‘The principal of Healdtown was Dr. Arthur Wellington, a stout and stuffy Englishman who boasted of his connection to the Duke of Wellington. At the outset of assemblies, Dr. Wellington would walk onstage and say, in his deep bass voice, “I am the descendant of the great Duke of Wellington, aristocrat, statesman, and general, who crushed the Frenchman Napoleon at Waterloo and thereby saved civilization for Europe — and for you, the natives.” At this, we would all enthusiastically applaud, each of us profoundly grateful that a descendant of the great Duke of Wellington would take the trouble to educate natives such as ourselves. The educated Englishman was our model; what we aspired to be were “black Englishmen,” as we were sometimes derisively called. We were taught — and believed — that the best ideas were English ideas, the best government was English government, and the best men were Englishmen.’ – Nelson Mandela, Long road to freedom, p. 37
Black-consciousness activist Andile Mngxitama writes in The roots of anti-Indian racism about the nouveau-riche vulgarity of the Guptas and why blacks resent Indians:
“The vulgarity of the showmanship at the Gupta wedding shows a desperate attempt to flee from blackness. The same madness is seen throughout post-colonial Africa, in the form of conspicuous consumption, and we would do well to remember that this is true for South Africa as well. The ministerial handbook is a bible for entering the white world. Why do we think Julius Malema and Jacob Zuma want houses with bunkers? Why would Juju so prize his R250 000 watch? These are all comical schemes to run away from blackness.”
However, it is too late to try and wean blacks from so-called “conspicuous consumption” and the abuse of public money to buy cars, houses, clothes and other status symbols. It is like trying to talk a drug addict out of his habit when he is already in an advanced stage of dependency.
Both blacks and Indians in South Africa have as their model the English, who are the most vulgar nation in Europe. The English pray to money and ostentation like others pray to God, tradition or nationality. Britain only became civilised in the nineteenth century and therefore lacks any real culture or tradition, unlike the French, the Italians, the Austrians/Germans or the Spanish.
In their quest to become “English gentlemen” and British celebrities, South African blacks are going to bankrupt the country. Having the right house, the right car, watch, jewellery, etc., is what counts. Mngxitama is right when he says: “…they are merely running away from blackness and mimicking whites, like all blacks do”. V.S. Naipaul wrote a novel called The mimic men, the title of which characterises the behaviour of the ruling class of a newly independent Caribbean country. However, South Africa’s nouveau riche class of blacks and Indians are not mimicking whites in general, they are mimicking Britain, possibly the last of Europe’s class societies.
In a way, I think the ANC is doing Afrikaners a favour by impoverishing us through affirmative action and BEE. I see it with my children. They accept that they are never going to be rich, being the wrong colour and speaking a marginalised, oppressed language. Therefore what is important to them is getting more than 80% for mathematics or writing an Afrikaans essay that would simply blow their teachers away.
We will go back to living simple lives like our grandparents did, keeping a few chickens and fruit trees, but with the difference that we will use technology to harness energy and invent new ways of survival. While billionaire blacks run Eskom and burn coal, we will turn to the sun and solar energy. The other day I heard over the radio that there are now light bulbs that only use 1W of electricity. Amazing! Soon we will have no need of this “English” civilisation which is but the final stage of decadence and decline before it collapses, exhausted, like a beached whale.
The greatest civilisation that Europeans built, was the Roman one. It was founded upon stoicism, asceticism, wearing a simple toga and a wooden armband, to show that you were proud to be poor. Poor but intelligent, cultivated and patriotic. When Rome became decadent under Nero and others, it declined and ultimately came crashing down.
Contemporary Britain is extremely decadent, but South Africa is even more decadent. It has surpassed its colonial centre in its plebeian excess, its sexual, dipsomaniac, money- and drug-crazed, orgiastic consumption.
If only we had had any educated authors, they could have written brilliant novels about the last days of Empire, the Trimalchian splendour of the Guptas. They invaded our country with Anglo-Indian arrogance, as if the Raj had suddenly risen from the dead, Lazarus-like, in Sun City.