The Cuban occupation of South Africa
The announcement last week that Cuban
military personnel would be sent to South Africa to train the ANC's army
has caused grave concern among the Afrikaner minority in South Africa.
Not only have Afrikaners been placed in category six by the
international Genocide Watch group, but many of them previously fought
against Cuban military adventurism in Africa, killing and wounding a
substantial number of Cubans. They are at risk of Cuban revenge and
victimisation.
Amid increasing ethnic tension within
South Africa, exemplified by suspended ANC Youth leader Julius Malema's
incitement to genocide against Afrikaners and Boers, as well as ongoing
controversies relating to race and language in South Africa, the Cuban
military presence could only exacerbate such tension.
The former SADF entered Angola to fight
Cuba on behalf of the USA and what was then known as the "free world".
The disastrously inept Afrikaner leadership is largely at fault for
allowing a complete takeover of South Africa by radical and communist
elements, leading to the planned Cuban occupation of South Africa.
However, Western support for the ANC in the 1980's, including the
financial backing of Sweden and Britain's Anglican Church, also ensured
the radical, leftwing revolution that has swept over South Africa since
the early 1990's.
The only reason why the current ethnic
atrocities such as so-called farm murders being committed against the
Afrikaner minority have not deteriorated into fullscale genocide, is
because of state incompetence and incapacity. The infusion of Cuban
military personnel into the current SADF, which is nothing but an ANC
militia like Umkhonto we Sizwe, could provide the ANC with the means and
capacity to wage an intrastate war against the Afrikaner minority whom
it hates so much.
Afrikaners have a right to be protected
from the ANC and Cuba by the United States, their former Cold-War ally.
Conservatives in the USA should note that the Cuban army will henceforth
be stationed within the borders of a former friend of America.
Last Updated ( Tuesday, 17 January 2012 04:56 )
The English-Afrikaans thing in the SADF – another view
This
is a blog, not a scholarly paper. I hope that its title is not too
misleading. I have written a narrative, rather than a “balanced” article
of pros and cons leading to an academic conclusion. But as an Italian
South African who grew to maturity between the mid-fifties and the
mid-seventies, my experience of the English-Afrikaans thing has been so
markedly different from that of many others that I feel compelled to
offer mine as a corrective view. I do not have a drop of either
Afrikaner of English blood in my veins, and therefore no prior
allegiance to either group. What I have done, is simply to tell the
story of my relationship with both.
But
first, I must declare an interest. I regard myself today as an
Afrikaans-speaking South African. I made the transition during the
course of my army days as a direct consequence of my personal
experiences. I was once told that I am “very pro-Afrikaans”, as though
there is something wrong with this. The underlying presumption is that
to be “pro-English” is to be objective, whereas to be “pro-Afrikaans” is
to be biased. This is both untrue and untenable. I made a choice for
Afrikaans as principal language of communication. In terms of the
“popular” prejudice, I made the unpopular choice. But “pro-” or even
“anti-” is in this case beside the point, since most of my experiences
pre-date that choice. It is the experiences that determined the choice,
not vice versa. Interest declared. Now for my story.
Early childhood
I
was born in Cape Town, the son of Italian immigrants, on 4 July 1955. My
dad was a professional barber. He owned the Ritz Barber Shop and
Hairdressers at the old Ritz Hotel in Sea Point. I spent my early
childhood in this Italian-Jewish suburb. It was an easy-going community.
Right from the start I imbibed strong values from my dad. During WW2 my
grandfather, who then owned the barber shop, was interned in
Koffiefontein, though he was an anarchist, not a fascist. As a result,
my dad had to leave school a month before his Matric finals to re-open
the shop. Before this, with the shop closed, often the only breakfast he
had before going to school was black, sugarless coffee. But my dad was
neither vengeful nor prejudiced. He never wanted his children to suffer
the poverty he did, nor the fate of being treated as a foreigner in the
land of his birth. During our early years he was reluctant to speak
Italian with my sister and me. He taught us to be pro-South African and
bilingual. He drilled us on our Afrikaans. By the time my sister and I
were adolescents, we spoke Afrikaans as a good second language, like my
dad.
To Durban
When
I was five years old, my parents decided to move to Durban. Mum, whose
only official language is English, was quite happy to do so. For my
sister, who has my mom’s fair skin, straight, chestnut hair and green
eyes, this was also fine. She fitted in easily among the largely blonde,
blue-eyed, fair-haired Durban English-speaking children of the time.
For me, on the other hand, a swarthy little boy with black,
tightly-curled hair and dark brown, almost black eyes, the very image of
my Neapolitan grandfather, the move was to generate a tsunami of woes.
Durban
was in those days a stronghold of English-speaking liberalism. They
referred to an Afrikaner as “Dutchman!”, “Hairyback!”, “Rockspider!”,
“Crunchie!”, “Kydaar!”, etc. One popular joke was: “If English-speaking
children go to a nursery, where do Afrikaans children go?” Answer: “To a
rockery.” My friends’ parents spoke all the time of England. They
seemed to prefer it to their native South Africa. They weren’t going to
be guilty of racism or discrimination or apartheid. The reality was
significantly different.
A
good number of my friends’ parents supported the Progressive Party,
others the United Party. This is how I experienced their liberalism,
their tolerance for other races:
They
used the term “touch of the tar brush” to refer to me. Only much later
did I realise that this phrase actually impugned my mother’s virtue. I
would probably “go to Mansfield High” where most of the other “darkies”
like Greeks, Lebanese and Portuguese went, as well as people of
questionable racial origins (i.e. classified white but with presumed
"coloured" antecedents). I was seldom asked to the birthday parties of
my peers, though there were one or two who invited me home after school.
I mostly was sent home quite early.
My
nickname amongst my fellow pupils was “kaffir” – no joke! “Don’t use his
pencils, they stink!”, “Don’t swap sandwiches with him, his mother puts
s-h-i-t on them!” are the sorts of things they used to say. Did they
think up these attitudes all by themselves, these Grade 1 to 4 children?
I very much doubt it.
I
remember that in English we once had to compose a description of a
fellow pupil and see if the rest of the class could recognise whom we
were describing. Ashley Forrest’s description was: “He smells like a
kaffir and eats like a kaffir and looks like a kaffir …”, at which point
the whole class had identified me raucously. The teacher’s response?
“Ashley, dear, it isn’t nice to say things like that.” Nothing more – in
a liberal English-medium school.
I
think that had I been of the race classification “coloured”, they might
have been kinder. But a darker-skinned person classified as “white” was
definitely persona non grata in that particular community – too close
for comfort, perhaps? This suggests something of their real, underlying
attitudes towards other races.
I
raise these issues not to engender hostility so much as to show how
Natal English-speaking liberals reacted when confronted with “other
races” so close to home. They had some other choice circumlocutions,
too. For example: “We don’t need the Group Areas Act. They could never
afford to live in our area.” It was not difficult to work out who “they”
were. As a young outsider, this was my first experience of Natal
English-speaking liberalism. I was very much on the receiving end. I had
never encountered racism like this before, and it shook me, even though
I was still only a small boy.
At
the same time, I was constantly hearing about the stupidity, the mental
inferiority, of the (verkrampte) “Dutchman” and his hateful prejudices
against the blacks. Another “joke”: “What do you call an English-speaker
if you take out half his brains? Answer: A moron. And if you take out
all his brains? Answer: An Afrikaner.” You can imagine a little kid
taking all this at face value. This experience formed my background to
the whole English-Afrikaans thing. My first encounter with it was with
the Natal English-speakers and their practical racism as compared with
their theoretically liberal politics.
But as yet I had not met a single identifiable Afrikaner – nor, in all likelihood, had most of my peers and their parents.
Secondary school
My
first two years of high school were spent at Kearsney College, a
boarding school at Botha’s Hill (pronounced Boh-tha’s Hill), which was
run on the British model. At Kearsney I got to know several
Afrikaans-speaking teachers, all of whom taught me … well, Afrikaans.
Meneer Zaayman, Jannie Storm and Gerrit Burger they were. They were all
pretty okay guys, very much like all the other teachers. No notable
prejudices, all three highly intelligent and interesting. Jannie Storm
was my housemaster, and as a bit of a tearaway, I did get caned by him
with fair frequency. But that had nothing to do with his being Afrikaans
as such.
Then
my folks moved to Pinetown and they wanted me at home. I was enrolled
at Pinetown High School (PHS), a massive bilingual state school. As was
the practice in Natal, it was parallel rather than dual medium; that is,
the English- and Afrikaans-medium streams were separate rather than
mixed in the same class, as in the Cape Province. It was here that I got
to know Afrikaners on a day-to-day basis for the first time. The
familiar prejudices of my English-speaking peers remained the same, but
the Afrikaans kids were just like any other kids to me. There was no
evidence justifying the sneering hostility the English-speaking kids
showed towards them. The Afrikaans teachers were very much like the
other teachers; perhaps a little tougher and more direct in their mode
of expression. That was okay with me; in fact, I thrived under them. One
of them, old Meneer Stemmet, was a bit cane-happy, but so were a couple
of the English-speaking teachers. I was a lazy little sod, but my std. 8
class teacher, Meneer A.L. Venter, got me up from about 20th to the top
three with, amongst other things, his firm but kindly discipline, his
excellent teaching skills and his thin cane. He gave me, I think, my
very first taste of vasbyt.
The
other memory of the English-Afrikaans thing also comes from std. 8, my
first year at PHS. Of the fifteen prefects, one was from the Afrikaans
stream; a big, tough guy named André Nel (ironically, one “l” short of a
later army buddy). The general opinion amongst my classmates in the
English-medium stream was that he was there solely because he played in
the first XV. One first break, quite near the beginning of the year, as I
was walking towards the field, a number of guys walked past, making
kissing noises at me. I was then felled by a smashing kick to my behind
by one of the bigger Matrics. A crowd quickly formed. I was totally
confused, not to say intimidated.
Then
the crowd parted. A booming voice cried out: “Los hom uit!” It was
André Nel. He helped me up and removed from my back a sign saying “Kiss
me or kick me.” “Is jy oukei, boet?” he asked. When I nodded, he turned
to the others. “Julle los hom uit!” he warned, turning away. The others
left me one by one, not without comments such as “Your stupid rockspider
chum!” I wasn’t too concerned by them at this point. I was gawping
after André, who had rejoined his fellow Afrikaans-speaking Matrics. He
saw me looking at him and winked. I turned away, embarrassed at having
been caught staring.
From
that day I rather hero-worshipped him, and from time to time found the
odd excuse to talk with him. He was always very kind and spoke excellent
English with me. I had not yet reached the point of realising that I
probably owed it to him to try and speak a little Afrikaans. If I was
seen talking to him, the usual remarks were made later, in class.
This,
then, was the extent of my experience of the English-Afrikaans thing as
I finished Matric, and prepared myself for the ordeal of military
service.
5 SAI Ladysmith
My
first major exposure to a largely Afrikaans environment was in 5 SAI,
Ladysmith. My Afrikaans comrades here were not neutral background
characters, as were most of the Afrikaans pupils at my school. They
accepted me as one of them, and stood by me during the early days of my
diensplig, when I was a weakling who barely survived the (as it was to
me then) agony of army PT.
Once
again I was astounded by the sheer degree of prejudice from the Durban
English-speakers. Nowhere in the country was there a group more hostile
to Afrikaans and Afrikaners, who hated the very sound of the language.
They referred to it as “forced down our throats”. Most of them had no
doubt never heard about how brutally English was forced down the throats
of Boer children.
One
story illuminate the general attitude of Natallers rather well. In one,
a visiting American academic had been invited to a wealthy home in
Kloof (pronounced "kloef"). At the dinner table, he tried a line of
poor, heavily-accented Afrikaans. In the ensuing silence, the hostess
said to him, “Professor, you can be forgiven, as a visitor, for not
understanding these matters. But please, never again speak that crude
patois in this house.”
A
few excerpts from one of my other blog entries on this site, “An SADF ou
man looks at conscription in the ’70s – Part 1”, contain the main gist
of my experiences of the English-Afrikaans thing in the army. I was a G5
who asked to stay on, and managed to persuade the Medics to reclassify
me as G1K1. This first excerpt takes up the ensuing story (the full
account is in the blog):
“I
am taken back to bungalow C3 … (the) Corporal looks at the relevant page
(in my groenboekie), whistles and shakes his head. But he’s decent
enough to say, ‘Mooi so, troep! Welkom terug! Gaan neem weer jou ou plek
in!’
“The others are amazed to see me. ‘What’re you doing back here? We thought you were going home!’
“ ‘I was; but they changed their minds.’
“ ‘They made you G4K3?’
“ ‘G1K1.’
“
‘You mean you changed their minds and got yourself made G1K1, you stupid
fucking arsehole?’ says Ritchie-Robinson, a G2K2 from Durban who
clearly doesn’t want to be here. ‘What are you, some kind of kop-toe
hairyback?’
“
‘Boet.’ A very tall, soft-spoken Afrikaner in the corner ... ‘Kom sit by
ons. Ék’s bly jy’s terug. Ek dink jy’s baie dapper.’ So simply but
kindly put. He stands up, walks across and shakes my hand. I barely
reach his chest. He must be at least 1,9 m tall.
“ ‘Ek’s Jaarsie. Jaarsie van Jaarsveld.’
“
‘Ek’s Phillip Vietri,’ I say in my heavily acented Afrikaans. ‘Julle
ouens sal moet my hulp Afrikaans leer om te goed kan praat.’ Or some
such monstrosity of grammar.
“ ‘Toe maar, boet, hier sal jy baie gou leer. Dis mos die army, dié.’ The other Afrikaans guys laugh.”
Not
much need for comment here. The next is taken from the account of my
first 05:00 PT session. I was a 56 kg weakling at the time:
“I
hold out for 35 (of the 45) minutes. Then I fall out, hurk, bowed over,
lungs burning, desperately gasping for breath. The PTI brings the squad
to a halt.
“
‘En jy, jou miserabele klein fokken bliksem?’ he asks. ‘Staan op, troep!
Staan op, sê ek!’ He walks up to me, places his foot in my lower back
and shoves. I go sprawling. In a flash, Jaarsie is out of the squad,
standing to attention in front of the PTI.
“ ‘Korporaal, gee hierdie man asseblief ’n blaaskans. Hy was gister nog G5.’
“
‘Troep, dis hý wat gevra het om G1 te word. Nou moet hy homself soos een
gedra. Gaan terug en staan op jou fokken plek … Jy,’ the PTI continues,
addressing me, ‘Gaan sit ’n rukkie langs die veld. Sodra ek met hierdie
ander klaar is, gaan ek vir jou ’n opfok gee.’ Ten minutes later, the
others have finished. They are told to sit in their squads at the side
of the field.
“
‘Troep, kom hier!’ the korporaal calls to me. I stand up, jog miserably
towards him. I’m never going to survive this opfok, I know it … Suddenly
I become aware that it’s not just me standing in front of the PTI. My
eight buddies are right behind me.
“
‘Korporaal,’ says one of them, ‘as u hierdie man nou ’n opfok gee, wil
ons dit saam met hom doen. Hy’s ons maat, en ons wil hom ondersteun.’
The PTI pauses for a moment.
“
‘Okei. As julle regtig so fokken mal is. Val in.’ It’s only our first
day of basics, so the opfok isn’t more than about 30 minutes. How I got
through it I don’t know to this day, except that there are seven other
guys doing it with me, encouraging and supporting, keeping me going. We
run back, looppas, singing ‘We ain’t gonna run no more.’ Fat chance! My
arms are looped around the shoulders of two of the guys who have done
the opfok with me. God, the bungalow is a welcome sight! The shower
water is hot today. And I have survived my first opfok!”
The
third short extract shows how my Afrikaans buddies regarded me. It was
one of the most heartening moments in what was for me, wuss as I was
then, a crucifying six weeks:
“Friday
(afternoon) of the first week was a bad session for me. As we tree uit
following the PT session, myself as usual strung about two of my mates,
one of the English-speaking ouens shouts, ‘Why do you guys even bother
with him? He’s such a weakling,’ indicating me with a jerk of his head.
“
‘Sure he’s a weakling,’ replies one of the ouens helping me – it is
Jaarsie. ‘But he’s a tough little guy – he never whines, and he never
gives up.’ ”
These
are three truncated excerpts from a much longer narrative, but they get
the point across. The anti-Afrikaans prejudice continued as before. But
here, during the intensity of SADF basic training, the Afrikaans guys
were not merely like other ouens. They actually showed a
self-sacrificing comradeship towards me – even to doing an opfok they
didn’t earn, just to show support.
There
was absolutely no reason for them to help me like this. I was
everything they were not: a weakling, English-speaking, a Catholic. But
they did. They were kindness itself, and never anything else. Why? I
suppose it was in their nature to be so. Perhaps it had something to do
with the fact that, by my staying on and voluntarily becoming G1K1, they
recognised some vasbyt in me, as well as a love of my country that I
shared with them.
I
was not a National Party supporter, but I cared deeply about South
Africa, and really did see National Service as a way of serving my
country. And certainly, because of the values I had learned from my
father, who by then had been dead for two years, I approached them with
no bias as to their language or culture. Those seven boertjies were the
greatest, and we spent twelve of the best (if agonizing) weeks of my
life together.
There
were many Afrikaans-speaking instructors who gave us hell during our
army days, not the least those monstrous individuals known as PTIs. They
would use anything at their disposal to break you down, and for your
later survival it was vital that they did. So their rondfok was part of
the process. At the times, rondfok could be painful and even
humiliating; but if you had the guts to go through with it, it worked.
“Vetseun Engelsman”, “Rooinek”, “Soutie/Soutpiel” or “Engelse hondekak”
were no worse than some of the epithets “my” PTI used on me: “G5G1, jy
gaan bloed pis!”; “Fokken Italiaanse hondekak”; “Mammie se klein
G-eentjie”; “Onnosele klein fokkertjie”. And these were amongst the
milder ones. With my glasses, my weakness and my voluntary change from
G5 to G1K1, I came in for more than my fair share of rondfok.
Some
of the English-speaking guys liked to think they were being tough by
resisting the “Dutchmen” who were training them. They weren’t. In fact,
they were working against their own best interests. Co-operating with
the guy who is breaking you down in order to rebuild you as a soldier is
damned hard work, and you need to be mentally strong to accept the
training and to go through with it. If you did, you’d certainly be
extremely fit and tough at the end. The instructors had to do it, and
chances were you had a bigger chance of cracking if you resisted.
SADF
basics certainly toughened me up, permanently. “My” PTI was a
consummate bastard who hammered me unrelentingly for the first six
weeks. Few people can have been as victimised as I was by him. And yet,
at the end of it, I ran the 8 km with three minutes to spare, and as I
staggered in, totally buggered (sorry, it’s the only word to describe
how I felt), he gave me the thumbs-up! His monstrous harshness had
actually made me tough enough to survive that run.
Never
once did I feel I was being singled out for being an Engelsman
(linguistically) or even an Italianer (ethnically); it was army
business, mostly about toughening up this soft little WOP into becoming a
strong, fit SADF soldier. I will not deny that there were sadists,
fellows who messed one around because they could, rather than because
they needed to. But these were sadists, not necessarily Afrikaners. In
fact, the biggest sadist in Charlie Coy was a Lieuty called Hitchings.
Now there was a swine! But he was a swine because he was a sadist, not
because he was an Engelsman.
What is the answer?
What
can account for the very different way in which I have experienced
Afrikaners throughout my life, then? Why should I, who for my first
eighteen years grew up in the same way as my then fellow
English-speakers, have had such a colossally different experience of
Afrikaners?
I
can only really speak for Durbanites. I have gone back and back to this
question for years, without finding any satisfactory answers.
I
have often asked Durban English-speakers why they do not learn to speak
Afrikaans properly. The most common answer is that Afrikaans is not an
“international language” like English. But it was then an official
language, and even today it is one of the biggest of the eleven official
languages. Italians, Hungarians, Finns and Romanians do not refuse to
speak their language simply because it is not “international”. What does
English being an “international” language have to do with it one way or
another?
Another
is that it is more useful to learn an “African language”. How many
people I heard say, back then, that they would rather learn Zulu than
Afrikaans. Today, when Zulu is an available option in KZN schools, they
are giving preference to Afrikaans, though they still don’t really
bother to learn it. Natal English-speakers appear to be as unilingual as
ever. For the record, I, the friend of “Dutchmen” and “hairybacks”,
speak English, Afrikaans and Zulu, as do many Natal Afrikaners. Some
Natal English-speakers know Zulu, though not many. But the real oddity
is that Afrikaans is as much an African language as Zulu, Xhosa or
Sotho. It was spoken by Malay slaves in the Cape for at least a century
before it was adopted by the white Afrikaner.
Which
leads to another “reason” for not speaking Afrikaans: it is claimed to
be the “oppressor’s language”. For 45 years, while the National Party
ruled South Africa, there might be something of a case for this view.
But this must be seen against the background of English as a mandatory
imperial language for 300 years, the language of a nation that, amongst
other events, is guilty of brutal oppression against the Native
American, the Indian, the Australian Aborigine, the Maori and the
Kikuyu, not even to mention the Boer Republics. If ever there were a
case for an oppressor’s language between English and Afrikaans, English
wins hands down every time.
But
this is not an argument that achieves anything – most languages have
been an oppressor’s language at one time or another in their history,
including many African languages. It is dangerous to single out any one
particular language for this exclusive role.
Another
reason I have heard expressed with a certain frequency is that
Afrikaans is a “dying language” not worth bothering about. This is
without doubt wishful thinking, based on the idea that the “oppressor’s
language” would be rejected holus-bolus in a new and democratic South
Africa, with the resultant conclusive triumph of English. But has this
been the case? With the de-politicisation of Afrikaans since 1994, it
has flourished as a language. When I moved to Oudtshoorn in 1992, the
Cape Times was the newspaper of choice amongst bruin Afrikaners. When I
left in 2002, it stood in stacks in the tea rooms. The newspaper of
preference had become universally Die Burger: Landelik.
All
the great Afrikaans cultural festivals are post-apartheid phenomena.
Afrikaans literature is written by a diversity of people, including
black ANC member Matthews Phosa, former Mpumalanga Premier, who has read
his poetry at the Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunstefees. Afrikaans has
broken out of its ideological straitjacket and become the language of a
universal South African culture; white, black, coloured, Christian,
Muslim, Buddhist (Breyten Breytenbach). In the film Tsotsi, the
characters speak in flaaitaal, the characteristic Soweto dialect of
Afrikaans. Authors such as Deon Meyer made Afrikaans the language of
excellent detective thrillers, set very much in the new South Africa.
Dying language? If anything, it is Afrikaans that is enjoying an
unparalleled “African Renaissance”.
So
in the end, what is one to say about the old English-Afrikaans thing? I
am no wiser as to its origins or meaning now than when I first
encountered it. As I read SADF accounts of the ’70s and ’80s, I see a
few Afrikaners who were surprised by the hostility towards them. I see
many English-speakers who reckoned that Afrikaners were hostile towards
them. And I see a few fellows who reckon that the SADF training threw
them all together until the differences became meaningless. I seem to be
quite a rarity, in that I experienced intense prejudice from the
English-speaking side of the divide and nothing but kindness and
openness from Afrikaners. But what I experienced is fact, and it has
shaped and affected my life ever since. I can only attribute it to the
good work of my Italian late father; bilingualism and broad patriotism. I
think it shaped my attitudes, and that shaping might very well have
made the difference in my experience and my life.
Today,
the anti-Afrikaans prejudice still exists in pockets. But today,
fortunately, it is an isolated and marginal phenomenon. Most of us have
grown up and moved on. Or emigrated.
Last Updated ( Thursday, 06 October 2011 03:45 )
The denialism of the ANC's National Democratic Revolution
RW Johnson on why ANC alliance members remain so attached to an outmoded Soviet concept
In the mid-1990s the SACP, with Joe
Slovo much to the fore, became enamoured of the Human Development Index
(HDI) pioneered by the UN Development Programme because instead of
ranking countries by GDP per capita the UNDP was interested in a
broader measure of welfare which would include the quality of life in
that country, life expectancy, child and maternal mortality rates,
social equality, achievements in education and health, gender equality
and so on.
The UNDP measure had two immensely
appealing features for the SACP. First, it promised to rank countries
like Cuba a lot higher than usual because they enjoyed equal poverty, a
goodish health system and more gender equality. So this would be a
better measure for what the SACP was planning to achieve in South
Africa. Accordingly, the SACP paid enormous and positive attention to
each successive Human Development Report (HDR) of the UNDP and
emphasized that what the government was most keenly interested in was
human development.
Thus in 1997 Jay Naidoo, then heading
the RDP secretariat, declared that "The challenge is to meet the basic
needs of our people and at the same time strengthen economic growth.
These challenges are vital but the real issue that needs attention most is human development." (Emphasis added.)
Secondly, the UNDP was a very weak
agency, highly dependent on local buy-in from the client's end - which
meant, in practise, that it would be easy for the SACP to take over the
local operation in South Africa. This duly occurred. I remember
attending one UNDP report presentation in Pretoria where those thanked
included a long list of SACP figures and where the speech given was a
standard Party rant. It was somewhat weird to imagine that these fiery
declarations denouncing Gear and "the 1996 class project" were somehow
meant to emanate from the UNDP.
The intention was clearly that the SACP,
leading the Alliance, would be able to show the effect of the RDP in
gradually transforming South Africa for the better with a rising HDI
number which would reward all the ideological initiatives of greater
empowerment, gender equality, better preventative health care and so
on. Helpfully, the UNDP had calculated its indices retrospectively and
these showed South Africa improving from a score of 0.66 in1975 to a
score of 0.741 in 1995. If improvement like that could be achieved in
the last twenty years of National Party rule, surely the figure would
race ahead under ANC rule?
Well, no actually. The 2001 UNDP Report
showed that South Africa had slumped to 0.604 due its high Aids rate
and lower per capita income due to the (then) weak Rand. The fact that
South Africa under ANC rule had slumped even behind its 1975 figure was
so much the opposite of what the SACP (and ANC) wanted to hear that
they promptly lost all interest in the HDR. After 2001 each successive
new HDR was largely ignored.
In fact they were objective measurements
all right and by 2010 the HDR showed that South Africa's score had
fallen again to 0.597, placing the country 110th out of 172 countries surveyed. (Zimbabwe was in 172nd place.) Had South Africa maintained its 1995 score it would have been 59th. That is, under ANC rule South Africa has fallen 51 places, a fair measure of the catastrophic failures this period has seen.
And this is not just due to Aids.
Poverty, inequality, unemployment the health services and education
have all got worse and even the Aids figures would have been a lot
better but for Mbeki's Aids denialism which the ANC did not in any way
counter or contradict. The straightforward fact is that ANC rule has
been an awful failure not just in terms of this measure, the HDI index,
which the ANC previously embraced, but when judged on any objective
terms at all.
Yet this is not acknowledged by the ANC.
Instead the standard line is that the ANC has achieved an enormous
amount but that much remains to be done. To the extent that things are
not as they should be, this is due to the inheritance of apartheid. Yet
the HDI figures mock this view for they show beyond dispute that South
Africa's HDI figure was far higher in 1995, after nearly 50 years of
apartheid, than it was in 2010 after 16 years of ANC rule. Moreover,
the trend continues to be downward. Yet few members of the black ANC
elite are willing to face this fact.
This is an extract from RW Johnson's latest column. Read the entire article here.
Van Niekerk incident the result of Naspers monopoly
The recent incident during which a
fistfight between Mr. Abel Malan and Prof. Anton van Niekerk of
Stellenbosch University ensued, can be directly attributed to the
division and intolerance which the Naspers monopoly has sown among
Afrikaners.
The immediate cause of the incident was
an article by Van Niekerk in which he heaped historical moral guilt and
calumny on Afrikaners and whites. Moreover, in the article Van Niekerk
is guilty of revisionism as to the totalitarian system of communism
that existed in Eastern Europe and which has been condemned as a
"stain" by the world community, as well as several recent Russian
presidents.
Also because of its betrayal of the
Afrikaans language community, the University of Stellenbosch and its
lecturers have become a symbol of the moral and intellectual decay of a
certain Afrikaner elite, opportunistically siding with the current
rulers. The school of journalism at this university produces the type
of ideologically blinded, anti-Afrikaner hacks who afterwards abuse
their positions of power at the Naspers monopoly to attack and libel
ordinary Afrikaners in the name of their neo-Marxist ideology.
Both the University of Stellenbosch and
Naspers have again and again demonstrated their intolerance towards
views deviating from their nonsensical dogmas. Van Niekerk's article
was a piece of propaganda unworthy of any true intellectual or academic
and the uncritical publication thereof in Beeld and Die Burger
suggested that the umpteenth orgy of white guilt and a "psychological
operation" against the long-suffering Afrikaner population was
underway.
Although Mr. Abel Malan's lack of
self-control cannot be justified, it exemplifies the general
frustration felt by Afrikaners in relation to the media and academic
Gauleiters of a sadistic regime. And here, for the edification of the
half-literate word processors streaming out of Stellenbosch's mind
factory, we mean "sadistic" in a psychopathological sense.
There is a real possibility that
violence between Afrikaners could escalate further than mere
fistfights, as long as the pernicious media monopoly in Afrikaans
persists. The most profitable newspaper in Britain has just been closed
due to the unethical behaviour of its editorial staff.
Neither Naspers's profitability nor the
life-long appointments of Stellenbosch's radical professors provide
them with carte blanche to continue with their provocation and
libellous attacks upon Afrikaners.
The real truth about the 'previously disadvantaged'
This article has been circulating on
the internet, via e-mail and also posted on various discussion forums.
It is imputed to J. Theron of Brisbane and we are publishing it here
under that name.
Kindly make special reference to the following:
1. Who "disadvantaged" the 'black' people of the interior Southern Africa before the (supposed) belligerent 'white' settlers moved inland in the mid19th century..? As certainly, what the 'settlers' f ound was not a hugely advanced infrastructure-, deep mines-, airports-, vast libraries of written
works-, grandiose institutions of learning-, etc. No, as little as 170 years ago they found masses of black people (indigenous to the Southern tip of Africa) living on the fringes of the stone age. Beings in skins, wielding sticks, living primitive dwellings, dragging- and carrying things around, who had not even invented the wheel yet.
2. Ethiopia - a country that was NEVER colonised. Today one of the most desolate places on the planet - who "disadvantaged" the people of Ethiopia..?
3. Put Zimbabwe and Germany next to each other and please explain the differences. In 1945 Germany was (for all intents and purposes) flattened to ground and torn in half. Fifteen years later, West Germany was described as an "Economic Wonder". Around the same time as the end of Apartheid, Germany was re-unified. It yanked the (unified) Germany back four centuries in time.
Yet, in (around) fifteen years (for the second time a few decades) it built an 'economic wonder' - today, fast becoming a global leader in almost every aspect. Reminder: a lineage very strongly associated with... WHITE AFRIKAANS SPEAKING people... One the the 'flip side' - Zimbabwe - was handed one of the wealthiest countries in the WORLD (eg a currency that was worth more than the USA Dollar, etc) - what is it today..? Competing with Ethiopia to be the most desolate hell-hole on the planet..? Please explain...
I can carry on for days - but enough for now. Just one more request: please.., pretty please.., kindly respect the intellect of our audience and refrain from cheap (ANC-like) red herrings - eg calling people "racists" - and kindly just answer the questions- directly and with tangible substance.
In parting, I would suggest the following, - The term "Previously Disadvantaged' is as much a fantasy, as is the delusional lunacy that threatens voters with the revenge of the ancestors (a bit like the "rapture" we are all eagerly awaiting, for the 4 017.75th time since 2000 alone...), the same delusional inanity that claims the words "KILL THE BOER" really, actually means - "come over to my mansion for tea and cookies"...
- You cannot take something from somebody WHO NEVER HAD IT..! In fact, what is it that white people, specifically white men, supposed to "give back" to black people..? Can someone PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE explain to me what it is that white men took from blacks?
- - - LAND..? Blacks NEVER owned any land. Any form of formal ownership is a Western concept. The 'black' tribes of the mid 19th century haphazardly SETTLED in an ad hoc manner - effectively governed by tribal savagery - iow the most savage ruled the land (a bit like Hillbrow today). They simply ran away until they could not run anymore - not having ANY grasp of the concept of a horizon or for that matter any measure of finite land mass - eg the boundaries - that is the fundamental concept of ownership.
- - - MINERALS..? More hallucinations aside - eg ancient gold mines... - a little bit like the Zimbabwe Ruins (the Pyramids, etc) - next to the magnificent structure, the indigenous people build stone-age dwellings out of dirt and sticks (at best emulating the birds). Minerals beneficiation is an entirely Imperialist/Western concept - in fact, in many ways it saw some of the most tangible advances, by WHITE SOUTH AFRICAN MEN - just peruse some of the academic paper at Wits' Engineering Library.
- - - WEALTH..? Money-, Capital- and the pivotal mechanisms of the wealth that allows you to breath, eat, have children, live a rather healthy productive and fulfilling live, but also allowed the cognitive development that leads you to make your daft comments here - it is ALL of Western origins. In fact, the key advancements in modern finance- and economics were made by the.. DUTCH. Why do you think it is called 'Wall Street'..? It was initially 'Wal Straat' - yes my dear, the Dutch took their cognitive substance there as well... The same Dutch that were the most direct decedents of the people that landed at the Cape in 1650 - in fact, the modern 'WEALTH system' was originated by the Dutch and it funded the explorations around the tip of Africa.
- - - Perhaps we took their aeroplanes-, their Breitling watches, their Italian Suits, or their German luxury limousines, their 'Blue Light Brigades ' or perhaps their Space Shuttles..? Mmmm... I just hate the implicit assumption that 'whitea' stole from 'blacks'...
1. Who "disadvantaged" the 'black' people of the interior Southern Africa before the (supposed) belligerent 'white' settlers moved inland in the mid19th century..? As certainly, what the 'settlers' f ound was not a hugely advanced infrastructure-, deep mines-, airports-, vast libraries of written
works-, grandiose institutions of learning-, etc. No, as little as 170 years ago they found masses of black people (indigenous to the Southern tip of Africa) living on the fringes of the stone age. Beings in skins, wielding sticks, living primitive dwellings, dragging- and carrying things around, who had not even invented the wheel yet.
2. Ethiopia - a country that was NEVER colonised. Today one of the most desolate places on the planet - who "disadvantaged" the people of Ethiopia..?
3. Put Zimbabwe and Germany next to each other and please explain the differences. In 1945 Germany was (for all intents and purposes) flattened to ground and torn in half. Fifteen years later, West Germany was described as an "Economic Wonder". Around the same time as the end of Apartheid, Germany was re-unified. It yanked the (unified) Germany back four centuries in time.
Yet, in (around) fifteen years (for the second time a few decades) it built an 'economic wonder' - today, fast becoming a global leader in almost every aspect. Reminder: a lineage very strongly associated with... WHITE AFRIKAANS SPEAKING people... One the the 'flip side' - Zimbabwe - was handed one of the wealthiest countries in the WORLD (eg a currency that was worth more than the USA Dollar, etc) - what is it today..? Competing with Ethiopia to be the most desolate hell-hole on the planet..? Please explain...
I can carry on for days - but enough for now. Just one more request: please.., pretty please.., kindly respect the intellect of our audience and refrain from cheap (ANC-like) red herrings - eg calling people "racists" - and kindly just answer the questions- directly and with tangible substance.
In parting, I would suggest the following, - The term "Previously Disadvantaged' is as much a fantasy, as is the delusional lunacy that threatens voters with the revenge of the ancestors (a bit like the "rapture" we are all eagerly awaiting, for the 4 017.75th time since 2000 alone...), the same delusional inanity that claims the words "KILL THE BOER" really, actually means - "come over to my mansion for tea and cookies"...
- You cannot take something from somebody WHO NEVER HAD IT..! In fact, what is it that white people, specifically white men, supposed to "give back" to black people..? Can someone PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE explain to me what it is that white men took from blacks?
- - - LAND..? Blacks NEVER owned any land. Any form of formal ownership is a Western concept. The 'black' tribes of the mid 19th century haphazardly SETTLED in an ad hoc manner - effectively governed by tribal savagery - iow the most savage ruled the land (a bit like Hillbrow today). They simply ran away until they could not run anymore - not having ANY grasp of the concept of a horizon or for that matter any measure of finite land mass - eg the boundaries - that is the fundamental concept of ownership.
- - - MINERALS..? More hallucinations aside - eg ancient gold mines... - a little bit like the Zimbabwe Ruins (the Pyramids, etc) - next to the magnificent structure, the indigenous people build stone-age dwellings out of dirt and sticks (at best emulating the birds). Minerals beneficiation is an entirely Imperialist/Western concept - in fact, in many ways it saw some of the most tangible advances, by WHITE SOUTH AFRICAN MEN - just peruse some of the academic paper at Wits' Engineering Library.
- - - WEALTH..? Money-, Capital- and the pivotal mechanisms of the wealth that allows you to breath, eat, have children, live a rather healthy productive and fulfilling live, but also allowed the cognitive development that leads you to make your daft comments here - it is ALL of Western origins. In fact, the key advancements in modern finance- and economics were made by the.. DUTCH. Why do you think it is called 'Wall Street'..? It was initially 'Wal Straat' - yes my dear, the Dutch took their cognitive substance there as well... The same Dutch that were the most direct decedents of the people that landed at the Cape in 1650 - in fact, the modern 'WEALTH system' was originated by the Dutch and it funded the explorations around the tip of Africa.
- - - Perhaps we took their aeroplanes-, their Breitling watches, their Italian Suits, or their German luxury limousines, their 'Blue Light Brigades ' or perhaps their Space Shuttles..? Mmmm... I just hate the implicit assumption that 'whitea' stole from 'blacks'...
South
Africa is the most interesting country in the world to live in. For
almost eight years I lived in Paris and I could stroll to the Louvre,
the Picasso Museum, buy cheap tickets at the Bastille Opera for what
was then about R50, browse dozens of interesting little bookshops with
names like "Letter tree", "Foam of the pages", "Doodles", and so on.
Unlike Anglo-American bookshops that contain mostly a mixture of
bestselling trash and classics, the French love their quirky essays and
novels by eccentric authors teeming with wayward knowledge and ideas.
