pistorius is being tried for the murder of girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp. It is the unidirectional, black-on-black and black-on-white violent crime in South Africa. The fear of being butchered was likely behind the blade runner’s irrational, irresponsible actions. I had hoped that Pistorius would speak up. For all his privilege, Pistorius knows the rapacity and invincibility of the criminal class in his country. Like every other Afrikaner, he knew in his gut what infiltrating gangs would do to a legless Boer. The world is praising the proceedings in that court. However, “making sport of a caged animal that has confessed” is how a South African reader described this courtroom Colosseum. What do you think?
DAN ROODT: I largely agree with that. One of the columnists on our Praag.org site described the trial as a “canned hunt and a legal travesty.” Most people watching it probably do not know that only 8 percent of murder cases in South Africa result in a conviction, so killers have a 92 percent chance of literally getting away with murder! South Africa is both the murder and especially the rape capital of the world. Usually the statistics are massaged in such a way that only murder proper, called “first-degree murder” in the United States, is included in the absolute number of murders. But if one also counts other homicides with a lesser culpability, we are the world champions, even above India’s 43,000 homicides. But, of course, India has over 1 billion people, whereas we have just over 50 million. Even for first-degree murder, we have more of those per year (16,000) than the U.S. (14,000), which has six times our population.
Regarding the court procedures, Pistorius is spending a lot of money on his legal team, and the state is using an experienced Afrikaner prosecutor, Gerrie Nel. However, there has been large-scale affirmative action applied to the appointment of judges, so that many of them lack the knowledge of the law and the experience to do their job properly. In many cases, black offenders, especially, get off very lightly and in practice do not serve more than 10 years for first-degree murder.
The government is also applying pressure on lawyers to apply affirmative action in their own ranks as most of the top-level senior lawyers, or advocates, as we call them, are still white. They are preferred by the big-spending corporate clients in civil cases, especially. A lawyer friend of mine recently told me of one tedious corporate court case in Pretoria that has lasted 10 years and consumed $5 million in legal fees, also swallowing up her whole life. Ironically, even the president, Jacob Zuma – who has had more than 500 charges of corruption against him and was also accused of rape in December 2005 – used white Afrikaner lawyers to get him off, using their technical knowledge of the law and court procedures.
There is also rampant corruption in the criminal justice system, with policemen and petty court officials being bribed to make documents and evidence disappear, so the kind of televised court-room soap opera of the Pistorius trial is not at all representative of the vicissitudes of the average trial.
Unlike in the U.S., South Africa does not collect crime statistics broken down by race anymore, but we know that the vast majority of prison inmates serving time for violent crime are black. White offenders – which include white-collar crimes like fraud or insider trading – only constitute 1.8 percent of the prison population, while whites make up under 10 percent of the total population. A recent reliable survey showed that whites are disproportionately victims of house robberies, constituting about 50 percent of the victims, while the perpetrators are almost invariably black.
The image of South African blacks disseminated by the global media is of a population of kindhearted, forgiving people like Mandela, whereas the reality demonstrates something entirely different. There is something inexplicably sadistic about murders and assaults by black perpetrators on their white victims in South Africa, which often include lengthy and dehumanizing torture sessions, mutilation of bodies, sexual violence, and so on. Often the victims are children, including toddlers and babies. Every week we read about farm murders in the press where the victims are normally elderly white farmers, regularly ambushed on a Sunday morning when they return from church attendance.
MERCER: The South African Constitution, naturally, sanctions the prosecution of individuals based on the things they say. Conversely, Americans are supposed to enjoy a constitutional right to speak freely. The freedom gap is, however, narrowing. The establishment – politicians, journalists, jurists, educators and academics; “conservatives” as much as liberals – trip over one another in a collectivist, concerted effort to ruin an “offender.” The latest individual to be crucified for committing America’s original sin – harboring impure racial thoughts – is Donald Sterling. You’ve written that, while “few people in the U.S. have had any direct experience of racism, they nevertheless discern racism in other people’s body language, in their use of euphemisms or in being patronized by others.” Explain how this “metaphysical racism” now works as an “engine of history.”
ROODT: Unfortunately, ever since the 1960s, South Africa has been influenced by America in a very bad way. Instead of looking to the U.S. for lessons in self-reliance, the right to self-defense, or how to finance start-up tech companies, we have simply imported your liberal, pathological political correctness. That includes the sensitivity around language and terms with a racial connotation. I cannot begin to tell you how many words there are in South Africa to describe people of various races including, of course, pejorative terms. I seem to recall that my generation was very sensitive to using some of those words, and there was a famous case in 1978 when the old government’s censors banned a satirical novel entitled “Magersfontein o Magersfontein!” for containing a piece of dialogue in which the word “kaffir” was used in an ironic way. This is our equivalent to what you call the “N-word” in the U.S. In print these days, most people here also refer to the “K-word,” as there is just such a taboo against using it. However, if you go to any school playground or university campus in South Africa, young whites are using it as a way of rebelling against the system. How long this will last, I do not know, because the government and mainstream, politically correct society are clamping down on it and even giving people suspended prison sentences for a first offense after being found guilty of using the “K-word.”
So in South Africa you can torture an elderly white lady and maybe get away with it, but you will be prosecuted for speech crime for using racial epithets. I would not be surprised if all telephone conversations will be monitored, NSA-style, at some point in the future to ensnare those who use so-called racist language.
When it comes to “metaphysical racism,” that is at a far more subtle level. Someone who first alerted me to this was the documentary filmmaker Craig Bodeker from Denver, Colorado, with his piece “A Conversation About Race.” Many people in the film say that “racism is everywhere,” surrounding us like sin or some invisible element. Also, in “A Conversation About Race,” I learned that some American blacks think that a compliment from a white could be a sign of racism. So either an insult or a compliment could be construed as racism.
In South Africa, some of the liberal commentators such as Steven Friedman who writes in the Johannesburg Business Day claim that blacks were damaged by apartheid and therefore cannot be expected to perform at the same level as whites. In the U.S., this claim is made about slavery, that the insidious effects of slavery are still present, which would explain the academic achievement gap, but also differences in wealth and income. Colonialism also comes into it, as far as other African countries are concerned. The fact that Africa has remained underdeveloped for so long is almost always blamed on colonialism, notwithstanding that it was colonialism that had introduced Africa to the wheel and to writing, not to forget science and technology!
Whereas about a decade ago, the British magazine The Economist had described Africa as “the hopeless continent,” it now sees Africa as a fast-growing continent, not very different from countries like China, Hong Kong or South Korea. Even Goldman Sachs thinks that Africa will soon be a developed continent competing on an even keel with Europe, North America or Asia.
The flipside of the new optimism about Africa, including South Africa, is that every failure or missed growth target is somehow backwardly rationalized in terms of racism, colonialism and apartheid. In short, “metaphysical racism.” So even when it comes to technology, the economy and education, there is always a cloud of racism somewhere that the developed world has to address by offering aid money or some form of expiatory confession from Western leaders.
I always wonder: If Africa is now standing on its own two feet and growing so fast, why do so many countries still need development aid? Why do South African blacks still need affirmative action, including racial quotas in sports?
ILANA MERCER: The dominant-party state that is South Africa is steeped not in an African creed but in an American one. One of your most astute observations has been that post-apartheid South Africa is very much a creature of the Anglosphere. In the U.S., centrally planned and enforced multiculturalism is twinned with open borders for Third World peoples. How has South Africa fallen in line?
DAN ROODT: Many people see South Africa as an experiment in multiculturalism and open borders. Almost robotically, we’ve adopted most of the American liberal precepts in a very naïve, knee-jerk fashion. Some people are even urging that we abolish borders completely, to allow any of the billion Africans north of our country to come and settle in South Africa, much like your government is doing vis-à-vis Central American dependents. However, our experience of the massive illegal immigration we have had since 1994 is that it increases intolerance, especially among the poor and the unemployed. Locals regularly kill foreigners, and we have had so-called xenophobic riots.
In some towns close to the border, the foreign population is about 80 percent. Foreigners have access to public health-care facilities, so many are “obstetrical tourists” who come here to have babies – “anchor babies,” as you call them in the U.S. Generally speaking, state hospitals are getting worse and worse, also as a result of being overburdened with foreign Africans.
Recently, there was a court decision that foreign children that have been orphaned or separated from their parents, for example in the war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo, also qualify for free public education in South Africa. After Lawyers for Human Rights had sued for the privilege, the government did not oppose their petition to the court.
Open borders will lead to even more ethnic strife, and we may even import some of Africa’s civil wars as the belligerents pursue their combat in South Africa. In your country, it’s gang warfare.
MERCER: Under the Afrikaners, South Africa was a European-style nation-state – Christian and biracial, in the main. Under Mandela’s African National Congress, it has adopted multiculturalism, which subsumes an “American radicalism that aims at abolishing the nation-state and replacing it with a kind of global corporatism and welfarism,” to quote your work. South Africa is now an “Afro-Saxon” nation. Explain, please.
ROODT: Yes, I think those remarks of mine are borne out by what is happening in Europe right now. There is some kind of revival of the Western spirit going on in places like France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Italy, Austria and Hungary. It is something of a truism that Afrikaner nationalism in the 20th century was based on European-style ethnic nationalism. If you look at it more objectively and free of the moral hysteria and distorted accounts, apartheid or separate development was an attempt to impart European-style ethnic nationalism to South Africa’s African tribes. To some extent, it worked, and it still has an effect to this day. For example, there has been a resurgence of Zulu nationalism in South Africa, and to some extent the ANC under Jacob Zuma has become a vehicle for Zulu aspirations and advancement. With the difference that it is no longer limited to the old homeland of Kwazulu. The whole of South Africa has now become “one big Bantustan,” as the liberal commentator R.W. Johnson has characterized it.
But in other respects, South Africa has become a colony of the USA, culturally speaking. Blacks identify with African-American culture. You hear American rap music wafting from their cars, and they have adopted the same kind of victim’s discourse that you find in the USA. There is actually a Kenyan professor who teaches in the USA., as far as I know, Ali Mazrui, who coined the term, “Afro-Saxon” for the English-speaking blacks in Africa, the USA, the Caribbean, in Britain, and so on. In fact, they outnumber the original English-speaking population of England! The black elite in South Africa identifies with this global Afro-Saxon culture, and they see themselves as being an important part of it, using South Africa’s wealth and developed infrastructure to advance the Afro-Saxon cause.
Talking about the welfare state, one of the worst fears of the old apartheid theorists was that ultimately the productive, developed part of the economy would have to subsidize the unproductive, impoverished, undeveloped part, dragging both down into an equally distributed poverty. This is more or less what is happening in South Africa now as we have a welfare state for 50 million people, supported by only 2 million real taxpayers. The funny thing is that multiculturalism and affirmative action actually disguise this process completely, so that you can no longer really tell who the producers are and who the consumers of wealth are.
In the same way, knowledge and expertise also end up being distributed in such a way that you no longer know who really has it: Is it the person who does the job, or his secretary or assistant or deputy or whoever? The other day I heard that an ex-taxi driver was appointed to a top job in our central bank, but he is barely able to write an email and knows nothing about banking. Yet he has some outside white mentor or adviser who actually helps him do his job and is also his business associate. So everybody tries to exploit this made-in-America spoils system.
Unfortunately, the USA seems to be in imperial mode, and so it wants to export its multicultural model everywhere, including to Europe where there are still real nation-states in which people speak the same language, have a common history and identity and have not been transformed by immigration. You only have to come to South Africa to see the American model in its most extreme form, where race and political correctness dominate everything.
When it comes to issues of race and ethnicity, we have also imported the sensitivity around language and ideas that pertain in the USA. Once I actually quoted a black columnist complaining about the low scores in math recorded in black schools in Soweto. The next thing I was denounced as a racist. Even if you just try to defend your language and culture, or the right of free association, that is also seen as racist. Too much criticism of government corruption or affirmative action is likewise deemed racist.
Since the fateful dawn of “democracy” in 1994 The ANC kleptocracy continues to gut South Africa, literally selling, stealing, embezzling and pulverizing what is left of the beloved country- what was the powerhouse of Africa- down the river at break-neck speed. They have had plenty of help with generous assistance from the likes of the US and UK liberal political troublemakers and their despicable media whores; all of them complicit in South Africa’s current fragmentation and eventual destruction. There is plenty of South African blood on their hands with well over 400 000 murders since the dawn of “freedom” in 1994. Collaborating insiders now and then give a token acknowledgement of the situation by washing their blood-stained hands in their convenient, overflowing bowl of liberation epithets. This gesture will never absolve them of their complicity in these horrors.
Slick global media, awash with Disneyesque Mandela fairy tales, would have us believe that all is well in the world’s newest democracy. The stark reality is that crime is the principal, overarching context of the ”modern,” ANC-dominated South Africa. Since the ANC takeover general crime and extensive, violent crime pervade every aspect of life in the “rainbow nation.” Christopher Stone notes in his 2006 Harvard University working paper, Crime, Justice, and Growth in South Africa: Toward a Plausible Contribution from Criminal Justice to Economic Growth:
“The distinctive feature of crime in South Africa is not its volume but its violence.5 The homicide rate presents the extent of violence most starkly. Although the rate has declined substantially since 1994 when South Africa recorded 67 murders per 100,000 people; it was last reported through March 2005 to be at 40.3 per 100,000, among the highest national rates in the world. There is some variation among provinces, but the murder rates across all of South Africa are high, especially in the Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal.”
High rates of crime and corruption are crippling the national life and hamstringing normal social activity along with all if not every service inherent in a modern, functioning society. President Jacob Zuma himself has had over 700 charges of corruption laid against him. Crime and corruption from the highest levels of South African government to the very bottom of the public service are destroying any and all hopes for a peaceful and prosperous South Africa in the future.
Based on the available crime statistics and all-pervasive corruption South Africa could easily be confused with any other terrorist shell state. It’s fast becoming another “smoke-and-mirrors” nation going through the motions of a functioning republic but filled with the rotting carcass of a broken and pillaged “post-liberation” administration and further wracked by the funk of a thoroughly crippling post-colonial entitlement mentality . Shell states are filled with factional violence where local and international syndicates join forces to rule the day under the cloak of “nationhood.” They are hot spots for sanctioned theft, international money laundering and transit points for the illegal trade in guns, ammo- and in South Africa’s case a bounty of rhino horn for pals in the East. They are drug transit points and above all they are places awash in the blood of the innocents. The human cost is immense. In many ways South Africa has fared little better than Iraq.
The ANC takeover of South Africa occurred just twenty short years ago. In that period of time almost 70,000 whites and thousands of upon thousands of blacks have lost their lives to violence and murder. South African farmers, particularly Afrikaner farmers, have seen the worst of it. Since 1994 over 3140 South African farmers have been murdered in some of the most horrific and barbaric ways imaginable. That’s one farmer every 2,3 days for the last 20 years. By comparison only 39 farmers lost their lives during the Kenyan Mau Mau. Yet the international media turns its back on South Africa’s gruesome holocaust.
During the past month we have been bombarded by the Oscar Pistorius trial. Oscar, in his fit of paranoia has played into the hands of the liberal social Marxists, the Western and local media and neo-tribalists who are hell-bent on proving that the only kind of man truly morally culpable of any crime in this world is a White man. All other crime “pales” by comparison and is hardly worth a passing mention. From the ferocity of the legal assault on Mr. Pistorius it would appear that all other races are exempt from the Western standards of law and order and are free to rape and pillage at will and with the full approbation of the state.
South African cable TV has a special channel dedicated to the live broadcast and analysis of this ghastly fraud of the South African legal system. The trial has also been given nauseatingly wide coverage by the international media. Officials and local media talking heads openly boast that the world will see the efficiency of the post-Apartheid South African legal system in action.
In reality what the world is watching is a canned hunt, a legal travesty, a torture session where a confessed killer is being brutally probed over his “intent” by state prosecutor, Gerrie “bull dog” Nel. While Nel and his state legal minions are flagellating a confessed killer for propaganda mileage thousands of barbaric perpetrators run amok in the countryside. These are the real criminals that Advocate Nel needs to be contenting with, not some Roman Circus. South Africans know and understand their motives.
The entire post-Apartheid dilapidation of the South African legal system feeds into this perverse roadshow. Truth be told, Gerrie Nell is the state prosecutor of a South African legal and police system so fraught with corruption and criminals itself that it can barely muster the energy to keep law and order on the streets let alone catch, prosecute and incarcerate the masses of high profile violent criminals who infect the land. According to Africacheck:“Between 1998 and 2012, at least 21,785 criminal cases involving police officers were reported to South Africa’s Independent Complaints Directorate (ICD)” .
Since the Mbeki era crime statistics are only released once a year entirely out of fear of tarnishing the image of the ruling party. When arrests are made dockets are stolen or lost and evidence simply disappears for a price and the criminals are back on the streets. Bungling by incompetent South African police officers and investigators on crime scenes is also far too common.
It seems fitting, then that “bull dog” Nel finds himself wasting his substantial legal energies tormenting a man who has already confessed. What a convenient brief. Any coward could preside over the harassment of a caged animal.
South Africa- dialogue derailed…
In 1998 the late, anti-communist South African writer Aida Parker warned of the inevitable economic crises and internal recriminations pecking party which would ultimately engulf the post-liberation South African body politic. The soaring crime, the bread and circuses mentality around corruption and now the impact of the cumulative liquidation of South Africa’s farmers over the last 20 years is beginning to precipitate this very thing.
Censorbugbear reports:
“In April 2011 the TAU (The Transvaal Agricultural Union)said: …that (of the 3,800 whites recorded as having been murdered in rural regions by armed militia-gangs), about 1,780 were commercial farmers – members of the Agri-SA and TLU unions. They have been murdered and terrorised off their farms and smallholdings by these gangs, while the rest of the farmers are facing heavy pressure to ‘sell’ their land deeds to the state. A large number of these farmers who ‘sold’ their land willingly, have thus far also never been reimbursed for handing over their registered deeds to the ANC-government: essentially their land was simply stolen from them.”
“In November 2007, One of South Africa’s most experienced former military commanders and analysts, ret. Maj-Gen Chris van Zyl, warned in a lecture in that the growing Southern African food-crisis was creating massive political unrest throughout the southern African region. People were now on the move by the many millions – mostly into South Africa from the rest of Africa. “This is the largest migration on the African continent now occurring right now in South Africa, where many millions of famished Africans arrive in their desperate search for survival”. The UN-sponsored news agency IRIN reported in May 2007 that many millions of South Africans are struggling to cope with the country’s soaring food prices.”
In short, the compromise and eventual loss of South Africa’s commercial farming sector through violent attacks and haphazard redress makes the country ripe for a full-scale poverty revolution. It’s a national disaster in the making. The flood of migrants pouring in from their own spectacularly botched democratic experiments has only helped to prime the charge.
The West has been on its suicide mission for some time coldly sacrificing, one by one, its Judeo-Christian outposts to phony self-determination, sham democratic “transformation” and revolutionary conflagration without end. South Africa appears to be its most highly favoured poster child. In Aida Parker’s Spring 1998 special publication, Issue No. 221 “Kill the Farmer, Kill the Boer” SA’s Bloody Road to Ruin she wrote:
…The most serious problem facing the country gets the least official attention. Nor can there be any doubt that the Mandela government is not playing open cards on this crisis situation. Which brings us to a question of our own: The story, apocryphal or not, goes that Julius Nyerere, visiting China, asked Mao Tse-tung how best he could set about imposing communism on Tanzania. Mao replied: “You must destroy the most conservative strata of society, the farmers.”
Sadly, her words ring as true today as they did sixteen years ago for nothing has changed. All has degraded and the slaughter continues unabated. From the value of the Rand to the average life expectancy South Africa has edged ever closer to the chaotic precipice of the political and social abyss.
Of South Africa’s current president – from the horse’s mouth- the SOWETAN, March 12 2012 says:
Zuma is the first president of the ANC to whom the “the worst shall lead” principle readily applies. He is the worst president of the ANC since 1912.
So true on every level.
In hindsight, at least the Mandela government had the cheek to disregard one of the more damning 1998 NIA reports on farm murders.
Apart from hearing the distant strains of “mshini-wam” – “Bring me my machine gun [so I can shoot the Boers]”- one can scarcely recall when the current ANC “cognoscenti” have uttered one word regarding this genocide. Only now, before a general election, is there any passing mention made in the media of the many butchered and fallen. Perhaps our leaders’ aggregate IQ handicaps them from coherently and openly expressing their concerns and grief over the demise of their fellow citizens or is it, perhaps, a cryptic sign of their tacit approval?
The two responses to my letter alerting people to the destructive influence of Marxism and liberalism in South Africa do not really respond to the core of my argument. (See Speak for yourself and Move on, Mr Roodt, change is good.)
Mr. Deon Crafford of Pretoria states that “we are not divided by nationalism anymore, only by economic means”. If that were the case, why are the politicians campaigning in this election not arguing over interest rates, tariffs and trade, or the minutiae of macroeconomic policy? Instead, every party has some kind of ethnic platform, whether it is “taking back the land that whites stole from us” (the EFF) or support for racial quotas in the form of so-called broad-based black economic empowerment (DA and ANC).
During the current Oscar Pistorius trial which has been turned into a mass media event, the state could not even supply a trained interpreter from Afrikaans to English in Pretoria, the epicentre of Afrikaans in South Africa and in the world! This is just another indication of the shambles we find ourselves in, with a system founded on some 1940s melting-pot dream that could only have been invented in Sweden, where everybody has blue eyes and drives a Volvo.
How low do we have to go before people acknowledge that the current system is not working and will never work because it is not suited to a multi-ethnic state? Show me one province in South Africa that does not have a premier from the locally dominant tribe and I will eat my hat. Or just appoint a few Pedis to run Kwazulu-Natal and watch what happens. That is real diversity, not the fantasy-world of beer adverts proclaiming “One nation, one beer.”
The Constitutional Court decides whether there should be same-sex marriage or Afrikaans in schools. Is that democratic? Does anyone think that a referendum on same-sex marriage will get a “yes” vote? Most South Africans have probably more in common with Uganda than with Sweden or New York State.
Mr. Vladimir Putin has become the most popular world leader since Ronald Reagan. He opposes globalism and champions national sovereignty. In a recent speech to the Duma he quoted Nikolai Berdyaev, an early Bolshevik who soon turned to a kind of Christian existentialism and conservatism. The quote was:
“‘The point of conservatism is not that it prevents movement forward and upward, but that it prevents movement backward and downward, into chaotic darkness and a return to a primitive state.”
A haunting statement, given South Africa’s descent into anomic violence, as reflected in the media every day.
A slightly shortened version of this column appeared in the Johannesburg daily Business Day.
Few outsiders understand the ethnic dynamics of South Africa. Foreign journalists come here and imagine that we are some kind of remake of the USA, transposing American ethnic categories (and Hollywood movies) onto us. Of course, many people in Johannesburg and Cape Town imagine that they are living in America too, especially the mediocre crowd who have taken over our universities, describing the world in terms of “racism”, “whiteness”, “white privilege” and so on.
Race is undeniably a driving force in South African history, but not in the way that most people think. More fundamentally, one cannot understand our past and present upheavals without appreciating what Boerehaat, or “hatred of the Boers” is.
A week ago, an associate director of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies, David Saks, casually mentioned on the News24 website in a comment that there had been an underlying current of Boerehaat in the ranks of the anti-apartheid movement. When I was at university, many people in Johannesburg and at the University of the Witwatersrand were proud of their Boerehaat and of hating Afrikaners. It could even be seen as a sign of distinction.
In the early 1970s a cartoonist for the Wits campus newspaper, Franco Frescura, went out of his way to portray Afrikaners as oafish, unintelligent and ugly. He later became a lecturer in architecture. Although Frescura was of Italian origin, he has publicly denounced his “racist parents” and he was apparently strongly influenced by his English-speaking Johannesburg peers. Call this the “uitlander culture” of Johannesburg which goes right back to the discovery of gold in 1886 when hordes of British and Eastern European thugs had descended upon Johannesburg. The uitlanders’ visceral hatred of Kruger and the Transvaal Boers soon led to the outbreak of the Second Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902.
Franco Frescura actually has a website of his own where he describes his upbringing thus:
In Johannesburg Franco attended Houghton Primary and King Edward VII High School (KES) where, unbeknown to him, a number of the families with whom he came into contact had deep-seated links with the Communist and Liberal Parties.
He also proudly states in the same website biography:
Although Franco has gone down in student folk lore as the author of a well-known lampoon published on the cover of Wits Student in 1972 which featured a child looking into a lavatory asking the question “Excuse me, are you the prime minister?”, this is incorrect for the real author was a fellow student and co-activist who has since preferred to remain anonymous.
The South African prime minister at the time was B.J. Vorster, possibly the most popular white South African politician ever as he had managed to garner 65% of the vote and 80% of the seats during the 1977 elections. A golfer and reputedly a heavy drinker, with such tastes Vorster could almost have been described as an Englishman except that he spoke the language with a pronounced Afrikaans accent. However he did pander to English public opinion and famously discouraged Afrikaans language activists from pushing for more language equality by saying “it might upset our English-speaking voters”.
Why would Franco Frescura and so many others have held Vorster in such contempt, given his popularity with most English-speakers? The answer, of course, is to be found in David Saks’s statement: the anti-apartheid movement, as well as the South African Communist Party and ultra-liberals such as Mrs. Helen Suzman who represented the ultra-rich suburb of Houghton, were saturated with Boerehaat.
I would go much further than David Saks and state that South African communists were hardly ever motivated by love for blacks or black human rights. Instead, the driving force of the whole movement was ethnic hatred of gigantic proportions, directed against the Afrikaner people of South Africa. The current near-genocidal levels of violence as encountered in sadistic farm murders, suburban attacks, as wel as the country’s rape epidemic (more than a million women are raped every year, or about three thousand every day) have their roots in the Boerehaat movement. What unites both the gangs of anomic black killers torturing farmers to death and the more genteel haters sniffing out “Afrikaner racism” in mainstream media columns? Boerehaat pure and simple.
Except Boerehaat is not simple. Sure, most Afrikaners in this country have been exposed to English invective such as “rockspider”, “dumb Dutchman”, “bonehead”, “crunchie”, ‘white trash” and the like. But underlying it is a whole worldview, a psychosis well worth a Ph.D. thesis. Or several.
Jews are very touchy about anti-Semitism and most criticism of Jews is usually deflected as anti-Semtism. Even aspects of US foreign policy that could be construed as being detrimental to Israel are described as “anti-Semitic΅. For example, American senator Ron Paul has recently been accused of anti-Semitism by Ben Stein for criticising US bellicosity in the Middle East and the American occupation of Afghanistan.
Any cartoon or verbal caricature of Jews as being rich, greedy, devious people with hooked noses would immediately be denounced as anti-Semitic and in South Africa charges would no doubt be laid with the so-called Human Rights Commission. The Dieudonné affair in France is another case in point where the French government clamped down on the comedian and banned some of his shows for their anti-Semitic jokes.
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Caricaturing, stereotyping and even inciting hatred or genocide against Afrikaners do not carry the same weight, however. Communist Party members Nelson Mandela and Ronnie Kasrils sang their version of the “Kill the Boer” song which is all over YouTube, and it hardly dented the exemplary reputation that these two men, as well as their “comrade” Joe Slovo, enjoy in England, France, the USA and other Western countries.
Apart from Franco Frescura and his fellow cartoonist Zapiro, the list of proud Boerehaters in South Africa would be very long indeed. It would include author Nadine Gordimer, former editor of the Rand Daily Mail, Allister Sparks, as well as the newsrooms of many newspapers and radio stations, not to mention academic departments at universities where political correctness, Marxist ideology and Boerehaat are Siamese triplets. Probably the website The Daily Maverick is currently the flagbearer of Boerehaat ideas and attracts a particularly shrill kind of ultraliberal or left-wing inquisitor out to drive the final few nails in the Afrikaner coffin, sometimes literally when sadistic murders against Afrikaners are defended or minimised.
The German concentration camps of the Second World War are usually held up to be the prime example of genocide. We forget that the British – in order to further uitlander political and economic objectives – had introduced the concentration camp into South Africa where 30 000 Boer women and children died. But to understand contemporary Boerehaat and the excesses it might lead to, we have to look at the more left-wing instances of genocide that occurred during the twentieth century. There is the example of the Russian revolution during which Trotsky, Stalin and Beria killed millions of people or worked them to death in the gulags.
More recently, there is the case of the fanatical Khmer Rouge movement in Cambodia during the late seventies which blended ethnic hatred and communism to produce a particularly lethal cocktail. Just like in South Africa, there was a left-wing revolution in Cambodia with the ideal of constructing a millennarian society free of classes and races in a great “transformation”. Up to four million people were killed, many of whom were ethnic Chinese and Vietnamese.
When I lived in Paris, I had a Cambodian-Chinese neighbour whose mother was shot outside their house by the Khmer Rouge. That contributed to my increasingly critical sense when it came to left-wing revolutionary ideology. However, very much later I realised that he was telling me that his family had been victimised because they had been Chinese and not Khmer! When the race enemy and the class enemy coincide, that is when you get a particularly powerful incentive to genocide. In Cambodia the entire population was driven out of the cities, in order to effect the revolution and build “a new society”.
In an article entitled “Racial Communism: Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge”, Eric D. Weitz writes:
“Someth May was a young Cambodian… [who] recalls… when a party cadre addressed a crowd [amidst deportation]: “As you all know, during the Lon Nol regime the Chinese were parasites on our nation. They cheated the government. They made money out of Cambodian farmers…. Now the High Revolutionary Committee wants to separate Chinese infiltrators from Cambodians, to watch the kind of tricks they get up to. The population of each village will be divided into a Chinese, a Vietnamese and a Cambodian section. So, if you are not Cambodian, stand up and leave the group. Remember that Chinese and Vietnamese look completely different from Cambodians.”…. Under the new regime, the Khmer Rouge declared, “there are to be no Chams or Chinese or Vietnamese. Everybody is to join the same, single, Khmer nationality…. [There is] only one religion – Khmer religion. Similarly, a survivor recalls a cadre saying: “Now we are making revolution. Everyone becomes a Khmer.””
Does that not sound familiar to us today, here in South Africa?
“Now we are making revolution. Everyone becomes a Khmer.”
Since 1994 we have seen equally fanatical attempts at so-called “nation-building” in South Africa whereby people have to adopt a new identity and “dissolve ethnically” into “the majority nation”. Those who refuse, or prove to be unassimilable or simply “different”, are then targeted, vilified and even killed.
I have previously remarked that in South Africa, “apartheid” is a simple metonym for “Afrikaner”. The racial, ethnic, linguistic, geographical and historical complexities of this society could hardly be subsumed under the globalised myth of “apartheid” as an evil neo-Nazi system of oppression. In that sense “apartheid” is meaningless, semantically empty. But to be anti-apartheid far more concretely means hating Afrikaners. Like Helen Suzman, the MP for Houghton, once said:
“I hate the Afrikaner. I hate his ways, his language and of course his politics.”
The fires of Boerehaat have not been extinguished by the Afrikaner leadership’s abject abdication from South African politics in 1994. On the contrary, Afrikaner powerlessness and seemingly masochistic obsequiousness in suffering vituperation on a daily basis have just added fuel to the fire. It has also led to pathological manifestations and internecine conflicts within the ranks of Afrikaners themselves. The phenomenon of the “self-hating Jew” has been replicated in South Africa with the self-hating Afrikaner, ever ready to heap opprobium on his own and to serve the cause of Afrikanerdom’s enemies. Many homosexual and lesbian Afrikaners, filled with rancour against the majority heterosexual members of their own tribe, have rallied to the cause of the anti-Afrikaner propaganda war that is raging to this day.
Up to 40% of journalists writing in Afrikaans today are apparently “gay”. Whatever their private lives, their opinions are far to the left of what ordinary people are thinking, so they are fast destroying what is left of Afrikaans journalism and newspapers by alienating their readers. In fact, the entire Naspers media group seems to have lurched into a “self-hating” orgy of white guilt and a kind of cultural death or ethnocide perpetrated against the very nation that had nurtured them financially for so long. Naspers represents nothing but a gigantic “psyops” operation aimed at the ultimate destruction of the Afrikaner people, their sense of identity, belonging and togetherness. Distributing Boerehaat invective, together with exalting nihilism, rancour and guilt feelings, all in Afrikaans, may be deemed more effective than simply overwhelming Afrikaners with propaganda in English.
According to the Boerehaat stereotype, Afrikaners are:
Of low intelligence
Ugly as sin
Rough, coarse and lacking in manners
Racist and anti-black
Women are fat and men have beer bellies
Ignorant and uncultivated
Given to incest and “in-breeding”
Afrikaans sounds ugly and “guttural”
In some respects, the Boerehaat caricature of Afrikaners corresponds to the Appalachian stereotypes in the USA. Combing through the production of South African English novels and films for such caricatures would be an easy, if tedious, task. Often in such publications, incest is presented as a metaphor for racial exclusivity, as in the supreme Boerehaat novel of the 1990s, Triomf, first written in Afrikaans by an Afrikaner lesbian, Marlene van Niekerk. Often Afrikaners who spend a lot of time on neo-Marxist, English campuses in South Africa would either have an identity crisis and commit suicide or they would actually become Boerehaters themselves, despising their own family, language and traditions to varying degrees. Although Van Niekerk apparently still writes poetry in Afrikaans, she has publicly called for violence against Afrikaners and abjured any sense of an Afrikaner identity.
The main character in her book is mentally retarded, the quintessential “dumb Dutchman”; both he and his brother sleep with their mother. In one scene he voyeuristically gazes thtough the hedge at the lesbian neighbours having sex and from the narrator’s point of view it represents a kind of higher world that he may only watch from a distance, being mired in mental retardation and ethnic exclusivity, which one supposes to be mutually linked in some way.
Although horribly vulgar, tedious and badly written, Triomf was immediately hailed as a masterpiece and translated into English. It was also made into a movie which was a complete box office flop but was again feted as a work of genius by the liberal press of Johannesburg, being “a true depiction of the Afrikaner psyche”.
During the Oscar Pistorius murder trial, the global media had a feeding frenzy, extolling on the natural propensity of Afrikaner men to abuse women and possibly even kill them. One of the ANC ministers, Lulu Xingwana, immediately diagnosed the Pistorius murder as a natural outcome of Afrikaner male chauvinism, saying to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation:
“Young Afrikaner men are brought up in the Calvinist religion believing that they own a woman, they own a child, they own everything and therefore they can take that life because they own it,” she said during the interview aired on Monday.”
Pistorius, despite his surname, was not even an Afrikaner and had been educated in English schools. But it was Boerehaat on a global scale in which the local uitlander journalists, or journalists infused with the Afrikaner-hating uitlander spirit, gleefully participated. To such an extent that even a self-hating Afrikaner “useful idiot” such as Max du Preez, to my great surprise, identified it correctly in his blog entry, Fifty Shades of Boerehaat:
“I can write a book about the downside of Afrikaner Calvinism, but hating or disrespecting women and children would not feature. The women in my family were and are strong, independent human beings whom all the men in the family love and respect deeply.” (See the whole blog comment underneath.)
Many Afrikaners have often wondered: Why do the people in Johannesburg and Cape Town, especially in the media, hate us so much that we are consistently misrepresented? In this cartoon by Zapiro, Afrikaans singer Steve Hofmeyr and author Annelie Botes are represented as dinosaurs from a bygone age (which, by definition, should already be dead or extinct). Note also the emphasis on their “small brains” or low intelligence.
Cartoon by Zapiro, alias Jonathan Shapiro
I hope the reader has by now formed an image in his mind as to what Boerehaat is. In most parts of the world, there are to be found what Freud called the “narcissicism of small differences”: Belgian jokes in Holland or in France, and so on. When such minor ethnic chauvinism degenerates into a social and political ideology, and is married to Marxist-revolutionary doctrine, we may well see the genesis of a Khmer Rouge movement or the potential for genocide.
Afrikaners are already the scapegoats for everything that goes wrong in South Africa. The lack of performance of other groups, even their corruption and profligacy in government, is routinely blamed on the Afrikaner.
Could Boerehaat discourse and societal breakdown as a result of social anarchy, crime and corruption lead to a bloodbath in South Africa, with Afrikaners being held responsible for every kind of failure, even while completely out of power?
And what causes Boerehaat? Why is it so persistent? These are questions I want to address in a second part of this column.
To be continued.
Max du Preez writes: Fifty Shades of Boerehaat?
The killing of Reeva Steenkamp by Oscar Pistorius has brought out the worst in people, from journalists to politicians to ordinary people. We read on the weekend (Mail & Guardian) that the problem with violence against women has a relationship to the macho rugby culture among white men; that Pistorius got treated differently because he was white and rich – what an insult to Magistrate Nair, one of the best in the country.
Now we have cabinet minister Lulu Xingwana saying to (of all places) Australian radio that the problem starts with Afrikaner men and their Calvinist upbringing who think all things, including women and children, belong to them to treat as they want.
I am a product of a Calvinist Christian-National Afrikaner upbringing of the extreme Free State platteland kind and not only am I a rugby fanatic, I played the game (not very well, though) from the age of six to well into my twenties.
I can write a book about the downside of Afrikaner Calvinism, but hating or disrespecting women and children would not feature. The women in my family were and are strong, independent human beings whom all the men in the family love and respect deeply. Whenever my father or uncles acted as if they were “the head of the family”, we all chuckled behind our hinds and said Ag shame.
Minister Xingwana should read the story (in my books Of Tricksters, Tyrants and Turncoats and Oor Krygers, Korrelkoppe en Konkelaars) of the wife of General Koos de la Rey, one of the most prominent patriarchs and Calvinist fundamentalists in Afrikaner history. Her name was Nonnie. She was not only the head of the rather big De la Rey family in every sense, her husband made very few decisions without her, even when he was a general in the Anglo Boer War. More than that: she stood up to the British generals who not only respected her, but actually feared her as much as they feared her husband’s military prowess. They knew: don’t mess with a stoere Boervrou.
(By the way, I wonder if Lulu realises that one of her own struggle icons, dominee Beyers Naude, was also a staunch Afrikaner Calvinist right to the end?)
South Africa’s multiracial and multicultural society is exploding into a never-ending Kulturkampf or American-style culture war. Anti-racists are the new racists, spreading intolerance and even violence ahead of them with a megaphone, figuratively speaking. During the court appearance of a wine farmer, Mr Johnny Burger, the crowd in the Cape had been swept up into a lynch mob threatening to kill him on the spot. Police had to use pepper spray and a stun grenade to disperse them. Shades of the Ku Klux Klan? Except here the Klansmen are anti-racists.
Anti-racist intolerance is growing in leaps and bounds. In another recent incident, it led to the unfortunate resignation from Pretoria University of one of our praag columnists after Dr Piet Croucamp from the University of Johannesburg had accused her of hate speech. As I have commented elsewhere in an Afrikaans column:
“The media group Naspers and a small group of academics acting in bad faith and attacking others in the name of race, mostly for personal reasons, represent a danger to freedom of speech in South Africa.”
This afternoon I got an email from a friend saying that Mr Burger’s case reminded him of the notorius “Black Circuit” of the early nineteenth century. At the time a 1000 Cape farmers had to appear before a roving court to answer to trumped-up charges of murder, rape and assault. In the end, no-one was convicted and it was found that colonial English missionaries had colluded with local Khoi-San tribesmen to falsely accuse farmers of heinous crimes.
Contrary to our law, Mr Burger, accused of assaulting a Coloured child, was presumed guilty until his innocence could be proven. Two days ago, the Cape Times newspaper wrote about the case of Flippie Engelbrecht, the child concerned: “Those who brought the case to court charged that after the assault Engelbrecht had lost his sight, had epileptic fits, and because of this had rolled into a fire and suffered terrible burns, losing his hands.” In yesterday’s Cape Times, headlined Questions surround Flippie’s assault, “new evidence” came to light in the form of medical records showing that Flippie Engelbrecht had reported a “swelling on the side of his face”, which may have been a tumour, causing his epileptic fits and other medical problems. The same medical records contradict some of the dates advanced by the victim. However, in the meantime the wine farmer had committed suicide after his life and his business had been ruined by hysterical anti-racists pursuing him in the media, both traditional and social, led by the radical, Afrikaner-hating ex-lawyer (who was struck off the record as an attorney after dubious business deals and bankruptcy), Carina Papenfus.
So here we have two incidences of whites being subjected to histrionic public campaigns by so-called “liberal” anti-racists whose objectives have more in common with the Spanish Inquisition than with advancing the precepts of liberalism. Freedom of speech and even academic freedom in South Africa have been casualties of these campaigns, not to mention the two white victims, one committing suicide and another resigning her post and leaving the country, presumably for fear of being further persecuted.
Our universities are no longer places of learning but over-politicised shrines to political correctness and obtuse hatreds that are seemingly ignited by throwing a switch.
Volumes have been written on the cultural, linguistic, racial, anthropological, ethnic, ideological and religious divisions of South African society and I do not wish to dwell on the obvious. What concerns me more, is the apparent descent of people with nominal university qualifications into this kind of racial street fighting. They wield race and the word “racist” like a Cape Flats gangster brandishes his knife. Not so long ago, twelve schools had to be closed in that area as a result of gang activity and Mrs Helen Zille, the premier of the Western Cape, was calling for the army to be brought in to stabilise Manenberg.
Yet, ostensibly, we have more to fear from the pseudo-intellectual gangsters than from the drug-dealing, turf-warring criminals of the Cape Flats. Their influence on public discourse is far more insidious and destructive of the last vestiges of civilisation that remain in South Africa. They are intolerant zealots such as are to be found throughout history, wherever religious wars or ethnic conflicts have ignited and blazed.
Except for the Sunday paper Rapport, no-one seems to take Papenfus seriously. She waged a slanderous email and Twitter campaign against the hapless winemaker, apparently threatening and cajoling his customers into ceasing to order from him, with the intention of ruining his business and his life. Ms. Papenfus is a kind of cyber thug that replicates the intimidation tactics of petty gangsters in the public sphere. After all, as any mafioso or racketeer knows, a small business may be ruined by hitting one or two of its weak spots. Although she must have studied at one time for a degree or diploma, she has no intellectual pretensions. Her creed is simple: harass the whites. And being white and Afrikaans herself, but an ANC member, it is a case of être plus royaliste que le roi.
Papenfus is dangerous, but easily understood. The other two zealots who pounced upon the soft-spoken Pretoria woman philosopher, occupy positions of institutional power. Croucamp is a lecturer at the University of Johannesburg in political science and frequently appears on talk shows, both on radio and on television, wearing his trademark blue bandana. Schutte writes a column in the Mail & Guardian newspaper which is also avidly read by the “tenured radicals” at South Africa’s more than twenty universities.
Schutte was due to debate Croucamp’s victim on the topic: “‘Do white people have an obligation to withdraw from the public sphere?’ But as she stated in a subsequent column: “I am obviously not going to validate Louise Mabille’s hate speech by actually debating with her. Rather I will end by saying that she has presented a shining example of how whites should not participate in the public arena. It is a good thing that Louise Mabille has handed in her resignation and that the University of Pretoria has accepted it.”
From Rhodes University, we have already had an opinion by Dr Samantha Vice that all whites, i.e. everyone of European descent, should take some form of vow to remain silent in public. So white guilt leads to the ultimate form of self-censorship, public silence.
Elsewhere, Ms Gillian Schutte describes herself, somewhat pretentiously, as a “feminist-neopagan-post-structuralist-deconstructionist-socialist” and she apparently has a Master’s degree in creative writing from the University of the Witwatersrand.
The one thing we can already deduce is that the mob outside the Cape courtroom who wanted to lynch Mr Burger at least believed in some form of dialogue. They were screaming, hurling abuse and gesticulating. With police intervention and protection, one could still call it communication.
Croucamp and Schutte want to reduce us to silence, however. Theirs is the monologue of totalitarianism, of censorship, of “There is only one truth and it is mine”. They pontificate in the name of power, the corrupt power that is ruling, nay, pillaging, South Africa.
It is therefore ironic that Schutte should describe herself as a “post-structuralist-deconstructionist”. Does she even know what she is referring to? The very basis of any “deconstruction” is the existence of more than one meaning, even the uncertainty, indetermination and radical plurality of meanings. Just over ten years ago a small group of us Afrikaner thinkers had a private seminar with Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction, at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales on the boulevard de Raspail in Paris. I remember Derrida as a modest, soft-spoken, amiable figure who reminisced about his single visit to South Africa. He liked Potchefstroom and even told me that “Heidegger would have felt at home there”. Derrida was full of gentle irony, self-doubt and respect for others, even the Other, as he so often termed it in his more political writings.
Schutte, by contrast, is a third-world ideologue, possessed by a terrible certainty. She has more in common with Robert Mugabe or Idi Amin than Jacques Derrida. Like so many others strutting about our campuses today, she has no real culture but the fad of the moment. The more politically correct such fads are, the better. Her meretricious pseudo-intellectualism has all the charm of Winnie Mandela’s expensive sunglasses and jewellery, being the brash expression of a corrupt and power-hungry soul. Ideas are but slogans, brands, to market yourself to another kind of mob to the one that wanted to lynch the Cape winemaker.
I have often thought that South Africa today has much in common with Nero’s Rome. Our country has become murderous, corrupt and decadent. Innocence has died. Approximately a thousand children are raped every day, including babies, and nobody says a word. Or if they broach the subject, they are immediately reduced to silence, given the ritual knife for disembowelling themselves. Schutte’s smug satisfaction (“It is a good thing that Louise Mabille has handed in her resignation and that the University of Pretoria has accepted it”) may be deconstructed to reveal two things: Schadenfreude and a paradoxical expectation of honour in others.
There is no English word for Schadenfreude, hence the German loanword that is universally used. However, the Afrikaans (and Dutch) term leedvermaak expresses the same thing, with a few more connotations (“signifieds” for post-structuralists) thrown in. The other day I tweeted in Afrikaans, something to the effect that leedvermaak is the apotheosis of journalism in South Africa. Vermaak also means entertainment, hence the misery of others, their travails amid hysterical accusations, calumny and vilification provide entertainment. Anti-racist Blitzkrieg, either on the vineyards of the Cape or on the campus of Pretoria University, therefore feeds the sensationalist mainstream media machine, sated on the blood of murder victims.
Celebrity “businessman” Kenny Kunene
Due to the surfeit of murders in South Africa, people are becoming bored with news of another killing, no matter how ruthless and macabre. Celebrity murder, such as the Oscar Pistorius case, is still news, but not even serial killings elicit much attention. In a society as utterly cruel and corrupt as ours, we are in desperate need of frivolity, such as the camp antics of that incorrigible clown in drag, Pieter-Dirk Uys, or Kenny Kunene’s parties where guests eat sushi off the bodies of bikini-clad ladies.
South Africa is profoundly amoral. It lacks a moral or ethical code to define right and wrong. Someone like Baudrillard would say that this “lack”, in a psychoanalytical sense, creates a need for a kind of pseudo-ethics, a moral simulacrum.
This is where anti-racism comes in. Anti-racism is the simulacrum of our lost moral code. It is no coincidence that the objectionable sentence in Louise Mabille’s column contained references to both Calvinism and baby rape, the former marking the overtly Christian morality of the old South Africa and the latter epitomising the radical “freedom from all scruples” that characterises the new South Africa.
In this respect, Gillian Schutte, despite her evidently defective grasp of some basic philosophical and literary concepts, understands the “new amorality” well. In one of her “feminist” videos, a rape victim explains that the “cure” for the shame attached to having been raped, is to join the so-called “slutwalk”, ardently recommended by Ms. Schutte. By self-identifying as a slut, a woman is freed from the fear of rape and “forced sex” as it is euphemistically called. Miracle cures are to be found everywhere in South Africa, peddled by immigrant Nigerian pastors and indigenous witchdoctors alike. Not to forget the infamous “virgin cleansing myth” by which one may be cured of HIV-Aids by raping a virgin, including an infant, and which Louise Mabille alluded to in her column.
Gillian Schutte is also a champion of the word “cunt” which, according to her, should become part of our everyday discourse. As she puts it,
“When women finally reclaim and speak this word, its full potential will be released and women will repossess their collective cunt-power and rise up against misogyny and patriarchy with the absolute intent of ending it.”
Amid the universal amorality and Neronic decadence of South Africa, Schutte is clutching at ethical straws, more precisely: pubic hairs. Instead of simply affirming and enjoying the slutwalk, she opts for the simulacrum of the good, which has now turned out to be the “collective cunt-power” of women.
But there is no “good” anymore. South Africa is really living according to the famous maxim from Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov: “If there is no God, then everything is permitted.” As I intimated the other day, SA really stands for “Sadists’ Apocalypse”. Eighteenth-century French literature, specifically the writings of the Marquis de Sade, is all that we have to remotely begin to understand our baby rapists and farm murderers.
Apart from Gillian Schutte’s “cunt-power”, the other pseudo-morality that people desperately cling to is anti-racism. In our sadistic universe where nothing is wrong, some people imagine that racism is the one remaining sin. You may kill, rape, bribe, lie and steal, more or less with impunity, but uttering the word “Bantu” will earn you the opprobrium of polite society, that society which is now reappropriating the magical power of four-letter words.
The simulacrum of sin is transgression of anti-racist etiquette. That alone awakens some form of long-lost moral response which is delivered with predictable ecclesiastical ritual: denunciation, excommunication, prohibition, censorship. From the TV studio did Schutte, the high priestess of atavistic cunt-power and pagan ritual, deliver her sermon against what Orwell called thoughtcrime: “racist” thoughts and suspicions, including the mere mention of “baby rape”, which is a proven and documented phenomenon in this country.
Did Johnny Burger, the Cape winemaker, commit suicide to save his honour? In a country where “trial by media” and populist passions have come to influence courts and the judicial system, Burger probably correctly surmised that he would not receive a fair trial. His suicide reminds me of the death of the patrician Latin author Petronius who, having got wind of Nero’s henchmen being sent to kill him, preferred taking his own life while drinking wine and having musicians perform for him.
Thanks to Carina Papenfus’s hate campaign, no-one will ever drink Burger’s wine again.
Similarly to Burger, Louise Mabille fell upon her own sword and resigned. Understandably, there is despair and pessimism among the remaining class of thinking people in South Africa. We are outnumbered and outscreamed by those who are playing for the gallery.
However, notwithstanding samurai customs, there are other ways of saving one’s honour. On these shores, we have the example of the bittereinder, of someone fighting to the very, bitter end, against all odds.
Are we ready for that thankless struggle, knowing full well that we shall face calumny all the way? If reason be dead, can thought or the mind still withstand the mob, baying for our blood?
The press ombudsman on Saturday ordered Rapport and its sister publication City Press to publish an apology for causing unnecessary harm to paralympian Oscar Pistorius.
The two newspapers were also ordered to issue corrections on a story they published on June 30 which alleged that Pistorius was seen at a car dealership with a woman buying an Audi R8, Press Ombudsman Johan Retief said.
The newspapers reported that Pistorius was brash and demanding while at the dealership.
It was reported that he was accompanied by bodyguards and a beautiful woman and insinuated that she may have been his girlfriend.
Pistorius is currently facing murder charges following the fatal shooting of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp on February 14.
The articles appeared on City Press’s front page and on page three of the Rapport and on Rapport’s website.
Retief said there were two separate judgements for the papers, as the story that appeared in the City Press was slightly different to Rapport’s version.
City Press had omitted some aspects as it adapted the story from the Afrikaans article written by Rapport.
Retief found that the uncertainty of the model of the car Pistorius was alleged to have bought was no longer reflected in the headline. The opening paragraph of the City Press report also appeared to be a statement of fact.
A mistake appeared in the article where it was stated that two employees “when called” confirmed certain detail, whereas these sources were not called, but personally interviewed.
The Rapport journalist, who wrote the original article quoted an anonymous person who was at the dealership when Pistorius was alleged to have been there.
He quoted another two anonymous people who said they were “close to the dealership” after dealership management refused to comment.
The newspaper also spoke to Annelise Burgess, the Pistorius’s spokeswoman, before publishing the reporting.
The paper reported that Burgess initially said Pistorius had gone to the dealership to buy the R8 vehicle for his uncle.
In a written response she later sent to the journalist, she stated that Pistorius had been at the dealership to buy himself a second-hand Sedan.
The journalist emailed Burgess, asking her to clarify the different versions.
She telephonically explained that she had misunderstood Pistorius’s uncle, Arnold, when he told her that Pistorius had simply been assisting him with paperwork for the R8 as he had wanted to purchase the vehicle.
Pistorius visited the dealership twice, once to buy himself a the second-hand vehicle, and secondly to assist his uncle.
Retief found that Pistorius had bought himself a used Sedan which was not as fast as an Audi R8.
It was later established that the woman who had been seen with Pistorius was his cousin.
The man who the papers reported was Pistorius’s bodyguard was his brother, Carl.
Retief ruled that the papers had used a headline and picture which was unfair to Pistorius.
The headline read: “Oscar takes beautiful young woman to see his racy R1.5m Audi R8.”
The papers also published a picture of a new Audi R8 sports car, with a picture of Pistorius superimposed on it.
Retief dismissed claims brought by Pistorius, his family and Burgess that the newspapers had failed to verify its information and ignored the information they supplied to the paper.
He ruled that the papers were justified in publishing the allegations as allegations, as that was the information they had at their disposal at the time of publication.
“The report was misleading, but not deliberately so,” he said. – Sapa
Oscar Pistorius’s lawyers are trying to negotiate an out-of-court settlement with the parents of his dead girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp, The Times reported on Tuesday.
Pistorius’s lawyer Kenny Oldwage confirmed that they were in discussions with the Steenkamp family.
“You will understand this is a very sensitive situation,” he was quoted as saying.
Steenkamp and her half-brother Adam reportedly helped their pensioner parents Barry and June financially, including with the rent on their home.
Her parents have lodged a multimullion-rand civil claim against Pistorius for loss of income and emotional distress.
Pistorius’s lawyers want to settle the lawsuit before the outcome of the criminal trial.
Advocate Petrus “Dup” de Bruyn, for the Steenkamps, said “nothing has been decided on yet”.
Steenkamp’s mother, June, declined to comment on the civil suit.
“This is just too much… we are grieving… missing our baby… our beautiful, beautiful daughter who should have been celebrating her birthday today [Monday],” June Steenkamp said.
Pistorius appeared briefly in the Pretoria Magistrate’s Court on Monday for shooting Steenkamp on February 14 in his Pretoria home. His trial for alleged murder was set for March 3 2014. – Sapa
The police’s explosives teams carried out a precautionary sweep to check for explosives inside the Pretoria Magistrate’s Court room where paralympian Oscar Pistorius would appear on Monday.
Reporters were asked to temporarily leave the court where earlier, video cameras were being set up.
Security had assisted media with more chairs.
Pistorius’s brother Carl Pistorius was seen carrying the access tags that would allow his family inside.
It would have been Pistorius’s girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp’s 30th birthday on Monday.
Pistorius was charged with premeditated murder after the model and law graduate was shot dead in his Pretoria home on February 14.
The State was expected to serve the double amputee with an indictment, the National Prosecuting Authority said on Friday.
“We also expect to have the trial starting early 2014, but we cannot at this stage confirm the exact date because this has to be agreed upon in court by all parties concerned,” spokesman Medupe Simasiku said at the time.
During a subsequent bail hearing, Pistorius’s defence read out a statement in which Pistorius said he thought Steenkamp was an intruder.
He has been out on R1 million bail since February 22, with some of the conditions amended since then.
On June 4, prosecutor Andrea Johnson said in court that no details of the investigation would be revealed. She said the State needed more time to investigate the crime.
This was by agreement with Pistorius’s defence.
Johnson said the attention generated by Steenkamp’s death was not something the prosecution or the State could control, and felt his rights should not be overridden and that he had the right to be treated like any other person.
Last Tuesday, police confirmed that the investigation into Steenkamp’s death had been completed and that the matter would be postponed.
National police spokesman Lt-Gen Solomon Makgale said the investigating team was convinced that Pistorius had a charge to answer to.
The court session was expected to start at 9am. – Sapa
While Oscar Pistorius awaits his trial for the killing of his lover, Reeva Steenkamp, another attractive young blonde is constantly at his side.
But there’s no danger of athlete Claudia Viljoen stepping into tragic model Steenkamp’s shoes since her role with the Paralympic gold medallist is very different.
Her job as double amputee sprinter Pistorius’s training partner is to keep the Blade Runner focused on athletics and not on the case due to be heard in August.
Viljoen, 24, a former international 100m and 200m hurdler, is a regular visitor to the Pretoria home of Pistorius’s uncle Arnold, where a gym has been built in the pool house.
The pair train together on a treadmill, bicycle and weights equipment each day, but Viljoen, an old friend of 26-year-old Pistorius, has told friends she is reporting back regularly to his coach, Ampie Louw, on the Paralympian’s state of mind as he tries to rebuild his shattered life.
“Claudia trains with Oscar in the morning, often together with his uncle Arnold’s family,” said a source close to the Pistorius family.
Viljoen, who describes herself as “a 100m hurdler and sports scientist”, is engaged to business consultant James Heunis, 30. She was in South Africa’s preparation squad for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, but suddenly dropped out, apparently because of personal issues. Aside from her athletics, she works for her family’s plant hire business.
Her looks earned her a place in the Athletics South Africa 2011 calendar as Miss July, where she appeared in a carefully-posed shot wearing only briefs and a medal.
On Sunday, her father, Barend Viljoen, told The Mail on Sunday that the Pistorius family were closing ranks over Oscar.
He said: “They know what they are doing. They have brought in professional people to help. We would prefer to keep everything private.”
Steenkamp’s mother, June, recently said she was shocked to learn her daughter was in pain after she was shot the first time while in the bathroom during the Valentine’s Day tragedy.
Pistorius then fired two more bullets into the room, one of which killed her. Pistorius told the court at his bail hearing in April that he feared a burglar had broken into his apartment. He said he grabbed his gun from the table closest to Steenkamp’s side of the bed and began firing.
Arnold Pistorius said last week his nephew stayed inside most of the time, surrounded by pictures of Steenkamp. “He’s got photos in his room, he’s got photos all over the place. What can you say if the person you love the most dies and you were the instrument – it’s unthinkable.” – Mail on Sunday
Minister of Women, Children and People with Disabilities Lulu Xingwana on Wednesday apologised for her comments about Afrikaner men.
“It has become clear to me that my comments may have offended some members of our community. I would, accordingly, like to retract these remarks and apologise unconditionally to them,” she said.
Xingwana told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that young Afrikaner men were raised to believe they owned women and children.
“Young Afrikaner men are brought up in the Calvinist religion believing that they own a woman, they own a child, they own everything and therefore they can take that life because they own it,” she said during the interview aired on Monday.
“We also have cultural differences as well in our own communities where we have women who are forced into marriage and we are dealing with all those issues.”
Xingwana was being interviewed following the arrest of paralympian Oscar Pistorius after the fatal shooting of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp on February 14.
“Through my comments, I sought to convey the message that, as a country we have emerged from a very violent past and that some tend to use cultural and religious beliefs to justify gender inequality and abuse,” she said.
Earlier, the Afrikanerbond said Xingwana had proven beyond doubt she was not fit to hold office in a constitutional democracy.
The Christian Democratic Party called for President Jacob Zuma to fire her.
“Many non-Afrikaners, black and white, are members of Calvinist churches and her latest statement could be considered as religious intolerance,” party spokesman Rev Theunis Botha said.
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