Tag: Wilmot James

DA battle about racial identity

Political Analyst Ebrahim Fakir says sixth Democratic Alliance (DA) Federal Congress is going to be a battle for the identity and leadership of the party.

The DA is all set to hold its sixth federal congress this weekend in Port Elizabeth. The congress is the highest decision-making body of the party.

This weekend the congress will elect a new federal leadership and make amendments to the party’s Constitution.

The coloured Wilmot James and black Mmusi Maimane are the frontrunners for the position of federal leader.

Speaking on AM Live, Fakir says the DA is grappling with issues of identity. He says identity matters because it shapes what the party wants to achieve.

Fakir says there is likely to be a contestation between two people for leadership who do not have a long pedigree in the party.

Coloureds vote for the DA in the Western Cape, but the party is struggling to win black votes in Gauteng.

Meanwhile, Maimane’s white wife, Natalie Thomas, has emerged as the power behind the throne, saying the mixed couple are the only ones able to “contribute” to South Africa.

She also tweeted on behalf of her husband about recent sex-ring allegations.

Britain likes anarchy, especially in South Africa

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?

Apartheid protected us from Africa’s ‘dark eye’

by Dan Roodt

In response to my letter originally published in Business Day and available as a column here, Apartheid evil is hype, there has been at least three irate replies (see underneath) and one of support, Apartheid better than nightmare of ANC rule. Dr. Wilmot James of the DA even wants me to “apologise” for “denying him his history”.

I find this rather strange as his party is more or less the successor of the National Party. Especially in Dr. James’s Western Cape, many ex-NP members and therefore apartheid “perpetrators” still hold office or are otherwise to be found in positions of influence within the DA. If they were really “war criminals” deserving a Nuremberg trial, would they have been so readily accepted by Dr. James as colleagues?

Every departure from orthodoxy is normally treated with disdain, if not outrage. However, given the increasing crisis in our country, it is high time that we went back to the drawing board and revisited some old political themes that have kept us busy for over a hundred years, if not more.

Apartheid revisionism should not threaten anyone as I am sure not even die-hard supporters of apartheid wish to return to the system pertaining in the 1960s. But we still need to understand our recent history, as opposed to mere propaganda and exaggerations. We could do with a bit more of the French penser à contre-courant.

Anti-apartheid author Nadine Gordimer referred somewhere to the “Manichean poison that she was forced to imbibe” in her works. But is this not true of the entire anti-apartheid movement? In order to succeed and to persuade the Scandinavians to donate millions to the ANC, the old system needed to be painted in starkly moral terms, as a Manichean conflict between good blacks and evil whites/Afrikaners.

The reality was of course much more complex and murky than that. And these days, as they say, we are getting mugged by reality in many ways, sometimes literally.

At least Mrs. Louise Asmal admits that “apartheid’s crime against humanity had nothing to do with death camps and mass graves”. If we can all agree to that, the type of apartheid revisionism that Hermann Giliomee and I have been advocating has already largely succeeded. In this, Mrs. Asmal has been preceded by Judge Albie Sachs who similarly told me a few years ago in Pretoria that “comparisons between apartheid and Nazism were not helpful”. Now we just need to persuade Archbishop Tutu and his former Truth Commission of the same thing, and there might be enough common ground to talk to one another.

Being an alumnus of Wits, I had a very sparse education, especially on apartheid theorists. I do not think anyone at Wits has ever read anything by Afrikaner politicians or theorists besides the out-of-context quote from Verwoerd on Bantu Education, the true purport of which Giliomee has so magnificently elucidated in his recent articles. Fortunately for me, I was given a lot of old political books a few years ago that originated from the late Otto Krause’s library, so at least I learned something about the political thinking prior to 1994.

No serious apartheid theorist, at least since the Second World War, has ever claimed, as Mrs. Asmal puts it, “that the white man was inherently superior to the black, and hence somehow acquired a right to rule over him and train him up to be a servant to his white master”. This is precisely the kind of crude reductionism which is as “unhelpful” as the oft-repeated truism that apartheid was a form of Nazism.

Verwoerd, if anything, erred in his assessment of blacks’ capacity for rapid and autonomous development. In this respect Verwoerd was far closer to Steve Biko’s type of thinking around black self-sufficiency than to traditional colonial ideas of European superiority that Churchill, among others, believed in.

According to Giliomee in Reconsidering Verwoerd and Bantu Eduction, Verwoerd was appalled that the Congo had become independent without any trained administrators. He defended his educational policy by saying: “We shall have to negotiate frequently in future with blacks about many things, including educational matters and policy issues. It would be better to negotiate with people with a good grounding and properly trained.”

So Verwoerd, unlike the myth that has been created by anglophone liberals and leftists, really was a “champion of education for black South Africans” (see below, the letter by Marius Roodt of Boksburg).

Admittedly, there existed unfair or even draconian measures under apartheid which have been enumerated many times, such as petty segregation, influx control and group areas, to which Dr. Wilmot James alludes. However, I am sure we could find similar, if not worse, excesses in the current system. Many informal settlements or slums have been forcibly cleared or relocated under the ANC government, just like Sophiatown, District Six or Fordsburg. Many Afrikaners have lost their family farms due to land reform. Each such event must be analysed on its own merits, instead of attributing it simply to the blind ideological fervour of the previous government. PW Botha once explained to me that he had only decided to move District Six during his tenure as Minister of Community Development after pleading at length with the landlords to maintain their properties and to stop a slum culture from developing there.

Ultimately, apartheid was an African political system adapted to African conditions, often in response to intense violence and the constant threat of political instability, especially during the Cold War. If we compare South Africa to Mocambique, Angola, Tanzania or even Zimbabwe, we can see that we have been spared the worst of an African-style socialist revolution. At least until now.

There is a uniquely African horror which apartheid protected us from and which is again manifesting itself in the form of farm murders, child rape, xenophobic killings and our slide into mayhem. Conrad painted it in Heart of Darkness, as well as Coetzee in Disgrace. Laurens van der Post gave an interesting lecture to the Psychological Club of Zurich on 3 March 1954, which was subsequently published by The Hogarth Press, entitled The Dark Eye in Africa.

To us as Africans, it is of no use to repeat the moralisms and platitudes of the foreign-born, Scandinavian-financed anti-apartheid movement, even if they do represent the dominant ideology now. We need to find our own truth, commensurate with our unique reality.

LETTER: Roodt must apologise

Business Day, 12 September 2012

I WAS appalled to read Dan Roodt’s ignorant and insensitive revisionist rantings (Apartheid evil is hype, Letters, September 10).

Evil is surely not reducible simply to the existence of death camps. It did not start there but the National Party’s apartheid policies systematically and deliberately stripped black people of their assets.

Mr Roodt’s “refined” Hendrik Verwoerd created Bantustans that became the impoverished dumping grounds for so-called surplus black people. In urban areas, the act of seeking a livelihood was regulated by influx control, pass laws and routine time in jail — and for black people in their thousands.

Mr Roodt’s “cultured” Dr Verwoerd shut down the great Jan Hendrik Hofmeyr’s feeding schemes for all (including black) children introduced during the war, closed the mission schools that educated individuals like Nelson Mandela and criminally, deliberately and shamefully invested a mere pittance in the education of black children.

His colleague, the equally “cultured” Dr Eben Donges passed laws that split up families (the Population Registration Act classified half my family white and the other half coloured), criminalised sex and marriage across the colour line and enacted the Group Areas Act that saw my father lose the house he built with sweat and labour not once, but twice.

Mr Roodt’s beloved John Vorster passed one law after the other to put anyone with a moral conscience in jail without trial (I spent five days of hell in the Bellville Police Station and three weeks in Victor Verster Prison under the Internal Security Act, a picnic compared to what my brother-in-law and others had to endure at the hands of Jeff Benzien’s torture) and unleashed his security police and the death squads on those who had the courage to resist apartheid. That many South Africans nevertheless made a success of their lives was despite apartheid.

This is personal you see. With his pen Mr Roodt denies me my history. With his pen Mr Roodt denies millions of South Africans their history. Shame on you. You owe all of us an apology. All because you thrive on attention, howsoever perversely it is obtained.

Dr Wilmot James

Federal Chairperson: Democratic Alliance.

LETTER: What gall, Mr Roodt!

Business Day, 12 September 2012

WHERE does Dan Roodt (Apartheid evil is hype, Letters, September 10) get the gall to write as he does? Has he no idea of what apartheid meant to most South Africans?

Apartheid’s crime against humanity had nothing to do with death camps or mass graves. Apartheid’s crime against humanity was to proclaim that the white man was inherently superior to the black, and hence somehow acquired a right to rule over him and train him up to be a servant to his white master.

Dr Verwoerd, when he was native affairs minister in 1954, asked in the senate: “What is the use of teaching a Bantu child mathematics when it cannot use it in practice?” (Note the demeaning use of “it”). He was quite clear that Africans could never aspire to equality with “Europeans”; therefore their education should give them no hope of bettering themselves.

Perhaps Mr Roodt may now admit to being rather more of a buffoon than my late husband.

Louise Asmal

Via e-mail

LETTER: SA now a better place

Business Day, 12 September 2012

DAN Roodt (Apartheid evil is hype, Letters, September 10) makes the quite staggering claim that apartheid should not be classified as a crime against humanity. Any right-thinking person cannot deny that apartheid was exactly that! Black South Africans were stripped of their citizenship, forced to undergo schooling in a language not of their choice, removed from areas where they had made their homes, barred from numerous professions, and prevented from attending the university of their choice, along with numerous other indignities and infringements on their rights.

He also makes the mind-boggling assertion that Hendrik Verwoerd was actually a champion of African education. However, in 1966, the last year of Dr Verwoerd’s premiership, only 1,547 Africans wrote matric, of whom 56% achieved a pass. This is compared to 2010, when nearly 450,000 black South Africans wrote matric, with a pass rate of 63%.

For such an avowed crusader of education for black South Africans Dr Verwoerd had quite a patchy record in this regard. While he was prime minister, the ironically named Extension of University Education Act was passed, which forced black South Africans to attend “bush colleges” rather than the established universities of the major cities, which were restricted to whites. He was also quoted as saying in 1953: “There is no place for (the Bantu) in the European community above the level of certain forms of labour.… What is the use of teaching the Bantu child mathematics when it cannot use it in practice?” He was also quoted as saying that the aim of Bantu education was to keep “the Bantu child a Bantu child”. In the 1960s the average spend by the government on a white pupil was at least 10 times of that of a black pupil.

Dr Verwoerd was a great many things, but a champion of education for black South Africans he was not.

Harking back to a bygone “golden era” of apartheid (even Julius Malema has been guilty of this recently) is dangerous. This country has a great many obstacles to overcome, but headway is being made. The increase in literacy, the phenomenal number of houses built, the electrification of millions of homes, and the constitution are all major achievements and evidence of a better SA. This country has major problems, but there is absolutely no doubt that this is a better place than it was under the leadership of Dr Verwoerd.

However, we must remain vigilant.

The dumping of textbooks in Limpopo was inexcusable and the current crisis in education is, along with a number of other issues, a warning sign for our country.

We should work together to ensure that SA becomes a success, and that all races feel at home in this great country. A successful SA will ensure that claims that this country was better under apartheid will be rightly scoffed at.

Marius Roodt (no relation)

Boksburg