The Cuban occupation of South Africa et al.

The Cuban occupation of South Africa

Tuesday, 17 January 2012 04:15 Dan Roodt 

 

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

Thursday, 06 October 2011 03:16 Phillip Vietri

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

Tuesday, 19 July 2011 13:33 RW Johnson

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 110^th out of 172 countries surveyed. (Zimbabwe was in 172^nd place.) Had South Africa maintained its 1995 score it would have been 59^th. 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

Friday, 15 July 2011 12:48 Praag

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'

Friday, 08 July 2011 04:08 J Theron, Brisbane

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'...

 http://www.praag.co.uk/opinion.html

Land grabs, mine grabs and genocide: The future of South Africa

Land grabs, mine grabs and genocide: The future of South Africa

By Mike Smith
19th of November 2011

The ANC’s Stalinist plan to steal white owned commercial farms in South Africa is going full steam ahead.
Following the release of the so-called Green Paper on Land Reform, Louis Meintjies of the Transvaal Agricultural Union (TAU) is apparently worried that the Minister of Rural Development and Land Reform has said that if the constitution of South Africa stands in the way of land reform then the constitution should be changed.
Typical ANC...if they cannot get their way inside the law then they simply break the law or change the law. TAU worried over changing constitution to grab white owned land
The Minister said: "Constitutions are tools that are created to help society move in particular directions. When society gets stuck as it moves forward we must have the courage to review the Constitution and, if needs be, amend it accordingly. "So if the honourable members are suggesting that there are aspects of the green paper which border on unconstitutional we will ask cabinet to change the Constitution if we need to in order to achieve the objectives we want to achieve as a country."
 Source
It is clear the useless and incompetent Minister has no idea what a constitution actually is. It is our mandate that we give them to govern us by. They are only allowed to do what the constitutions say, that means protecting our rights to own property and pursue our happiness. Nothing more. The constitution is not there for them to chop and change as they please. We do that, not them. They should stick to what they are paid to do and govern properly and protect our freedoms instead of stealing our tax money and try to undermine our rights around every corner.
According to the law, the government needs a two thirds majority before they can change the constitution. I can tell you that they will use every dirty trick in the book to get that 2/3 majority, even if it means hiding or falsifying ballot papers in the elections.
What irks me tremendously is the opposition DA party that cannot see through what is really cooking. Instead of opposing this ridiculous land reform in every possible way , they just want the land reform to take place within the constitution and a proper audit done beforehand. When are they going to get it? Land reform is illegal…Totally illegal if there is no “Willing buyer; Willing seller”.
Nevertheless, in a seemingly conflicting statement in the Afrikaans news Minister Gugile Nkwinti assured the farmers that government won’t grab land and I bet you thousands of farmers will believe this and sleep well tonight. Like I always say, a good rule of thumb with the lying ANC is to believe 180 degrees the opposite of what they say.
In the Afrikaans report he also said something that we have to take very seriously. He said that foreign ownership of land MUST be limited. So here we have two things now coming from the ANC minister.
They WILL change the constitution to grab the land and they MUST reduce foreign landownership in South Africa. So what stops them from declaring all white farmers as foreigners?
I can already see the limp-wristed DA saying “Oh they cannot do that, it will be unconstitutional”.
Fact is, the ANC has time and again proved to us that they feel NOTHING for the constitution. It is to them just a piece of paper the same as their famous “Freedom Charter”. They cannot even hold themselves to their own rules, which guarantee certain freedoms and equality to all South Africans.
 Besides there is a long communist history of denying people their citizenship, stealing their farms and shipping them off to Gulags somewhere.
Stalin did it in Russia with the Volga Germans who were driven to Kazakhstan and the Crimean Tatars who were driven to Siberia and Uzbekistan in Stalin’s Great Purge. He did the same with the Meskhetian Turks in South Georgia. Their houses were confiscated their farms chopped up into little pieces and given to so called “landless peasants”.
These policies turned the most fertile region, once called “the breadbasket of Europe” into a wasteland with 11 million people (7 million in the Ukraine alone) starving to death in the Holodomor. And those figures are conservative.
In Czechoslovakia in 1945 the communists grabbed the land of Sudeten Germans and Hungarians. In Hungary after the Second World War the communists grabbed the land of the Danube Schwaben...
Land grabs and mine grabs are what communists do. It is them; it is what they are. They are thieves and parasites.
Everywhere the communists have done this the most obstinate farmers have been persecuted and imprisoned.
In Czechoslovakia the maximum size of farms were 50 ha, in Yugoslavia it was first 25 ha and later 10 ha. Everywhere from China, Vietnam, North Korea to Cuba, etc. where Communists came to power they introduced these land reform policies and everywhere it led to poverty and starvation.
In Africa we have some perfect examples of this mentality directly north of us in Zimbabwe. A failed state and a starving population due to the Stalinist land reform policies of its leader. A while ago that other terrorist scumbag, President Sam Nujoma of Namibia wanted to declare the Namibian Germans illegal aliens in that country.
Now it is the turn of the Whites in South Africa who will soon have their citizenship constitutionally denied by a Stalinist Ukaz (decree) issued by the Marxist ANC scum in power in South Africa and who will have their land seized.
But that is not enough... Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe again reassured us that nationalisation of the mines and mine grabs is not ANC policy.
Like I said, just believe 180% the opposite of what they say and you will know what official ANC policy is. This followed the assurances of the other ANC lapdog Bobby Godsell of Anglo Gold Ashanti who, a few days ago, also assured us there will be no mine grabs
His reasons are that the ANC cannot buy the mines, because they do not have the “trillions required doing so” and to do it without compensation would require them to change the Bill of Rights, for which they need 75% majority in the SA parliament. So there is no way...
Well, that will all change very quickly when white South Africans are declared illegal aliens in their own country. They are already second class citizens. It is only a small step to take their voting rights and citizenship away. And when they can do it to the whites, they can do it to the Natal Indians and the Cape Malays as well. And there they have their 75% majority.
Nevertheless, their reassurances obviously were not strong enough for the Oppenheimers who recently sold their stake in De Beers to Anglo. Their excuse was family trouble and a bleak future for the diamond industry. Why the Oppenheimers sold De Beers
I am not convinced. I think the Oppenheimers know what is coming in the future of South Africa and they know when it is time to get out. The land grabs and the mine grabs will just be the prologue to a much darker future in stall for South Africa, namely that of an attempted all out genocide on the whites.
http://www.praag.co.uk/columns/mike-smith/779-land-grabs-mine-grabs-and-genocide-the-future-of-south-africa.html

Crime and its reality in Africa

Crime and its reality in Africa

Sunday, 22 January 2012 00:13 Dan Roodt

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.

I also attended lectures or ran into world-famous artists, philosophers and writers. I personally met or knew Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard, Alain Badiou, Julian Schnabel and attended a packed lecture by the blind, octogenarian author Jorge Luis Borges. Netx to the Pompidou Centre with its collection of Dada and Surrealist art, the building being itself a work of art, was a literally underground institution called the IRCAM where you could catch Pierre Boulez conducting amazing, experimental pieces of avant-garde music.

Paris has so much culture you could spend a lifetime just scratching the surface. Johannesburg, on the other hand, has one art museum which is now in a slum area, Joubert Park. For a city this size, it is something of a wasteland. Parts of it look like a wasteland too. And, of course, it is notoriously crime-ridden.

Which brings me to the real subject of this piece: crime in Africa. I strongly suspect that the crime industry in Johannesburg might be bigger than the banking industry, represented by the big four banks, three of which are still headquartered in downtown Johannesburg, but then their employees hardly ever venture outside on the streets.

Recent crime statistics have placed Cape Town ahead of Johannesburg as the most dangerous city in the country, which shows you that the notorious Cape gang members are stealing the limelight from their Johannesburg counterparts. Johannesburg is very proud of its gangster or tsotsi tradition, which goes back to the days of Sophiatown when the "Americans", the "Russians", the "Gestapo", the "Berliners" and the "Vultures" ruled the roost. Nadine Gordimer and many British authors have romanticized those glorious pre-apartheid times. The so-called "Sophiatown Renaissance" was the precursor to Mbeki's African renaissance.

Also, I happened to read a very amusing "call for papers" on the website of the Southern African Historical Society recently. Sometime in March there is going to be a conference at the famous Yale University in the USA, on the subject of - you guessed it - crime in Africa.  Except that the international academics gathering at Yale have chosen a more politically correct title for their conference: Crime and its fictions in Africa.

According to the invitation from Yale:

"The story of Africa in the world is in some ways a history of crime: from the Atlantic slave trade to the Nigerian '419' email scam, violence and illegality have often been the means by which the continent is inscribed in the Western imagination. On a more local level, crime has also served as the medium through which Africa and its peoples have negotiated engagement with globalization. Besides the obvious movement of illicit goods onto the global market, this is evident in the intricate international networks for smuggling people across the Sahara; in the prostitution rings that link parts of Africa to parts of Europe; and in the poaching syndicates driven by Asian demand for exotica such as rhino horn. The problematic role of law and/or its absence has long been the focal point of historical and social scientific work on Africa, though not without controversy over the line between voyeurism and observation.

Increasingly, fiction writers and literary scholars have also got in on the act. In South Africa, authors such as Deon Meyer and Margie Orford have topped the best-seller lists with their crime fiction, and the genre has gathered steam across the continent. What explains this development? What, if any, is the connection between the boom in writing about crime, and the problem of crime as it is experienced day to day? Finally, how can we both acknowledge crime’s dominant place in African narratives (and narratives about Africa), and question the limitations of this negative paradigm?"

I might have been tempted to go to Yale myself and deliver a paper there, except I have just missed the deadline and it would be an expensive way of causing controversy among a bunch of "tenured radicals" as American academics have been called, by arguing that crime in Africa, particularly South Africa, is no fiction.

All of us have been exposed to crime in some way or another. We know people who have fallen victim to the often sadistic acts perpetrated by the millions of criminals who roam our streets and farms. As someone tweeted the other day: "See South Africa: Home of the Big 5 ! Murder, Rape, Robbery, Hijacking, Theft."

In the past week I have had two mundane run-ins with shop assistants that convinced me that even in brand-name emporiums in shopping centres you run the risk of being defrauded by the people behind the counter. In the one instance I was short-changed by sixty-nine rand. It was a fairly complicated matter as I had bought some shirts on sale and part payment was ensured by some points on my loyalty card. Afterwards in the car I kept on staring at the till slip as the amount did not make sense to me. Then I realised that the shop assistant had pocketed my loyalty points in cash, sixty-nine rand to be exact. My wife thought the shirts were a bargain anyway and it was too much trouble going back, but above all I felt insulted. My mental arithmetic has always been good and I felt that no dishonest shop assistant should get the better of me. The worst of it was: it was all done in such a casual way, "trying her luck" as it were. In the Old South Africa someone like that would have been fired on the spot. But with trade unions, labour laws and the legendary African tolerance towards things dishonest and criminal, she knew she would get away with it. And if caught, it would simply be shrugged off as a "mistake".

The second incident involved a small payment of R39,99 but it almost turned into a loss ten times that amount. There seems to be a new trick. After putting your payment through your debit or credit card, the assistant would suddenly unplug the machine, muttering: "Oh, there's a problem with this machine. Let me put it through again!" In your naïveté - all white people in Africa are naïve, I have come to think - you would tender your card again and this time around, a debit of ten times the amount would be put through your card: R399,90, to be exact. In your hurry to get over this tedious hiccup, you would blindly sign the slip, except then you might notice that somehow a digit or two have been scratched out in pencil.  Having had former experiences of this nature, you would then start getting suspicious. The old Eurocentric logic and powers of deduction would start kicking in. A quick glance at your bank account on your cellphone would divulge that indeed the first payment had gone through. And you were now R400 the poorer on the second little swipe through the "faulty" machine.

But of course, all of this would be put down to the infernal machines, another "mistake". Calls to the bank. Denials that the first payment had gone through. Yet you have the evidence in your pocket and can even cite the transaction code. Eventually the second payment would be reversed. No apology. No guilty look. This is just routine. Another customer, another "mistake". How many customers are so gullible that they fall for this? I ask myself. How many tourists coming to South Africa to enjoy our beaches, vineyards and wildlife get fleeced or even killed when they venture into rough areas?

The Caribbean-born Indian novelist V.S. Naipaul got the Nobel prize for literature. He was also derided as a racist for his perceptive novel about the Congo, "A bend in the river". Somewhere in it a character remarks: "The problem is not that there's no longer a difference between right and wrong. The problem is there's no right."

While we worry about the "Big Five" of Murder, Rape, Robbery, Hijacking and Theft, there are other features of "zoo city" - that is also the title of a crime novel I believe - that escape us but are no less pervasive and insiduous. Everyone - from the tenderpreneurs of the ANC with their flashy cars and Hollywood lifestyles to the devious shop assistants - is on the take, sucking us dry.

But it remains interesting. If you are a thriller writer you have more material in Johannesburg and most other SA cities to write 720 novels, as many as Barbara Cartland did. If you are a social theorist, a columnist, a pop philosopher, you could also dip into the criminal cesspool and produce a conversation piece every day of the week.

As long as you stay in a secure complex - 60% of all violent attacks occur at the victim's residence - and minimise your risk, you could survive to tell the tale.

American Allen Drury described South Africa in the 1960's as "a very strange society". Yet this republic in 2012 is far stranger still, a zoo to gawk at, study and discuss.http://www.praag.co.uk/columns/dan-roodt/789-crime-and-its-reality-in-africa.html

S.Africa: Ruined Farm

 ΝΕΓΡΟΣ ΓΕΩΡΓΟΣ- ΕΝΑ ΣΥΝΤΟΜΟ ΑΝΕΚΔΟΤΟ

[42 Photos] S.Africa: Ruined Farm

Date Posted: Saturday 11-Feb-2006

Getting photos of farms which were handed over to the blacks is not easy, especially if they failed. The Govt really doesn't want to advertise this. Yet there must be hundreds of such farms.

These photos are from another fantastic farm - this time a grape farm - which was handed over to the blacks in S.Africa via the normal land reform procedure. And look at what a mess it is.

A while back I mentioned a Special Assignment program which showed one farm which succeeded (the one which was run by a white man on behalf of the blacks and which got lots of capital injection afterwards!). This was the other one - the failure which they showed on the same program.

This grape farm was called Blinkwater, which is Afrikaans meaning "bright water".

But first of all, I must show you this. This writing was on one of the walls of the ruined farm house. It was a message left to the blacks by the white farmer who lost his land. It reads: "You bastards will stay poor the rest of your lives". And what an accurate prophecy it was by the White farmer.



The White farmer's bitter message is on the wall...



Of the ruined farm house. Look at it now. The roof is gone, the doors and windows have been ripped out...









This Black man, is the only remaining black person on the farm. All the other blacks to whom the farm was given, are now GONE...



The black guy spoke in Afrikaans, and so they put these english subtitles in. These subtitles are worth reading because you will "get the story from the horse's mouth" so to speak. In this case, he is talking about the reservoir which used to irrigate the grapes. The starters and pumps were stolen... (by blacks of course!). So the blacks steal from the blacks. The whole thing is a complete mess. You'll see more of this insanity later further down.









The rusting pipes...





Even the pumps are gone... stolen...



The reservoir is now dry...



This is what's left of a once fine vineyard...





Looking out over the farm...



The black guy says the former White owner took the airconditioner with him...



The "they" the black man is referring to, is the Government. He says he thinks the Government wants everything to die. (I doubt it - but its an example of blacks now passing the buck - nobody wants to take responsibility).



He is once more referring to the S.African Govt changing its tune from day to day. (So what's new?)













None of the farm equipment is working any more...











Now here we see blacks struggling with other blacks. Blacks stealing from other blacks. This last remaining black guy now also has to police the place. Here he catches another black man walking around on the farm with a wood saw. He asks him what he's doing here. This black man, like many others, are cutting down trees on the farm for firewood for themselves.



Here you can see some trees have been cut...



Here is a pile of wood cut by other blacks who don't live on this farm. Isn't this cool? Now instead of blacks trespassing and ruining white-owned farms, we have blacks trespassing and ruining what's left of a ruined black-owned farm! Poetic justice I say.



This woman is also not supposed to be on this farm. He has some words with her.



He is saying the grapes will probably be dead by the next season.









Yes, all the simple daily routines have now stopped. This is typical of the way in which blacks work.







The End.

South Africa: Army Not the Solution to Raging Social Decay

South Africa: Army Not the Solution to Raging Social Decay

Date Posted: Wednesday 19-May-2010

By Meshack Mabogoane

Johannesburg - THE staggering social problems that have overwhelmed the country in the wake of a licentious "human rights" environment (and its sinister manipulation) are receiving attention, albeit grudgingly, from the government.

Now that the government admits some rot, there is a need for real frankness in assessing the mess and the role the government has played in creating it.

The Department of Defence has proposed absorbing recruits into its ranks for "instilling patriotism and discipline". That the army has to be brought in shows the gravity of the situation. It is a virtual state of emergency, and it stems from social engineering aimed at producing a degenerate social climate and, out of that, a malleable rabble.

After failing to destroy the country with explosives before 1994, the African National Congress (ANC) in power has succeeded in devastating society through the cunning manipulation of social grants, ill-meaning "rights" and state resources. This ethical wilderness is a fertile ground for propaganda and plunder and it suits incumbents in nihilistic tyrannies.

The Department of Defence's recruits will be the products of a government that has rubbished discipline and social ethics. There is excessive provision of "rights" to protect children and youth - ostensibly against abuse at home and on campus. But while youth are rewarded for misbehaviour, adults are restrained, even punished, for trying to inculcate responsibility in them.

The exponential expansion of the black population, in which the government is implicated by way of dereliction of its duties, worsens social problems. Women and children are abused, social grants-driven offspring are ill fed and ill bred - a massive social jungle and a national bungle are in the making.

"Rights" and "welfare" have undermined social institutions, values and responsibility - there is overwhelming evidence that they are harming society.

In overcrowded jails - or rather "hotels", which accommodate and subsidise the victims of social degeneration - the comforts and lack of discipline attract many. Tardiness and negligence in dealing with infractions within the bureaucracy - including the comical "disciplinary procedures" of the ANC - corrode authority. The general tone of the government and ruling party abets insubordination and irresponsibility in state and society.

And now the Department of Defence wants to act as a kind of fire brigade to extinguish the social inferno. It would be more cost-effective and socially responsible if the government stopped spawning social and personal degeneration.

The regime, by emphasising party over patria, comrade over citizen, has destroyed patriotism, which requires a real understanding of, and respect and love for, one's country. But the government falsifies history, eclipses significant events and downgrades personalities except those of its own. The heritage, views and concerns of all others are set aside and trampled on for its controversial legacies. An inimical propaganda arouses enmity and anger.

Moreover, the regime has sown conflict and enlarged chasms across generations, class, gender, racial and even black ethnic lines in pursuit of a "divide, undermine and control" programme. This militates against a common feeling of goodwill, mutual recognition and respect among citizens, which is indispensable for patriotism.

The army - now an emasculated militia - needs remedial treatment itself before its rickety structure is burdened with social jetsam. A disciplined army is what is really needed, otherwise it may produce "war veterans" fit mainly for seizures and heists. Hence the recruitment of ANC Youth League members - as comrades not citizens - is portentous.

While the Department of Defence meddles in social-patchwork solutions, it fails to face military issues because of lack of vision and political will.

The proposed role of the department in social rehabilitation will flop as long as the government allows or aggravates social degeneration and acts irresponsibly. The social collapse in this country is stoked by a hostile regime that is destroying its vulnerable citizens by exploiting their weaknesses.

Mabogoane is a freelance writer.

CRIME IN SOUTH AFRICA

[2 Pics] S.Africa: 2010: CRIME IN SOUTH AFRICA POSTER - My Pics: A Great Crime Advert: Wake up before its too late...

Date Posted: Wednesday 19-May-2010

I was driving around Johannesburg last Saturday when I spotted this advert on the side of the road. I thought it was an absolutely brilliant security company advert. It is for a company called SECURITY SOLUTIONS. I struggled to take photos with my cell phone... this is the best I could do. The company's advert says: WAKE UP BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE... and shows a photo of a coffin...

Yeah folks... WAKE UP... crime is a big issue. I'll tell you later about the Police meeting in our suburb last night. Not good - certain types of crime increased by 100% in one year. Shocking...


Posted By: Jan - http://www.africancrisis.co.za/Article.php?ID=76183&M=D&

Secret Tunnels under Johannesburg...

FROM THE SECRET LIFE OF THE CITIES

[2 Pics] S.Africa: My Pics: The Secret Tunnels under Johannesburg...

Date Posted: Wednesday 19-May-2010

Take a look at these 2 photos I took one day while going between buildings in the Johannesburg CBD (Inner City). What you are seeing is private and no open to the public because it is owned by a business.

The one photo is of a short tunnel between 2 underground parkings. That tunnel is 2 storey's underground. I thought it would take me to the longer tunnel, but it turned out to be very new and the other buildings aren't connected to it yet.

The other photo is a pretty cool one. Check that long tunnel - 1 storey underground. It is part of a series of tunnels that connect 5 buildings together. Cool huh?

http://www.africancrisis.co.za/Article.php?ID=76179&M=D&

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/8711089.stm Page last updated at 11:12 GMT, Saturday, 29 May 2010 12:12 UK

'Some things were better under apartheid'

Millions of South Africans still live in shacks When apartheid was dismantled in South Africa, many expected the lives of its black population would improve but promises of land distribution and new homes have not been fulfilled, as Hugh Sykes discovered. In a community of shacks on a hillside near Johannesburg, a man complained to me: "We didn't like apartheid, but some things were better under apartheid than they are now." In a community of shacks on a hillside near Durban, a man complained to me: "Life here under apartheid was bad, but now it is more bad." I felt slightly unsettled hearing this.  Shack dwellers have to go out to public stand-pipes to fill up containers with drinking water It seemed like questioning a sacred belief - that apartheid was an unmitigated, 100% evil system. But there is less idolatry here now, as it dawns on most people that the new South Africa is still scarred by extreme poverty and high unemployment. No paradise Of course, Nelson Mandela continues to be lauded as the hero of the liberation of black South Africans from the oppressions of apartheid. Building houses for all under one programme proved too costly But he is also being criticised for changing the direction of the South African economy from active state intervention to neo-liberal, free-market economics. During his presidency, the government switched from RDP - the interventionist Reconstruction and Development Programme - to Gear, which stands for Growth, Employment And Redistribution. RDP promised paradise - clean water, mains drainage, land redistribution and a million homes - all in five years. But paradise did not come. The economy of South Africa simply could not bear the cost. So the finance system switched to Gear. Part of the thinking was that it would help to develop a substantial black middle class, whose taxes would then trickle down to the poor. The middle class did develop, but the problem with trickle-down is that it is just that - a trickle. Houses 'an insult' Millions of South Africans still live in shacks.  The ANC government now is simply an extension of the apartheid government  "Bricks" Mokolo, former ANC activist Rain and dust get in, there is no security against burglars and shack dwellers have to go out to public stand-pipes to fill up containers with drinking water. And there is no proper lighting which - quite apart from the obvious inconveniences - makes it very hard for children to get their homework done on dark winter evenings. A former African National Congress activist, "Bricks" Mokolo, told me it is still very hard to criticise the government here. He says everybody has been, as he put it, "made to love the ANC, made to love Nelson Mandela" and "made to feel small" if they dare to complain. Mr Mokolo tells me angrily: "I didn't wait for Nelson Mandela. I too fought for my freedom. I was tortured in an apartheid jail." He was tortured so brutally that prison officers thought he was dead. After leaving him in a mortuary fridge overnight, they dumped what they thought was his dead body in a field. Mr Mokolo says that housing, especially, was better under apartheid than it is now. He calls the new houses that are being built all over the country an insult because they are significantly smaller than the old matchbox homes that the apartheid government built in the townships. "The ANC government now," he insists, "is simply an extension of the apartheid government. There's still separate development," he goes on, "there are still townships, 20 years after liberation." His conclusion: "There were places for blacks in those days. Now they are the same places. They've just changed the word. They've changed black, to poor." World Cup threat? This is a radical outlook that I have heard much more often than on previous visits. World Cup organisers have taken precautions after a wave of strikes A wave of strikes over the past few weeks is evidence of mounting frustration, despite the undeniable success of the growing black middle class in their smart homes and fast cars. "But what about us?" say the rubbish collectors who were on strike for 10 days in April, or the train and dock workers who were out for more than two weeks this month. Mineworkers were about to go on strike, too, a few days ago and were only stopped by a court order. If they had stopped work, there could have been a threat to power supplies during the World Cup. All the same, stadiums are taking precautions, installing generators and back-up generators. This reminds me of the last World Cup, when I was in Baghdad - power cuts, blanked-out TV sets during some of the games. That surely cannot happen here, can it?