by Dan Roodt
Over the past week or two, I have been embroiled in a polemic in Business Day and elsewhere about South African and Afrikaner history. First of all, I challenged the ubiquitous assumption that apartheid visited some form of genocide upon South African blacks. Neither did apartheid “withhold education from blacks” as historian Hermann Giliomee has so amply demonstrated in a few recent articles.
I got some irate replies from Mrs. Louise Asmal, wife of the destructive former minister of education Kader Asmal. Mrs. Asmal is Irish, therefore a foreigner enthralled by the stereotyped views of our history proliferating abroad. Dr. Wilmot James of the Democratic Alliance also responded to my “apartheid revisionism” by regaling us on the apparent injustices suffered by his family under the previous South African government.
However, any injustices from 1948 to 1994 must pale into insignificance next to the injustices, nay, atrocities suffered by Afrikaners since 1994, not to mention much of the nineteenth century and especially the Anglo-Boer. One letter writer to Business Day had the temerity to suggest that 34 000 Boer women in the British concentration camps had died as a result of “cultural factors” such as a lack of hygiene.
If only the Germans had thought of that one: the Jews died at Auschwitz and Dachau “because they were dirty”. Take that, you dirty Jew! There you have it, you vile Afrikaner miscreant!
I have often wondered at the source of British arrogance. When I worked in Johannesburg dealing rooms, we were often visited by high-flying financiers out of the City of London with dirty collars and cuffs. In the Johannesburg heat you also became aware that these people, although living in five-star hotels, did not make the morning shower one of their regular habits.
More often than not they were nothing short of uncouth, lacked any form of culture and were given to getting drunk ever so often. Yet these British yobs in dirty shirts with double cuffs sporting flashy cuff links radiated a sense of know-it-all superiority that was a wonder to behold.
The presenter of Top Gear, Jeremy Clarkson, recently fulminated against his own countrymen, saying about Britain: “We are the country that invented the concentration camp.” Notwithstanding Tony Blair’s lies about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, the British sense of moral superiority has never been stirred, let alone shaken.
Talking of James Bond, that great hero of fiction and film, it reminds me of something else: Britons are, like African warlords, “licensed to kill”. That is why it is almost futile to mention any past or present British war crimes and human-rights violations. It will only elicit boredom or the impression that one has broken some rule of etiquette merely by mentioning it.
Currently I am reading a book by one Willem Steenkamp, who is apparently the former military correspondent of the Cape Times. Entitled, Assegais, drums and dragoons: a military and social history of the Cape, it is irritating in parts, because one senses that the author is trying to offer a politically correct re-reading of early Cape history. For example, he spends a whole chapter arguing that the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were marvels of racial integration and intermarriage so that we are all in fact “Coloureds”. If so, then it must be a genetic miracle that Afrikaners from the oldest families still manage to produce offspring that appear even more European in features and in skin colour than the children of many European nations. Every time I drive past an Afrikaans high school, I am simply amazed at the incongruous sight of all these beautiful, gamboling white children in the African sun. On my mother’s side I have a lot of Botha blood, Botha being one of the oldest and most common Afrikaner surnames, going back to the early Cape. Yet a Dutch TV team, with an American geneticist in tow, replete with Harvard Ph.D., gave me a DNA test. To their utter disappointment, I was found to be of 100% European ancestry, or if you prefer, white, that dreaded concept.
However, if one disregards Steenkamp’s attempts at political correctness, the book contains some interesting material on the building of the Castle at the Cape of Good Hope in the seventeenth century. He quotes an author, Mentzel, who described life at the Castle thus:
“…for a man who loves method it is a veritable joy to observe the excellent order maintained in the Castle. The whole work of the day is mapped out by the clock and is performed with the utmost punctuality.”
To some extent, those two sentences describe much of the Afrikaner ideal for South Africa, one we had lived up to for most of the time when he had any say in government. On a recent visit to the Pretoria archives, I was astonished to see the meticulous way in which the early pioneers had immediately set about recording the meting out of the first farms in the Transvaal in the 1840s. I twice saw another of South Africa’s surfeit of Bothas, PW, at his home in the Wilderness near George, and on both occasions he repeated the words to me: “I believe in orderly government.”
The Castle at the Cape of Good Hope is something of a symbol of that order which we have vainly tried to maintain in South Africa, and not only because the Castle was used as an emblem for the old South African Defence Force, prior to the ANC’s takeover.
Whence the need for such a fortress in the seventeenth century? From the very moment that Jan van Riebeeck and his fellow pioneers set foot in the Cape on 6 April 1652, they had to protect themselves from two constant enemies: the cantankerous, often violent Khoikhoi or “Koina” as Steenkamp calls them, as well as, of course, belligerent Britain or England as it was known then.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, England was nothing less than a pirate nation, attacking merchant ships from other nations at will, much like Somalian pirates do today in the Indian ocean off the horn of Africa. Again and again the Netherlands had to fend off the English pirates and troublemakers, until the courageous Dutch Admiral Michiel de Ruyter sailed up the Thames and all but destroyed the English fleet. That gave us a few decades of respite.
Unfortunately, the treacherous British who changed alliances as it suited them, eventually got the upper hand and since then our misery here in South Africa has not ceased. Instead of “privateers” holding a commission from Queen Elizabeth I or some other monarch, a licence to rob and kill like James Bond, we are now faced with a motley collection of NGOs, churches, propagandists and rapacious mining magnates who would gladly see South Africa reduced to rubble if only they could make a quick buck in the process.
In the City of London the current anarchy and mining strikes must be a boon to traders who would be long gold and platinum, but short the rand and South African government bonds. They also propagate “land reform” in the hope of destroying our agriculture so that we would ultimately be completely at the mercy of British NGOs like Oxfam or Save the Children. Except, it is not our children that they will be saving.
In this way, there is a strange synergy between the British privateer, his profit motive that does not balk at bribery of the odious ANC officials, and the strange breed of histrionic, publicity-seeking “do-gooder” that also abounds in the British Isles. The latter have wrought almost more evil than the looting privateer or “businessman”. One such individual was Father Trevor Huddleston of the Anglican Church. Without Huddleston and his various public and private stratagems, the ANC terrorist regime would never have come to power in South Africa and we would have been spared the current descent into anarchy.
From my reading of the facts since Huddleston’s fateful arrival in South Africa in 1945, the ANC would long have fallen by the wayside as just another failed, penniless black organisation with megalomaniac dreams. Huddleston more or less “created” – trained, indoctrinated and groomed – subsequently world-famous black heroes such as Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu.
The culture of licence, criminality, violence, prostitution and gangsterish “glamour” that characterised Huddleston’s Sophiatown, would eventually overwhelm the entire country. Of course, Sophiatown has been lionised by English authors such as Nadine Gordimer and Anthony Sampson, the first editor of the black Drum magazine. Gordimer even wrote a roman à clef, A world of strangers, with an ill-disguised Anthony Sampson as the main character, boozing in shebeens and chasing after township whores.
After 1948, Britain or at least Labourite Britain, launched a total propaganda onslaught against South Africa, aided and abetted by much of the local English media who have never shaken off their colonial, jingoist origins during nineteenth-century British rule. They have maintained their fawning, sycophantic dependence upon English so-called “liberal” ideas, together with their often irrational and pathetic sense of “being superior” to Afrikaners.
Recently , the ideal of Sophiatown during the 1940s and 1950s, that “multiracial” demi-monde, has triumphed over that of the Castle. Thanks to the English menace, we have come full circle since 1652. The “excellent order” that we have created by being disciplined and law-abiding, together with the prosperity resulting from that order, have been swept away.
Those periods of South African history when Britain and its callous officials dominated us, notwithstanding its hysterical clergy, inciting blacks or Khoikhoi against the indigenous white population, have always been characterised by the kind of lawlessness and mayhem that we are currently experiencing.
But we must also blame ourselves, in having allowed – despite the historical evidence – this catastrophe. Our forefathers could withstand Britain, for decades and even centuries. They fortified themselves against all those English ships out there and formed commandos of citizens to defend themselves and to maintain order. In fact, the commando system that the ANC abolished had been more than three centuries old!
Why have we been found wanting?