Mrs. Margaret Thatcher famously stated in the nineteen-eighties that “Anyone who thinks the ANC will form the government of South Africa is living in cloud cuckoo-land.”
For this, she was ridiculed by the British radicals, with Bishop Trevor Huddleston of the Anti-Apartheid Movement in the forefront. Since that time, all the anti-apartheid secrets have been revealed, including the active role played by British radicals, especially within the Anglican Church, in undermining what was then still the sovereign government of South Africa.
Whereas the ANC and SACP also enjoyed Soviet and East German support, the financial and organisational muscle for the South African revolution was provided by Sweden and the Anglican Church. Another radical priest, Canon John Collins of St. Paul’s in London, oversaw a vast network of agents who channelled funds in the name of the Defence and Aid Fund into South Africa for political trials and to support the relatives of imprisoned revolutionaries. Under today’s banking laws, money may no longer be laundered in such a fashion.
On the website of the Canon Collins Trust, a document boasts that one hundred million pounds were distributed in support of attempts to overthrow the much-vilified reformist government of PW Botha. Revolution, and not reform, was what everyone had preached back then.
However, as South Africa pursues its dream of an egalitarian society at all costs, there is a certain revolutionary fatigue setting in, even among the most ardent supporters of the ANC. And the second phase of the revolution, or “second transition” as it has been euphemistically called, still lies ahead of us. During that phase, most white farmers will lose their land and large swathes of private industry, including the mines, may be nationalised. Mayhem and ethnic conflict will probably result.
Increasingly, to paraphrase a line from Joyce’s Ulysses, the New South Africa is a nightmare from which we are trying to awake.
Over the past thirteen days, there have been seventeen victims of farm attacks in South Africa. Not all have died, but the death rate is high. Some were horribly tortured. Another ten people were killed at the Lonmin platinum mine at Marikana amid strife between the mine and two competing trade unions.
The American NGO, Genocide Watch, has already classified South Africa as a category 5 (out of a possible 8) genocide risk, with polarisation between groups taking place. On his recent visit to South Africa, Dr. Gregory Stanton of Genocide Watch stated that the atrocities committed against Afrikaner farmers “were signs of genocide and that there is enough suspicion that it is being organised”.
Stanton also asserted an intrinsic connection between communist ideology and genocide. In this, he is supported by the post-Maoist philosophers of France, the so-called nouveaux philosophes, who broke with Marxism in the nineteen-seventies and also saw the germ of crimes against humanity in the concepts of Marx and Lenin.
In the minds of the ANC “comrades”, transformation is both necessary and inevitable, echoing classical Marxist-Leninism. Ordinary human lives or cultures will not stand in the way of their grand strategy to effect a radical change in South Africa. In almost every public appearance, ANC leaders use the Marxist cliché “moving forward”, indicating the country’s march towards a millenarian goal.
Afrikaner children at high school listen to the iconoclastic band Fokofpolisiekar, voicing their frustrations with violence, affirmative action and social decay in songs such as “Brand Suid-Afrika”. And certainly the impression that South Africa is burning, sometimes literally, is not amiss. If only the BBC, NBC and other major TV networks overseas had been filming all of this as they did during the seventies and eighties, already there would have been an impression that South Africa was experiencing a crisis.
After almost two decades of ANC rule, it appears that Mrs. Thatcher’s cuckoos are coming home to roost. Like ZANU PF in Zimbabwe, the ANC has not been able to make the transition from a crypto-communist liberation movement waving AK-47s to a political party managing Africa’s only industrial state. In its rhetoric and its thinking, it is stuck in a time warp, sometime before Ché Guevara got shot in Bolivia.
The ANC’s British supporters, as well as Sweden, saw fit to launch the ANC in its successful bid for power in South Africa. In fact, on 27 April 2004, the Swedish ambassador in Pretoria stated on Radiosondergrense, but speaking English, that “without the help of Sweden, the ANC would never have ruled South Africa”.
To many outside South Africa, the ANC still represents the party of Nelson Mandela. To them he personifies the romantic hero, a kind of black Ché Guevara who went to prison to liberate the South African masses. However, to the racial and ethnic minorities who suffer under ANC rule, with its accompanying threats of “kill a Boer, kill a farmer”, the movement is a Frankenstein let loose. The modern ANC was made in Britain, but it has grafted itself onto the South African state, blurring the boundaries between itself and the republic.
Through its culture of tenderpreneurs and high-spending officials, it has arguably become one of the richest political parties in the world, unassailable in the polls. In a vast country where electioneering is prohibitively expensive, oppositon parties face a permanent financial and propaganda disadvantage. The SANDF has been transformed, precisely, into nothing more than an ANC militia, an extension of Umkhonto we Sizwe. So even if the ANC is outvoted in 2019 or 2024 or when Jesus returns, as Zuma has stated, it will probably cling onto power, just like ZANU PF or the Angolan MPLA has done.
Of course, that paragon of human rights and democracy, Robert Mugabe, was also enthusiastically backed by British diplomats at Lancaster House and fêted by Fleet Street as a great African leader. The British penchant for radical chic has found a ready outlet in Southern Africa, to devastating effect.
However, like all radical movements, the ANC will overplay its hand. The question is not if but when. The further issue is how much damage it will do to South Africa and how many more massacres of Afrikaner families will take place before a realignment occurs.
