A Letter From South Africa by Jim Peron (September 1998)

When a country begins sliding into oblivion it really is the little things that get to you. You wake up in the morning and turn to see what time it is. The clock is off. The electricity is off again. Sometimes for a few minutes, sometimes for a few hours, but it seems to happen more regularly than before.

You pick up the phone at work to make a call. Nothing. Your neighborhood is without telephone service again. You breathe a sigh of relief—at least if all the phones are out, they’ll do something relatively soon to fix it. If it’s just your own line, it can take days before they’ll do anything.

After the power comes on, you turn on the television to watch a favorite program, and hope you get the right sound with the right picture. Sometimes you get the sound of one show with the picture of another. Sometimes it’s just the one or the other. Or a radio station instead of the soundtrack. You’ve read the papers—a large number of the “old” employees have walked out of the broadcasting studios. They couldn’t take it anymore. And since television is an arm of the government, their replacements are appointed politically, not because of their experience or ability.

You drive home after going out for dinner. Entire neighborhoods are without street lights. Well, to be more accurate they are without lights that work. And the lights have been out for months. The city has said it won’t fix them.

These are the little things in South Africa today. These are the things that annoy. The big things are too frightening even to consider.

Kafkaburg

For two years I couldn’t get a water/electricity/tax bill from the city of Johannesburg. Water and electricity are socialist enterprises here. I didn’t have an account number, nor did I know how much to pay. I tried calling the bureaucrats, but no help there: they said they’d get back to me, but they didn’t.

On September 25th, they showed up to turn off my electricity for failure to pay. The city workers refused to show identification, wouldn’t say whose account they were turning off, and wouldn’t show any legal authorization to do so. In fact, they told me they didn’t have to speak a language I understood (English). I called the police. I have a videotape of these civil servants telling me they aren’t obligated to identify themselves, and that if I refused to allow them on the property they had the right to tear down my gate. When I asked one of them for anything that would show them to be city workers, he replied, “This isn’t America you know.” I know! I know!

I told him, “It’s not Nazi Germany, either.” He later chastised me for running down “Nazi Germany.” “I’m sorry,” I said, “I didn’t realize you were a Nazi.”

I went to the city hall and waited hours for someone to see me. I was finally told to make a plan to pay the account. I was willing. I had R7,000 (7,000 rand) cash on me. But the bureaucrats wouldn’t let me pay or make a plan. They had forgotten to transfer the account to my name, you see; it was still in the old owner’s name and the bill was going to the wrong address. I was ordered to wait until they changed it over and sent me a statement.

I pay a R700 deposit and go. Two days later they turn on the electricity. Two months later, and still no statement has arrived. I call and call. “I’ll call you back,” they say. They don’t. I keep calling. Finally I get a sour bureaucrat who tells me I’ll have to pay R9,000 immediately and the rest over six months. I asked about the year payment plan. That was discontinued in November. “But I wanted to pay in October and you people wouldn’t let me,” I protest. “That’s your problem,” she says.

Back at city hall, I see another woman who spends the entire time screaming at everyone who comes near her. She screams in the phone. She screams at the switchboard for “bothering” her with phone calls. She informs me that it’s my obligation to pay my account whether or not the city sends me a statement. It doesn’t matter if I don’t know the amount owed. It doesn’t matter if I don’t have an account number to which the money is to be credited. My obligation is to pay an unknown sum into an unknown account, and if I don’t get it right they’ll turn off my electricity.

I got off relatively easy, though. Today’s newspaper told of one man who received an account for R500,000 in water use. The man owns a well and doesn’t even use city water. When he went in to talk to the bureaucrats, they were very sympathetic. They told him to pay 50 percent now or have his electricity cut off.

The Rise of Violence

Recently, I went into a print shop to get some flyers printed. The woman there was quite pleasant and we talked about the short blackout that day. She asked what I was doing in South Africa and told me that she and her family want to flee. Her family originally immigrated from India; like some Indians she was quite dark. Clearly she was not a member of the class “privileged” by apartheid. But what she said surprised me.

“My husband and I decided we were better off under apartheid. Sure now we can live next to white people and ride the same bus. But those things aren’t important.”

What is important? Not being afraid.

Today, the murder rate is ten times greater in South Africa than in the United States. One world atlas reports: “South Africa is the world’s most dangerous country (beside war zones), with 40,000 murders a year.” It wasn’t this way four years ago, before the ANC took power. But the government says the murders are a “legacy of apartheid.”

That’s part of the problem. Everything that goes wrong is “a legacy of apartheid.” The violence in the rest of Africa is a “legacy of colonialism.” It’s a legacy that has gone on for almost 40 years. Every time something goes wrong (and that happens constantly), the same litany of excuses are recited. “We inherited this problem from the corrupt apartheid regime.”

I lived for thirty-some years in the U.S. and never met anyone who had been shot. I was never near a bank robbery. Never heard of a friend’s car being hijacked. Only one person I knew suffered a burglary.

In the last two years many people I know have been burglarized. In fact, burglary is so common that people have stopped talking about it. One of my friends was hit six times in one year. The last time I saw him I asked what he had done that day. “I got a new TV,” he said. “Oh, how generous of you,” I replied. He has since left for England.

White farmers in particular are being targeted. Some, like Werner Weber, president of the Agricultural Employers Organization, believe there is an orchestrated campaign to force whites off the land so it can be redistributed. Farm attacks rise almost every year: 92 killed in 1994, 121 in 1995, 109 in 1996 and 140 last year. In some attacks people are murdered but nothing is stolen, indicating that robbery isn’t the motive. Farmer Dudley Leitch told an AEO meeting that while the murder rate among South Africans in general is 13 per 100,000, it is 120 per 100,000 for farmers.

A major cellular phone company placed an anti-crime ad in a newspaper saying, “President Mandela—you were in prison. Now we all are.” A top official of the bureaucracy that regulates telephones called the company and the ad was withdrawn. I guess it was too rude to state the obvious.

In America, you don’t see what’s happening. I know; I watch CNN. It doesn’t even come close to telling the truth about the decline and death of South Africa. The American media can’t tell the truth now—they have invested too much in telling everyone what a saint Mandela is.

Meanwhile, we live in prisons. My house has a set of bars on the outside of the windows and another set inside. I have a Rhodesian ridgeback dog patrolling the yard. I had a big, spiked, remote-controlled gate put in the drive. I can’t afford the precautions that others are taking. You now see individual homes with security guards. Walls over eight feet tall are common, with barbed wire or spikes on top. Across the street, my neighbors put an electric fence on the wall—now a commonplace sight. People are armed and have hired private security companies. In the U.S. following all these precautions would be considered paranoid. Here it’s average.

Police Story

On the street where my bookstore is located, a grocery has been robbed a couple of times. So were the post office and bank.

In the last few months, four of my customers have been hijacked by armed gangs, one of them in my parking lot. One was shot through the leg, another was shot at but missed. Another was beaten and spent weeks in the hospital. Well over 3,000 hijackings are reported each year. A family driving to Durban for holiday pulled to the side of the road so the two little boys could get out and take care of business. Several hours later the police found the two children sitting against the bodies of their dead parents; murdered for a car.

The new president of the ANC, Terror Lekota, told the press that the hijackings are the fault of apartheid. He claims the “apartheid regime” gave immunity from prosecution to hijackers in exchange for “intelligence” gathering on the ANC. Last year, another top government official blamed the spate of hijackings on whites. He said there was no crime wave at all, and that whites were inventing crimes just to collect insurance.

The acting head of the Licensing Department for the Johannesburg area, Gerrie Gerneke, issued a report in July 1997 confirming that the department was in the control of criminal syndicates. He said that half of all cars stolen in the Johannesburg area are “legalized” with new official documents within 30 days of being stolen. He said that cooperation between criminal gangs and union members has made it impossible for senior staff members or security staff to take any action. After Gerneke’s report to the government was made, two anonymous letters accused him of being a racist. As a result of these anonymous complaints, Gerneke was suspended for five months. A year later Gerneke says the government has not acted on any of his recommendations to deal with corruption. When a car theft ring was recently exposed, five of the 16 individuals arrested were policemen. The chief investigator said, “We found that policemen were receiving stolen cars and then selling them to their clients.”

In 1997 corruption reached such a level that Mandela appointed a Special Investigating Unit to look into the matter. According to Judge Willem Heath, head of the unit, there are currently more than 90,000 cases under investigation. If Heath and his crew manage to resolve one case of corruption per day, including weekends and holidays, it will take about 247 years to clear the current backlog. This doesn’t include any new cases that will arise. Heath thinks the cases involve a sum of around 6 billion rand.

In 1997 approximately 2,300 police officers were charged with corruption —just about one every three hours. Almost 500 police officers have appeared in court on charges of working with criminal gangs. In the Johannesburg area alone 700 police officers are facing trials for committing crimes ranging from murder to burglary. And everyone assumes this is only the tip of the iceberg.

Over the last two years, there have been dozens of major highway robberies. In broad daylight gangs of a dozen men armed with AK-47s and other “military” weapons attack security trucks carrying large amounts of cash. These robberies have netted millions for the gangs. Government officials blame security companies, banks, and anyone else they can think of. But some arrests have finally been made, the ringleaders have turned out to be ANC activists. The leaders who were arrested were officials in the so-called “armed wing” of the ANC, Umkhonto weSizwe. One gang leader had been Youth League secretary for the Johannesburg area. A close associate of his, also a gang leader, was arrested but “escaped” from jail. Both were recent guests at the birthday party of Peter Mokaba, Deputy Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism. There is evidence that Umkhonto weSizwe activists are not only behind some of the robberies, but that they are working with other armed cadres associated with so-called liberation movements from bordering countries.

In 1997 alone, there were 465 bank robberies. In all about $40 million was taken. Banks are raising their fees substantially to compensate for the losses.

Crime seems to be the only thing that works in South Africa—the risk of being arrested, tried and convicted is minuscule. In 1997, only 14.6 percent of murders led to arrest and conviction. Of 52,110 rapes there were only 2,532 convictions—about 6.7 percent. For the 330,093 burglaries there were 15,710 convictions, about 4.8 percent.

Experienced prosecutors have quit their jobs, replaced by novices who owe their positions to affirmative action.

During the 1997 Christmas season, the police and prisons “lost” almost 300 prisoners. In one instance a policeman took two prisoners to a bar for drinks. One of them borrowed his keys and returned to the jail to release 23 other prisoners. At another jail nine prisoners walked out, leaving behind a note: “We are out for Christmas and will be back on January 3.” (They didn’t come back.) Several prisoners left a police van when guards didn’t bother locking it.

In 1995, Sylvester Mofokeng was taken out of his cell for a soccer game. When he was returning to prison, he simply jumped out of the truck and ran through gates that were left unlocked. He was rearrested three months later, but in August 1996 he escaped again. Somehow he obtained a gun from a visitor and used it to force guards to release him.

Josiah Rabotapi is believed to be the leader of an armed robbery syndicate involved in the theft of up to $14 million in 30 armed robberies. He is also wanted for 16 murders. So far he has been arrested three times and escaped every time. Jan van der Westhuizen, a convicted murderer, has escaped from prison or police custody seven times.

When the police aren’t “losing” criminals, they are killing them. A recent government report showed that one person dies every twelve hours either while in police custody or as a result of police action. Two-thirds of these deaths take place during apprehension. According to one report, “an overview of 100 shooting incidents between police and civilians” showed a heavy “imbalance in casualties.” David Bruce, a researcher for the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation said, “In only five of the cases was a policeman hurt, and in one case a policeman was killed.”

In the northern suburbs of Johannesburg, citizens are fighting back. In some areas they have put security guards at the entrance to a subdivision. Entrances are closed off with gates to control who comes in and who goes out. Criminals can no longer simply load their cars with stolen goods and speed out when security guards stop them at the gate. These areas have seen dramatic reductions in crime. But the ANC has ordered the gates removed. It claims these efforts force crime away from white areas and are therefore racist.

This is life in South Africa today.

I’ve lived in South Africa for six years and I’ve seen a lot of changes. Even a few for the good. But the standard of living has declined. And people’s attitudes have changed: hope is gone, replaced by fear, anxiety, even horror. There is a joke going around: Americans have Bill Clinton, Johnny Cash and Bob Hope. South Africans have Nelson Mandela, no cash and no hope.

The Return of Apartheid

Another popular joke is that Mickey Mouse has a watch with the picture of our Ministers of Finance. In the six years that I have lived here the South African rand has depreciated by 50 percent. In just the last year it has dropped 30 percent.

The government has conducted a massive “jobs” program. But since the ANC has taken power the number of jobs has declined, despite sanctions being lifted and increased trade with the rest of the world. The only job increases are in government departments.

South African workers are not particularly productive. But the government has been pushing new labor legislation that continues to drive up the cost of South African labor. No wonder that fewer and fewer South Africans are employed.

The ANC is pushing a new “Equity Employment” bill through Parliament. This bill will force all employers to reserve a number of jobs for blacks. Businesses that don’t comply with the mandatory racial quotas face heavy fines. And so apartheid is back—the old laws in new packaging.

Recently, ANC members of Parliament have announced that they intend to introduce legislation applying racial quotas to sports. Specifically, the government wants to control rugby, a sport played traditionally by whites (unlike soccer, which is dominated by blacks). Mandela ordered a commission to investigate racism in the South African Rugby Football Union. SARFU took the issue to court and the court ruled against the commission. ANC officials then proclaimed the judge an unpatriotic racist for requiring Mandela to testify on why the commission was created.

ANC MPs, unable to get control of rugby legally, resorted to intimidation. They announced on the floor of Parliament that unless the leadership of SARFU resigns, ANC members will forcibly close airports to prevent other rugby teams from entering South Africa. Major corporations, all fearful of the ANC, threatened to remove financial support from SARFU unless the ANC got its way. Rugby head Louis Luyt, who had defeated an ANC partisan for the job, was forced out by the threats. After Luyt resigned, SARFU apologized to Mandela for making him go to court.

Communists in Government

The government of South Africa is actually a coalition of three groups. The ruling triple alliance is made up of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), the South African Communist Party (SACP), and the African National Congress (ANC), which leads the coalition. The SACP has a lot of influence in COSATU and together they exercise a great deal of control over the ANC. Thabo Mbeki, who just replaced Mandela as leader of the ANC, and is pegged to be president of South Africa when Mandela steps down, was trained in Moscow. His father, Govan, is an old line Marxist and SACP activist. At a recent ANC conference the hard left solidified its control over the ANC by capturing nine of its eleven top positions. Of the ANC’s 240 MPs in Parliament, 80 were appointed by the SACP. The ANC and COSATU also used some of their quotas to appoint SACP members to Parliament.

When Chris Hani was assassinated by Janus Waluz, a Polish immigrant, CNN called Hani, “a top ANC official” or “anti-apartheid activist.” But CNN didn’t mention that Hani was the head of the Communist Party and that Waluz was a refugee from communism. Instead, the impression was given that Hani was another Martin Luther King.

In the same way, many facts about Mandela and the ANC are never reported by the media. For example, Mandela awarded South Africa’s equivalent of the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom to Libya’s Muammar al-Qaddafi. Mandela has publicly said that Cuba is a model for a free, democratic society that is, in fact, more democratic than the United States. Castro has been here for friendly visits. When U.S. officials complained about Mandela’s cozy relationship with dictators, Mandela said that no other nation has the right to interfere in South African affairs—this from the man who supported sanctions against the old government. Curiously, Mandela dropped recognition of Taiwan at the demand of Communist China.

The ANC’s Bill of Wrongs

Gay rights are now enshrined in South Africa’s Bill of Rights. Gay publications around the world have praised the ANC for this. But in fact gay sex remains illegal. The government has taken no practical steps to legalize homosexuality. When a gay rights group took the sodomy laws to the Constitutional Court, the government opposed its effort. After a world-wide outcry, the government backed down. It appears the ANC is hoping the courts throw out the law, thereby taking credit for being pro-gay while not being responsible for the change. Yet the South African government continues to deny foreign gay partners of South Africans the right to stay in the country legally. The issue is in court, but the government is opposed to changes in the policy.

The ruling ideology is that “there are no absolute rights,” so the ANC put “weasel” clauses into the Bill of Rights. Any right guaranteed by the Constitution can be ignored. For instance, the right to engage in enterprise is absolute—unless infringed “by law.” Thus the government can do what it wants since it passes the laws. Other constitutional clauses say rights can be limited by government consistent with the operation of an “open” and “democratic” society. And remember, Mandela considers Cuba democratic.

The bill of rights negotiated by various political parties guaranteed freedom of speech. Repressive censorship laws were relegated to the dustbin. But the ANC has been pulling them back out and wiping them off.

A bill to repeal censorship was introduced in Parliament. I even testified in favor of it. The bill was mediocre but livable. Later, the ANC rewrote it in secret and passed it without making a written version available. The new bill actually creates a censorship body. All videos and films must be approved by the censorship board before they can be distributed. So-called “x-rated” material can be sold only in licensed adult shops. Anything deemed “hate speech” is illegal. The new “obscenity” standard is that anything “degrading” is illegal. Another victory for clear, concise legal concepts.

Lindiwe Sisulu, deputy minister of home affairs, said the government “tries” to balance free speech with the rights of “society, in reality, however, there can never be an absolute balance.” This means “not all speech can be equally protected.” Sisulu interprets the new censorship legislation much more strictly than in the past. She claims that “anyone who downloads pornography from the Internet will commit an offense.” Note that she has broadened this beyond the act which banned “degrading” pornography, bestiality, child porn, and hate speech. Now she says that any downloaded porn is illegal. Expanding the prior censorship of films and videos, Sisulu says all photos must be classified by the government before distribution. “No person may screen a film or photograph, including on a computer screen, which has not been classified by the Publications Board. This means that anyone placing material on the Internet must have a classification certificate for that material.” In other words the government now claims the right to classify—and ban—all photographs before they are distributed to anyone.

Yet the ANC stills finds the bill of rights too restrictive of government. Peter Mokaba recently gave a speech in a black area demanding that all blacks vote for the ANC so it can get two-thirds control of Parliament. He said this would allow it to rewrite the constitution and end all restrictions on government power. ANC secretary general Kgalema Motlanthe said that if the ANC won two-thirds control in the next election, it could govern “unfettered by constraints.”

Supine and Pusillanimous

In the last four years, the nation’s largest string of newspapers has lost its independence from the government after being taken over by Irish press baron Tony O’Reilly. O’Reilly’s Independent group is cozy with the ANC. An article in The Times of London says O’Reilly has been criticized for “his unhealthily close relationship with the ANC government. He began by appointing an advisory board stacked with ANC supporters and has been vocal in his support for all manner of ANC causes and watchwords.” Journalists have been unhappy that O’Reilly brought in his biographer, Ivan Fallon, to run the newspapers because Fallon “is disliked for his refusal to stand up to Government attempts to bully the press into uncritical support.”

According to The Times O’Reilly’s newspapers have downplayed scandals within the ANC government. In the Virodene scandal, ANC politicians promoted—and still promote—the so-called AIDS drug. Documents show that the company producing the drug was planning to offer a six percent share of the profits to the ANC. O’Reilly’s papers “have played down the whole matter, neglecting to cover key press conferences.”

Other newspapers, however, still manage to criticize the government, and the ANC and Mandela don’t like it. Mandela constantly attacks the press for being “opposed” to the “transformation.” In fact the press, on the whole, was staunchly critical of apartheid. Still, Mandela says the media, with the exception of television, are racist. In the next few years, legislation directed against the newspapers is almost certain. Mandela’s hero, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, wiped out recalcitrant newspapers by simply turning them over to the government.

Television is exempt from Mandela’s criticisms because the three main television stations are already controlled by the government. ANC officials run the stations and they are often deathly silent about the problems in South Africa. But they do have time for endless documentaries on Mandela and the ANC, with titles like “Our Heroes.” One new news director is a long-time ANC supporter with no broadcasting experience.

Two new mini-series have been produced for the coming season: one is a glowing film about the life of communist Helen Joseph and her fight for the ANC, and the other is about ANC partisan Bishop Tutu. A new television series, funded by the Labour Ministry, is called “Let’s Talk.” A recent episode showed the workers, all of whom are called “comrades,” on strike. The owner of the factory, who for some reason had an American accent, locked out the strikers. But the company management didn’t know how to build their own product, houses, and built them upside down! The government and the trade unions seem to believe that entrepreneurs and management are useless, and that all productivity comes from labor.

The South African Broadcasting System’s political allegiances are no secret: one station’s promotional commercial shows its on-air talent in “rainbow” clothing and marching with colorful flags to triumphant music. Several flags feature the face of Mandela. In another Stalinoid presentation, the television producers’ award show included a musical number with the chorus, “Oh, Mandela, we sing praise to you.” Not long ago, the son of the former president of the ANC, Oliver Tambo, who hosts an SABC talk show, ran an hour-long special praising media mogul Tony O’Reilly. No doubt the fact that O’Reilly has cuddled up to the ANC had nothing to do with the praise heaped upon him.

Fascism, South African Style

Civil society is being politicized. Everything must be solidified in the hands of the State and the State must be in the hands of the ANC.

Last year the government nationalized all water resources in South Africa. Under new legislation it will be illegal to dig a well without prior approval from the central government. The ANC attacked critics of the legislation as “racist whites” who want to protect their luxury swimming pools. Meanwhile the new rulers admit they can’t find 45 percent of all the water shipped to Johannesburg. Only 55 percent of the water is metered out—the rest simply disappears. But considering that meters are found almost exclusively in white areas, while black areas have unmetered taps, this should be no surprise.

But water is only the camel’s nose in the tent. The ANC Minister of Mineral Affairs, Penuell Maduna, called for the nationalization of all minerals, saying that “private ownership of mineral rights is unacceptable to the government.” Government spokesmen call private ownership “racist” because not everyone owns mineral rights in a private system. Maduna previously floated the idea that the government should also control all oil companies. Under the current system, price competition in petrol is forbidden and all prices are set by the government.

The hospitals in South Africa have become nightmares. Two years ago Mandela announced free medical care for children. The hospitals are now filled with unemployed women and their children. They sit there for hours to have a cough or a runny nose checked.

Dr. Zuma, Minister of Health, seems determined to make health care in South Africa equally bad everywhere. She has conscripted all medical students to be servants. They are to give two years of their lives to the State, to do what the State orders, anywhere the State orders. The legislation doesn’t even specify that the service has to be in South Africa. Speculation is that at least some will be assigned to Cuba.

When it was pointed out to Zuma that huge numbers of doctors and medical students are now emigrating, she called them “traitors,” and attributed their fleeing to “racism.” Wits School of Medicine reported that 45 percent of all students who graduated in the last 35 years have already left the country. A recent survey of the top doctors in South Africa revealed the almost unanimous opinion that Zuma is destroying the nation’s health-care system. The Independent wrote, “Many doctors said that Zuma’s apparent intention to introduce a communist or socialist national health system was stifling private practice and initiative. This, coupled with excessive control and interference, has left doctors despondent.” A spokesman for Zuma responded by saying that if the proposals are “seen as socialist, then we will continue to do so and offer no apologies.”

The destruction of health care has even affected the food supply. Vaccines that are urgently needed to protect livestock have run out. The only legal source for purchasing the vaccines in South Africa is through the government, and the government labs are empty. Farmers who send in their checks to buy the vaccines have the money returned. The top veterinary scientists are also leaving the country. At the Onderstepoort Research Centre only one of the original six specialists is still there. Onderstepoort, once considered one of the best research centers in the world, is now limping along. Scientists say there is a good chance that mutated viruses will decimate the beef, pork, and lamb industries before new vaccines can be developed. They warn that the public should expect a shortage of meat and milk as a result.

Under the old apartheid regime, government schools in black areas were woefully deficient. When the ANC took over the education system things changed. Now all the schools are woefully deficient.—equality has been achieved. But the number of students graduating from high school has declined under the ANC. Those who do well in school prosper only if they are the right color. The student who passed more courses with distinction than any other student in South Africa can’t even get a scholarship. Each application he has made has been rejected because he’s the wrong color. He has the best scholastic record in the country but no one cares. It isn’t wise to give money to anyone not approved by the ANC.

In the Eastern Cape, near Port Elizabeth, is the impoverished Khwezi Lomso Comprehensive School. The principal is Cecilia Behrent. During her tenure the school has achieved a pass rate of 84 percent, well above the national rate of 47 percent and double that of the provincial pass rate of 42 percent. The teachers’ union, in cooperation with the government, has been trying to have a union official replace Behrent, who is white. Her ouster is opposed by almost every one of her 1,100 students, almost all the teachers, and over 700 parents who have signed a petition on her behalf. The government refused to accept the petition.

Johannesburg Besieged

Johannesburg was a relatively safe and clean city when I moved here. I moved into a racially mixed area in the city center. I left a year later. Today, I won’t drive there in broad daylight. The streets are controlled by criminals. Some gangs sit at street corners and rob passing motorists. They break the car window, take what they want, pile it on the curb, and then wait for another car. They don’t even run with the stolen goods. They don’t need to; no one will arrest them.

Residents of my old neighborhood, Hillbrow, have discovered a new game: take cans of trash and throw them from 15th floor windows at pedestrians. The streets are filthy and reek of urine. Businesses are moving out. The luxury Carleton Hotel held on for awhile but finally gave up the ghost. No one would stay there, so the hotel closed its 200-plus rooms, and now sits empty.

Mayhem reigned on New Year’s Eve. In the Hillbrow section of the city, nearly 200 police officers patrolled an area of just a few square blocks —to no apparent effect. Three people were murdered on the streets that evening. Police who tried to stop looters were pelted from the high-rise apartment buildings. Paramedics were attacked when they tried to aid the injured.

So the ANC took action. Johannesburg is a massive city, and the ANC promised to break its management into several regions. “Local control” would then be achieved with four gerrymandered districts. Each district was drawn in the most convoluted way possible, ensuring that each had enough blacks. The ANC knows where its voters live.

The city hired thousands and thousands of new bureaucrats. In many cases two people did the same job—one black worker with the title and one white worker to do the work. Money was redistributed to the “previously disadvantaged.” While black townships haven’t improved, white areas have declined. Now Johannesburg, once the wealthiest city in Africa, can’t pay its bills, and can’t get bank loans. It went from budget surplus to bankruptcy in just two years. More ANC magic.

This black magic is being worked throughout South Africa. The British-based Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy recently said that 281 municipalities in South Africa are now technically bankrupt. That’s one out of every three cities in the country.

Public parks are now squatter camps. Broken water mains gush for days before they’re fixed. Pot holes remain unrepaired. The city budget allocates less than $100,000 for street repairs for the entire city! Inefficiency reigns. Under questioning in Parliament, ANC officials admitted that roads in Gauteng have deteriorated under their management. Transport Minister Mac Maharaj admitted that only 37 percent of the roads were in good or very good condition in 1997 where this was true of 80 percent of the roads in 1985.

The Political Struggle

In Johannesburg the opposition party to the ANC is the Democratic Party DP). Once a leading anti-apartheid party, it is now the only real opposition to the ANC left, and it has become increasingly libertarian. It supports the rights of gay people and free enterprise. It opposes affirmative action and censorship.

The northern suburbs are now staunch DP territory. And they are in a tax revolt. The government responds by sending in armed goons to terrorize elderly couples. The ANC isn’t happy. My area is the one area where the ANC doesn’t have a clear majority. It can’t institute one party rule here, so it intimidates, punishes, and withdraws basic city services.

To counter the opposition, the ANC now plans to make the entire Johannesburg area a “mega city.” No more regions. The DP areas will be swamped “democratically” by ANC supporters, allowing the ANC to continue to steal from DP voters and give to ANC bureaucrats.

Critics of the mega city were, of course, branded “racists”. (Today, that term has lost all meaning in South Africa. In fact, if you’re not labeled a “racist” one time or another, you’re simply not a decent human being.) Various community groups asked for a referendum. The ANC said that was undemocratic, and wouldn’t have it.

Local DP politician Frances Kendall called for a private referendum. Hundreds of voting booths were established throughout the city. The ANC ordered its supporters not to vote. In black areas voting booths were harassed and intimidated into closing. Then the ANC said the vote didn’t count because there weren’t enough voting booths in black areas. Just under 100,000 people voted. The vote was overwhelmingly against the “mega city”. The ANC said it didn’t care and would ignore it. After all the poll only expressed the views of racists.

When the ANC won power, the election was declared “free and fair” by European Community observers. One observer admitted to a Federal Party official that the election would be declared corrupt if judged by European standards, “but this is Africa.” For instance, more voters voted than existed. A recent census showed the population at under 39 million, not 44 million as previously claimed. Since more than half the population consists of children, there can’t be more than 19 million voters in the country. Yet more than 19 million cast ballots. No one seems to care that the ANC was elected with millions of fraudulent votes.

I was receiving hourly vote tallies by fax from the Independent Electoral Commission. I remember my amazement when I noticed that the vote total for the Federal Party was higher at 6 p.m. than at 7 p.m. Votes were disappearing. Vote counting went on for days when suddenly it stopped. For two days no results were released. IEC officials met with political party officials behind closed doors before the final results were negotiated and announced.

For the last several years the ANC has done everything possible to manipulate the voting system to increase its totals. First, it proposed that the voting age be reduced to 14 years since the overwhelming majority of youths are black. Public ridicule has quashed this proposal for the time being. Next, the ANC tried to change the laws so that non-citizens could vote provided they were from “neighboring,” i.e. black, countries. Because most white non-citizens are from England, Canada, the United States, etc. the white vote wouldn’t have increased. Opposition parties managed to kill this proposal as well.

Instead, the ANC achieved the same goal through the back door. The vast majority of “illegal” immigrants in South Africa are blacks from neighboring countries. The ANC granted them immediate citizenship. Meanwhile, “legal” immigrants, who are mainly whites from Western countries, find it increasingly difficult to stay in South Africa. Permanent residency for “legal” immigrants has become more difficult to receive, and the cost of simply applying has increased from less than $100 to over $1,400.

The National Party (NP), once South Africa’s dominant party, is fast losing support. It has never really opposed the ANC on anything, and it has made numerous backroom deals with the ANC to retain privileges for its leaders. The job of standing up to the ANC is filled by the “liberal” Democratic Party.

The DP has contested by-elections recently in several NP strongholds. In each case the DP handily beat the NP candidate. White voters no longer trust the NP, and with good reason. In the most recent local election the DP garnered 90 percent of the votes. Just before the election a top NP official said this seat was the NP’s “safest” in the country. But the ANC is launching a counter-offensive.

DP activists, many of whom were arrested for denouncing apartheid, are now branded racists by the ANC. ANC media mouthpieces refer to the “liberal racists” of the DP. ANC officials call liberals “bigots” and use the term “conservative liberals” to denegrate ANC critics. Party officials regularly give speeches denouncing critics as being “unpatriotic.” And recently they have started claiming that whites are preventing its programs from succeeding.

Mandela openly denounces the DP as racist. His objective is to sideline the DP. Of all the opposition parties—outside the Inkatha Freedom Party, which is strictly Zulu-based—only the DP has a hope of attracting black support. It must be destroyed if a one-party ANC state is to be constructed.

What happens depends largely on how the rest of the world views South Africa. If there is sufficient criticism and publicity, the would-be ANC dictators will back down. They have before and will again. But the ANC is whittling away at the rule of law and the world isn’t saying very much. The ANC won’t ban its opposition outright—at least not in the immediate future. Total government control of all the media isn’t in the cards yet either—but the newspapers will be attacked in the guise of promoting “diversity.” But there is a hope. International pressure and continued support for the DP may at least hold things off.

But the odds are against it. South Africa will most likely walk the road to misery, corruption, despair and destruction. Give it time. It won’t be any different here than in the rest of Africa.

Source:ourcivilisation.com

Why the title “Die, The Beloved Country”

Fifty years ago (1948) Alan Paton wrote a book ” Cry, The Beloved Country” about the horrors of apartheid in South Africa. It was an overnight best seller, which was eventually translated into more than 20 languages and became a set book in schools all over the world. To date it has sold more than 15 million copies and still sells 100,000 copies a year.

The sentiments in the prose which proved so popular have now been embraced with the abandonment of apartheid, with predictable and unpleasant results. So by altering one word of this famous title, the true effects of the change are described.

Death has prevented the author witnessing the achievement of his dreams, but his widow is still alive and has written a letter to the London Times explaining why she is now fleeing the country her husband loved.

John Morse chronicles South Africa’s slide to agony

The horrors of the ‘New South Africa’ are perhaps best encapsulated in the grudgingly disclosed facts concerning both the scale and the pattern of rape in the country. Whilst South Africa’s ANC rulers bask in the insane adulation of the world’s dominant ‘liberal’ establishment and its contrived ‘international opinion’, South Africa’s women, of all races, endure a reign of criminal terror, violence and cruelty unequalled anywhere else – incidentally exposing yet again the self-contradictory nonsense of liberalism, which simultaneously demands the dethronement of the white race and its values and the protection of women’s rights (something which in fact only Whites have properly understood and guaranteed).

South Africa is now being styled, not without good reason, the “rape capital of the world’. It is so designated in an article by David Jones in the Daily Mail of Saturday, November 13th 1999. This article backs up the observations of Jones’ colleague Ross Benson on the current state of that unhappy land two weeks before in the same paper, which I looked at in last month’s Spearhead. It is here, if anywhere, in the matter of rape, that key issues of censorship, racial motivation in the incidence of crime, and what amounts to the ethnic cleansing of the country’s white population are most dramatically crystallised and exposed.

Brutal assault

Jones sets forth the raw facts of South Africa’s now endemic problem of rape with uncompromising directness. He describes the brutal assault of a white woman, Mrs. Ame Brown, in her Johannesburg home, in the absence of her husband, who was working a night shift. Mrs. Brown’s two young sons were bound at the wrists and forced at gunpoint to watch by the four-strong black gang which had broken into their flat as their mother was violated in turn by each of the gang members. Says Jones: “As the first man made way for the second, he spat out the hate-filled words Ame, an Afrikaner, will never forget: “For years you Boers always took from us. Now we’re taking from you.”

In fact, Ame Brown worked as a care assistant looking after mainly black children at a Johannesburg home for youngsters. But her work on behalf of such an underprivileged, have-not section of the population obviously cut no ice with her assailants. Her race was all that mattered as far as they were concerned. “Afterwards,” continues Jones…

“… the attackers remained in the family’s home, a second-floor apartment, for almost two hours before brazenly carrying away everything they could find – from furniture right down to the boys’ favourite Dinky toys – through the front door and into a waiting car.”

The attack had what Jones describes as “its desired effect.” The Browns left the city, with its “gratuitously violent gangs and simmering undercurrent of residual racial resentment.” But their move to a rural location did not help them escape their nightmares. Their having been, in effect, thus ‘ethnically cleansed’ from Johannesburg, the family’s wounds, both psychological and physical, persisted and festered.

The youngest son, nine-year-old Justin, gave vent to what must have been suppressed rage of staggering ferocity and bitterness in one so young. In an attack on what was apparently the closest friend he had in his new home, a black boy of his own age, he tied the latter to a tree with his shoelaces, in the same way as he had been bound by his mother’s rapists back in Johannesburg and using exactly the same type of knots. He then beat the boy to pulp with a length of plastic hose.

Questioned by his parents, Justin, whom Jones describes as a “usually affable and impeccably mannered” little lad, replied, according to his mother, that “black people had come into our home and done horrible things to us, so why shouldn’t he do the same to them?”

Meanwhile, in the aftermath of her own savage attack, Ame Brown herself has been diagnosed as HIV-positive.

So much for the peace, equality and harmony that the abdication of South Africa’s Whites was supposed to inaugurate, and the ‘reconciliation’ (a weasel word that we shall be looking at later in its South African context) which we are endlessly assured Nelson Mandela was bringing about. The end of apartheid and European rule – as was widely predicted by any observer with half an ounce of sense decades before – seems only to have brought on a new, indeed an unparalleled – era of intensifying racial vendettas. This incident, which is far from isolated, perhaps best epitomises the country’s reality.

Effort to hide the truth

Completing the picture, Jones refers to the censorship which seems to constitute the principal response of the new rulers to the situation:-

“In the new South Africa, where the very mention of the words colour and race is now deeply taboo, I will no doubt be pilloried for relating this story, just as my colleague Ross Benson was vilified by sections of the press here two weeks ago for his painfully accurate article about the demise of post-apartheid South Africa.

“Instead of rounding on ‘racist’ outsiders and attempting to draw a veil over the underlying causes of the rape epidemic sweeping through this country with the speed and devastation of a veldt fire, the media and the ANC government would be better advised to address the facts.”

Rape in South Africa has now attained such proportions, says Jones, that…

“… thousands of women are expected to sign up for the first rape insurance policy. For £1.10 a month, it entitles victims to free anti-AIDS drugs, the morning-after pill, trauma counselling, alternative therapies and a full range of medical tests.”

In discussing the inadequacy of official measures to counter the rape onslaught, Jones focuses not just on the scale of what is happening but on the sheer vicious sadism of the attacks to which South Africa’s female population is being subjected. With grim drama, he comments:-

“In South Africa today, we are rarely just talking about ‘straightforward’ rape, if that is not too trite and unfeeling a phrase, but increasingly brutal and despicable rape.

“Rape by bottles and sticks and knives; rape by gangs who behave like packs of wild animals, biting and gouging their victims, with the intention of disfiguring them physically as well as mentally.”

He details a few instances:-

“Among the many harrowing cases I uncovered here, one black woman had her lips scorched off with a red-hot iron after her attack; another (black) woman had been deeply bitten all over her face and body.

“A young (white) bank clerk was pushed into a clay-filled building-site pit and raped just as she arrived for work in busy Central Johannesburg. Both her legs were broken, and afterwards her demented attacker abused her horribly with fistfuls of clay.

“Noeleen Naude, a 23-year-old Afrikaner, was caddying for her boyfriend and his father on a suburban golf course one warm Sunday afternoon when two black men, one with a gun, sprang out from behind a small hillock halfway round the course.

“After robbing the golfing party of their clubs and jewellery, the men took Noeleen away and raped her in turn, telling her: ‘We are black men and you are a white woman. We can do exactly as we want.’”

In the latter case, the culprits were caught and jailed for 30 years each. But this is unlikely to act as much of a deterrent. Despite such attacks as those on Miss Naude being “so commonplace they rarely rate more than a few lines in local newspapers,” only about one rapist in 20 risks going to prison, given present conviction rates, in contrast to three out of four in Britain, where we have long considered the security of our own womenfolk to be far from satisfactory.

A part of this, says Jones, is “thanks to appallingly shoddy detective work by male-chauvinist (sic), ill-trained, insensitive and under-manned police forces (some of whom have raped the victims they were interviewing).” Jones does not venture any comment on how far this state of affairs is due to the ravages of ‘affirmative-action’ recruiting in order to achieve the racial make-over of South Africa’s police which is ANC policy, nor how far the “inefficiency of the prosecution service,” which he also blames for the five per cent conviction rate, may be due to the same factor. Perhaps this may be assumed. But Jones does paint an appalling picture of official indifference – and worse.

Records ignore race factor

Speaking of rape and other crimes, Jones, rather absurdly, describes it as “in some ways laudable” that official police report forms no longer detail the race of criminals and their victims, as they used to under apartheid, “given that reconciliation is the name of the game in modern South Africa.” Apart from the fact that, in elementary common sense, there is, and can be, no ‘reconciliation’ as most people would understand it, where members of one group are deliberately committing violent crimes against members of another on an escalating scale, how can any such outbreak even be understood, let alone controlled, without an accurate ‘epidemiology’ of such crime? In the circumstances of South Africa, how can there be such a scientific criminology without accurate recording and analysis of the race factor?

In the mouths of the ANC régime and its supporters, the term ‘reconciliation’ would appear to have a special meaning. It seems to indicate yet another one-way street in which Whites give and non-Whites take, the former accepting whatever the latter dish out without protest or resistance. ‘Reconciliation’ appears to mean simply that South Africa’s Whites are expected passively to ‘reconcile’ themselves to whatever conditions non-Whites choose to impose on them.

This nonsense aside, Jones does manage to get something of substance out of the government’s ‘Secretariat for Safety and Security’. Whilst the majority of rape victims are black women – as is to be expected in a population in which a mere 14 per cent are white – white women are over-represented. An official of the Secretariat commented: “There is a higher percentage of white women raped than their share of the population.”

Adds Jones: “This might, or might not, explain why the Mbeki government no longer requires the race section of the crime report forms to be completed.”

This is of a piece with the observation, made in some sections of the media, that South Africa’s Whites in general have been disproportionately on the receiving end of the tidal wave of violent crime. For instance, of all occupational groups, it is reckoned that white farmers are most at risk of being murdered. Their casualties have been put in the hundreds since the demise of white rule. Murder in the countryside has gone hand in hand with large-scale encroachment of squatters on the country’s farms, and an evident disposition to drive white folk from the land which they and their ancestors first brought under the plough and, over many generations, made fertile and productive.

Ethnic cleansing

Rape and murder are the crimes normally associated with ethnic cleansing, and most quintessentially representative of it in most people’s minds. Judging by their combination with racial motivation in South Africa, there are few other places on earth suffering such a plague of this evil.

In the Balkans, the occurrence of ethnic cleansing was held to justify prodigiously expensive international military intervention – at least where Serbs and non-Moslems were held to be guilty of it. But in South Africa it is alive, well and internationally ignored. But here, of course, the victims are of culturally European, Christian background – a no-no in the New World Order to which South Africa has now been annexed.

Whites are being driven from pillar to post, and finally, in many cases, out of their land of birth altogether, by a combination of criminal, not to say terrorist, violence and ‘affirmative action designed to strip them of jobs, incomes and status – only the racial criterion applying for purposes of recruitment and promotion, regardless of character or competence.

So why the lack of international indignation, let alone action, that we have seen against the Serbs? The truth is that our ruling liberal establishment, dominant now throughout the West and hubristically inclined to impose its imperium on the entire globe, has made a huge emotional and political investment in the new multiracial South Africa. This has lasted two generations, almost since the end of the Second World War. The promoters of the process cannot allow it to be thought that, now they have got their way, there can be anything wrong with the outcome.

Facts must not be allowed to interfere with ideology. No matter what actually happens, the typically lunatic liberal delusion of ‘multiracial democracy’ in South Africa must at all costs be preserved inviolate, and maintained in its status as one of the self-justifying dogmas of our time.

Challenge to globalists

Notwithstanding occasional exposures like those of Messrs. Benson and Jones, there is today a virtual conspiracy of silence in protection of the new order in South Africa. This is consistent with the hysterical past attacks on the old order there. South Africa always represented a special challenge to the protagonists of liberal globalism, which envisaged as its cornerstone the merging of all racial and ethnic groups – with Whites as the main sacrificial victims – into a homogenised ethnic stew.

Especially after the victory of the Afrikaner Nationalists, with their policy of white exclusiveness and dominance, in South Africa’s 1948 general election, that country became, in liberal eyes, an unseemly warp in the pattern that international liberaldom had by now marked out for the future. More than that, Nationalist South Africa was a danger.

Partly this was because it was ruled by some of the most vigorous of the white peoples – Boer, Briton, German and other, people well able, other things being equal, to hold their own in a battle for their independence from the new liberal imperium. Partly it was due to South Africa’s immense mineral wealth, which made it difficult for economic pressure to be put upon her. Last but not least, the country’s new government was developing a racial programme which hinted at an alternative vision of world order, and one that could catch on elsewhere.

It was certainly the hope of South Africa’s greatest post-war leader, Dr. Hendrik Verwoerd, that this would be so. He frequently commented on the need for the countries of the West to climb out of their liberal ‘sick-bed’, in which he made it plain that, if he had anything to do with it, South Africa would never join them.

Verwoerd argued for apartheid – or ‘separate development’ – with great moral fervour. Whilst his priority was his own Afrikaner people, whom he saw as the standard-bearers of his country’s European identity, at the root of his outlook was the perception that South Africa’s multifarious peoples could only live in harmony if they lived apart. In view of what is happening now, who can say that he was wrong?

Far from wishing to oppress the non-white peoples – whose plurality apartheid, in his understanding of it, fully recognised – Verwoerd aimed to set up arrangements whereby each of them could be provided with a separate territory (a homeland or ‘Bantustan’) within which it could live as it saw fit and develop at the pace it preferred. The project foresaw ethnic self-determination, leading eventually to independent statehood, in a way that would liberate South Africa’s Blacks as far as possible from direct political domination by the country’s Whites, albeit within an overall framework of white leadership – bearing in mind that Whites were the strongest group and most of South Africa’s land surface would remain theirs – where internal peace would be facilitated by the fact that the possibility for the different racial groups to tread on each other’s toes would be minimised. At the end of it, whatever limitations the scheme might have laboured under, South African Blacks could have looked forward to ethnic sovereignty at least as substantial as that of most of ‘independent’ sub-Saharan Black Africa, and states probably more viable economically, whilst possibly avoiding the kind of tribal domination that prevailed elsewhere.

The word never became flesh. Verwoerd was assassinated, and his successors (some of whom may have been implicated in his murder) revamped the National Party, abandoned much of its vision, and ended up appeasing and seeking accommodation with world liberalism. The rest is history.

Was the old SA so bad?

So was the old South Africa really the unjust, tyrannical, hate-ridden monstrosity it has been portrayed as by its enemies?

When I first arrived there nearly 27 years ago, the country certainly presented a very different aspect to that of today, as described by Messrs. Benson and Jones. Despite the big numerical majority of non-Whites on the streets of Johannesburg, it was the ethos of the Whites that prevailed. The ‘feel’ of the country was European. Nobody arriving from any western land of origin had the sense of moving out of his own culture and civilisation. The atmosphere was one in which the work ethic, as understood in Europe and the West, prevailed. Economic life and public administration were expected to be efficient and honest in the European sense, and generally were.

Above all, law, order and public safety were enforced and preserved throughout most of the country. In areas designated ‘white’ under the provisions of the Group Areas Act – a key piece of apartheid legislation – peace and quiet, sometimes to the point of paralysing boredom, were the norm. Police officers were neither frequently seen nor frequently needed.

Amongst the black population, largely residentially contained within its own rural reserves and urban townships, it was only in the latter that crime attained serious proportions. It consisted almost entirely of black criminals preying on their black neighbours; in other words, it was a phenomenon mainly internal to black communities. It appears from what Benson and Jones say that this is one feature of the old South Africa that has been carried over into the new.

In most of the countryside, law and order very rarely, if ever, appeared a major problem. I never experienced any sense of danger when hitch-hiking, as I frequently did, entirely on my own in the furthest reaches of remote Zululand, the Transkei or other native ‘homelands’, or in the wilds of East or West Griqualand, mainly coloured districts within Cape Province.

None of this is to say that the old South Africa was a paradise. It was no such thing. Inter-group tensions and animosities were widespread, often being sharper between different non-white groups than between any of them and their white rulers. Of course, Blacks often complained against white rule, especially any aspects of it that might have borne down personally on the complainant. But there was enough realism amongst the majority to appreciate, not only that the Whites could not forcibly be overthrown, but also that if they ever were non-Whites would be immeasurably worse off.

Natural respect for power

Although never loved, the White Man was by and large respected – at least while he showed a determination to maintain his power. On the African Continent, whether between White and Black or among Blacks themselves, that is the sole criterion by which the legitimacy of government is judged. Africans are not interested in the finer points of their rulers’ character; they want to know only whether those who govern them are strong or weak. As South Africa’s Whites are now discovering, having voluntarily yielded up power against all the wisdom of their ancestors, woe betide the weak!

A part of the former strength of the Whites was expressed in the economic stability of the country. From the 1950s to the 1970s, it was clear to most people of all races that it was overwhelmingly the productivity and enterprise of the European that was creating a growing national income, in which all population groups shared, however unequally. The whole man-made structure of the country – farms, mines, cities, factories, advanced communications, etc. – was the product of the genius and hard work of Boers, Britons and other Europeans.

European imperialism, whether of Briton or Boer, inevitably produced some brutalities towards the natives. But such is imperialism and such, above all, is Africa, where things have always been thus from long before any European was seen or heard of there. That is the true background against which the alleged ‘tyranny’ of the old South Africa must be judged.

Two things must be said for the European settlers: firstly, they were great practical problem-solvers, as revealed in their physical development of South Africa; secondly, they, and they alone, successfully imposed peace and order on the situation that they found.

Now the Europeans have resigned their position of supremacy. Is anyone the better for it? In a country where unemployment now stands at 40 per cent, and the new masters’ public actions are dominated by an agenda of racial revenge, rather than anything of the least practical use to their own people, what is likely to happen to the once-impressive economic infrastructure that guaranteed to most inhabitants at least a chance of work and wealth. When ‘affirmative action’, crime and ethnic cleansing have made an end of the people who built practically everything, what then?

One thing is for sure. With the arrival in power of the ANC, the problem-solvers have been replaced by problem-creators. The ANC government, however much Tony Blair and Robin Cook may fawn upon it, is a corrupt gravy train made up of incompetents, crooks and parasites on the take. So what does this say about the whole 50-year anti-apartheid project, and about our own politicians who promoted it all this time?

The future

Whither then South Africa? Back to apartheid?

At the moment this is just not practicable. The ANC’s grip is too tight. Its leading lights and hangers-on, living the life of Reilly on the proceeds of theft from the Whites, are too tightly bound into their comradeship of corruption. For the foreseeable future, the ANC is likely to prevail in the misgovernment of South Africa, much as the communist parties of the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia prevailed over their own respective ethnic hotch-potches – the lure of the gravy train and the fear of counter-revolution causing their apparatchiks to hang together for dear life.

Nevertheless, apartheid remains the only specific for South Africa’s historical predicament to show any track record of success. If it were ever to be restored, this might happen by violence or consent. The ideal, of course, would be the latter, whereby the substance of apartheid’s original constructive intent was re-established through concurrence among South Africa’s separate peoples, once it was agreed that the continued reign of the ANC was intolerable for all.

Historically, salvation for South Africa has always originated from among the country’s creators, the Whites, and particularly the Boers. Today the latter appear broken and demoralised. If they were ever to revive their fortunes, and thereby those of South Africa as a whole, they would not be starting, as in 1948, from a position of strength, but from one of considerable weakness. To pull it off, they would have to discover in their midst some leader not only of inspirational courage, self-discipline and judgement, but of unprecedented political genius.

Will such a figure emerge? South Africa had better hope so.

Source:Spearhead.com

By John Morse

A stunning article appeared in the Daily Mail of October 30th. Written by Ross Benson, reporting first-hand from Johannesburg, it lifts the lid on the near-collapse of South Africa since white rule ended a few years ago.

And how may one measure that catastrophe? South Africa’s regression towards primeval barbarism, which Benson details, is quite neatly summarised at the head of his article: “A woman is raped every 28 seconds, qualified doctors are leaving in droves, while beggars and goats have set up home in the marble foyers of derelict banks. South Africa today has become a nation on the edge of self-destruction.”

Law and order have to all intents and purposes broken down in South Africa. Any sense of security no longer exists. Says Benson of the country’s crime:-

“Farmers are butchered in their fields. The parks and beaches have become killing fields. Car-jackings with mind-numbing violence are a daily occurrence. The murder rate is running at 27,000 a year.”

Benson then repeats the horrifying statistics for rape, of which more will be said. These figures, he comments, “breed the kind of fear that has you leaping at shadows, jumping red lights and climbing out of bed in the middle of the night to check, yet again, that you have double-locked the doors.”

For you to protect your home even halfway adequately, it now seems that you need to pay an ‘armed response’ security firm. But whatever you do is never enough. One black businessman told Benson that he had lost count of the numbers of his friends who had been mugged.

Everyone is in the firing line. No social gathering can take place without horror stories being exchanged. But at this point we get some hint of the censorship that hitherto has been mobilised to keep as much as possible of the truth from the public gaze (presumably an increasingly difficult task in the ever-worsening crisis engulfing the country). A white security man commented on the criminal mayhem: “It’s happening to your friends, your brother, his wife, your sister, your mother,” but, “it isn’t something you read in the papers or hear about on the television news any more.”

Adds Benson: “He carried a gun, but he wasn’t fooling himself. He knew it could happen to him. In Mandela’s ‘Rainbow Nation’ the dream is running blood red.”

Clearly, South Africa’s new ANC (African National Congress) Government is almost neurotically aware that the legitimacy of its rule is at stake here.

Decline of a city

Nowhere is the situation worse than in Johannesburg, where it is exemplified in all its worst manifestations. Benson gives a graphic description of how that unhappy city has declined. Here too, he comes courageously close to modern-day heresy in giving the White Man his historic due as the true creator of South Africa’s original productive infra-structure (a subject today largely taboo in a world sold on the ‘politically correct’ elevation of the non-European at the expense of the European), and also focusing on the White Man’s predicament now.

In a striking characterisation of the city, Benson writes:-

“Built on the largest seam of gold ever discovered, this was once the richest city in Africa, a gleaming steel-and-glass citadel rising out of the brown ocean of the Veld, a testament to the economic power (and perhaps the innate character? JM) of the white community that built it, but also an example of what can be achieved by hard work and individual enterprise.”

And now? “the skyscrapers are still there,” he continues, “but the people who gave them life and prosperity have gone, driven out by hordes of squatters, beggars and illegal traders who bought Mandela’s promise of a ‘better life for all’ – and demanded instant delivery.”

He continues:-

“Barbecues made of old oil cans blaze in the marble foyers of what used to be the headquarters of banks and airlines. There are goats tethered in hallways. Corrugated iron huts have sprung up on the once-manicured lawns.

“This is not an environment in which any respectable business person, be they black or white, can live or work – and most have fled.”

Benson next proceeds to a grim and frightening account of what has been very rapid urban and social decay in the centre of a city in which I once lived and worked myself. Now, even big business is quitting a metropolis of which it was once the raison d’être.

The country’s flag carrier, South African Airlines, has taken refuge in the distant outer suburbs. The big mining houses (which practically built the town) and even the Stock Exchange are to follow suit. It is evident they can hardly remain in a city centre in which it is unsafe for their employees to travel to and from work. Benson also reports that the Carlton Hotel has closed and sold all its contents, and “the Holiday Inn is a deserted fortress, its 800 empty rooms protected by reinforced steel shutters.” It is as if the London Hilton, the Dorchester and our other luxury hotels were to close down because order had totally collapsed, and the city had become uninhabitable! All this is the tale of one of the world’s major cities crumbling into chaos and dereliction, perhaps one day in the not too distant future to become as defunct as ancient Babylon.

It is now impossible even to walk in any degree of safety to the South African Supreme Court building to get one’s case heard. The alleyways leading to it are prowled by muggers who, says Benson, “are not open to appeal.” Although the court still goes through the motions of administering the law, this has, comments Benson, “helped ease the backlog of cases” in a country where, as other commentators have noted, ‘affirmative action’ has led to the colonisation of the bench by magistrates who are illiterate, incompetent, corrupt and racially and politically biased, and routinely bail murderers and rapists back into the community to re-offend. Cases are never dealt with, crime explodes – no law, no order!

Fear at night

No wonder Central Johannesburg is now so much a place to avoid, especially at night. “As dusk falls,” says Benson…

“… the streets start filling with prostitutes and criminals pushing drugs, and pills that turn a black skin white – before eventually killing you (if AIDS hasn’t claimed you first; up to 10 per cent of the population is carrying the virus and three quarters of the entire health budget will soon be spent on treating the incurable).

“You can hear the occasional sound of gunfire rolling down from Hillbrow, by cruel coincidence Johannesburg’s first integrated neighbourhood.”

To many, including me (who once lived in that very high-rise district), this does not seem so much of a coincidence.

Implicitly referring to the consequences of ‘affirmative action’, Benson describes how…

“… the police keep promising to move in and clean the place up; they never do, and if they did it probably wouldn’t make any difference: the Minister in charge of so-called security recently admitted to parliament that a policeman is three times more likely to commit a serious crime than an average member of the public.”

Summarising his observations of Johannesburg, Benson comments:-

“So much for the dream. This is the reality – and it is a shocking one, worse than I had anticipated. I have seen cities abandoned in war. This is the first city I have ever seen abandoned to the barbarians in time of peace.’

So what of the luckless Whites, themselves abandoned amid this chaos to the consequences of ‘multiracial democracy’? This, Benson makes clear, is not only a tale of de facto displacement by conditions of social chaos which white people find utterly intolerable; this in itself has caused mass white migrations. In Johannesburg those who opt to remain in proximity to the city have retreated to its northern outer suburbs. But there is a mass movement, in effect recoiling on the old pioneer routes, back to Cape Province, the region of South Africa in which Europeans first touched land. It is estimated that in five years 80 per cent of the country’s Whites will be clustered towards the Cape.

Even in the Cape there is now a project to establish at least one urban area, some miles into the interior outside Cape Town, which will in practice be a fortified settlement. With property priced beyond what most Blacks, and quite a few poor Whites, could possibly afford, it is, at the size of Monaco, to be protected by a 33,000-volt fence and patrolled by armed guards.

But in addition, fearful of lawlessness, the white population is also being harassed and persecuted by the law. As Benson comments:-

“The government has lost the battle of the streets but they have control of parliament, and they have used their power to pass legislation aimed specifically at one ethnic group.”

Instead of apartheid, there is now ‘affirmative action’, whereby Whites are de jure displaced from their jobs and deprived of their incomes to make way for Blacks, without regard for the latter’s qualifications or abilities, but purely on racial grounds in order to “redress past imbalances.”

The result? Air traffic controllers are now being appointed who cannot read their instruments. According to Commissioner of Police George Fivaz, 30,000 of his officers are “functionally illiterate.” To supplement the facts quoted by Benson, one may add the purging of the health services over two years ago (as also reported at the time in the Daily Mail, by Peter Younghusband, the paper’s then South African correspondent) by the Minister of Health Nkosazana Zuma, who replaced district surgeons and doctors with Cuban recruits competent neither in the English language nor as medical practitioners.

Working class whites thrown on scrapheap

Working class Whites are now being dumped and paid a miserable dole to make way for Africans. Benson quotes the example of a bus driver sacked after 17 years service. For blue-collar Whites, “the economic trap-door has opened beneath them and dropped them below the poverty line. Unemployed and never likely to be employed, their children ragged and barefoot, dependent on benefits of £150 a month each, which is often not paid (the social services are being ‘re-organised – and there’s a sinister phrase!). Some families can no longer afford to feed themselves.” These now rely on church soup kitchens.

Apparently, whilst the violently racist, anti-white politician Patricia De Lille says that Tony Blair has donated £20,000 to the home for sick children for which she works, “no-one,” says Benson, “is digging in their pockets to help poor Whites. They are off the end of Mandela’s rainbow, without a pot of gold in sight.”

The Government in the new South Africa is intolerant of opposition. According to white Democratic Party opposition leader Tony Leon, “they want everyone to be ‘on side’. If you criticise them – and we do vigorously – they call you neo-nazi racists” (a strange epithet considering that Leon is Jewish). It seems that even Patricia De Lille – whose Pan-Africanist Party’s slogan is “One settler [i.e. white person], one bullet” – has been “battered by this accusation.” The cause? She has been taking the ANC Government and its Ministers to task for the stupendous corruption whereby they have turned themselves and their most privileged supporters into a new class of fat cats (all very typical of post-colonial Africa).

Free school lunches promised by Mandela fail to reach the children; family allowances are not paid; council houses are so jerry-built they are virtually uninhabitable. But when these failures come under criticism as in the case of de Lille the response of the Government under the new president Mbeki is to threaten her with expulsion from parliament for being ‘racist’, and bring in legislation to outlaw criticism of a person’s ‘private life’ which might “impair their dignity.” De Lille asks where the money for these public projects went, and answers “into someone’s pocket.”

There was corruption under South Africa’s ancien regime, as there is any country in the world under any government. But it was never, as it is today, on a scale sufficient to cause the collapse of whole areas of public administration.

In a nutshell, then, thanks to Ross Benson, we now have an overview of the ‘New South Africa’ from which to take stock. What we see is a picture of vicious and exploding crime, of chaos verging on anarchy, of corruption and incompetence way beyond anything in the country’s past, and of the racial harassment and persecution of the white minority – the people who actually built the country in the first place, and without whom there would have been literally nothing for their successors to take over and bring to ruin.

It is not a picture which those with their heads screwed on the right way did not predict, decades ago, as the likely outcome of majority rule – though such people were then, and would still now be, vilified as “right-wing, racist reactionaries.” or worse. Such a fate has come upon Ross Benson, who has been roundly denounced in sections of the South African media, according to a second article by correspondent David Jones, also writing from Johannesburg, published in the Mail two weeks after his own.

Backlash

The Mail’s own letters page witnessed a similar backlash of censorious intolerance in the week following the publication of Benson’s report. This response looked a little like a co-ordinated ‘write-in’ against Benson by aggrieved ANC supporters in Britain. This was in spite of Jones‘ characterisation of his piece as a “painfully accurate article about the demise of post-apartheid South Africa.” It is worth pointing out that neither Benson nor Jones have any record of being ‘racists’ or supporters of apartheid – something that ought to be self-evident, to those in the know, by the fact that they have access to the columns of a major national newspaper like the Daily Mail.

[As stated at the beginning, this article was published on October 30th. The year was 1999. Why don't we hear more of these stories from the mainstream media?? -Editor-]

Source:ELLIOT LAKE News & Views Blog

Issue No. 221

Research: Estelle Lombard

September 1998

I was arrested for fighting apartheid, but what good is freedom if rampant violence terrorizes blacks and whites alike?

By Jenefer Shute

March 28, 2000 | A ringing telephone at 6 a.m. will jangle the nerves, especially when your whole family lives, as mine does, in another time zone. And my mother’s voice on the line that October morning was peculiarly high and tinny, not only, I realized, from distance – calls from South Africa still sound as if they’re echoing through interstellar space – but also from hysteria, barely contained.

“Everyone’s all right,” she said at once, as she always does (code for no one has died) “but Ben and Annie have had a horrific experience.” I braced myself for a tale of burglary, perhaps even mugging, since my brother Ben and his wife, Annie, live in high-crime Johannesburg – a place where, at parties, hosts hire security guards to walk guests to their cars; a place where drivers run red lights for fear of carjacking; a place where gangs rob bank trucks by blowing them to bits with AK-47s and then looting the wrecks.

But as I listened, with a creeping sense of dread, I realized that something far worse had happened. Not only to Ben and Annie, which it certainly had, but also, in a minor key, to me. To me and my stubborn complacency about South Africa after apartheid – the “new South Africa,” as it’s called there, always in quotes.

Here’s the short version, which is what I heard from my mother that morning, over a year ago (details came slowly, over the next few days). Ben, who’s 37, had come home from work that night after midnight. He works in arts management, so late nights at performances or events are part of his job. Annie, his 29-year-old wife (or bride, as I still thought of her, since the last time I’d seen them was at their wedding that March) was asleep at home, a modest townhouse in a gated suburban complex, typical for young, professional, but not particularly affluent white South Africans. As usual, Ben drove his car through the electronic gate and parked in the lot. He was walking the few hundred yards down the path to his door when somebody emerged from the darkness behind him and thrust a gun to his head.

Although Ben immediately offered up his wallet and car keys, three young men with guns forced their way into the house, proceeded to rape Annie (in Ben’s presence, à la Clockwork Orange), pistol-whip both of them, tie them up, gag them and torture them intermittently for the next five hours. During those hours, having bundled Ben and Annie into duvets so they couldn’t see, breathe or move, the intruders robbed and trashed the place at their leisure, pausing only to cook themselves a meal and drink all the liquor in the house.

Quite a party they threw themselves, apparently, interrupting it now and then to threaten Ben and Annie with death if they so much as coughed (which, given that they had towels stuffed into their mouths, was hard to avoid). At some point in this very long night, the men left, loading Ben’s car with everything they could lift, but Ben and Annie, not knowing if their assailants would return, or if all of them had indeed left, waited until they heard birdsong before daring to move.

A horrific experience by anyone’s standards. But hardly uncommon in Johannesburg, which now has one of the highest rates of violent crime in the world. The murder rate there is about nine times that of the United States. A rape occurs every 10 minutes in South Africa today, and a violent housebreaking is so common that it doesn’t even make the papers and is only perfunctorily investigated by the police, who, outnumbered, overworked, undertrained and often corrupt, hold out no hope of solving it (or the thousands like it). The only noteworthy aspect of this case, apparently, is that my brother and sister-in-law weren’t killed.

Something else worth noting: As my mother narrated these events, she didn’t – as far as I can recall – specify the race of the three young men. She didn’t need to. I took it for granted, correctly, that they were black. The overwhelming majority of violent crimes in South Africa, against people of all races, are committed by black offenders. Blacks are, of course, the majority in South Africa, but their involvement in violent crime is still vastly disproportionate to their numbers.

Random violence, rape, robbery can erupt into anyone’s life, no matter where you live or who you are – we know this only too well in the United States. But this incident, this South African statistic, struck me with a peculiarly bitter poignancy. Not only because family members were involved, though obviously for that reason. Not only because of the unfairness of it – my brother worked for the racially integrated Market Theatre in the 1980s and returned to Johannesburg from London in 1991 to become part of the “new South Africa” – because violence is always unfair. (And class privilege is still class privilege, however clean its conscience and its hands.)

No, what I experienced was a different, more complicated kind of confusion. As I listened, in the October pre-dawn, to my mother recounting these events, I thought I could detect in her voice not only shock, not only pain, not only disbelief, but a shrill note of vindication. My mother is a native-born South African, profoundly, reflexively, candidly racist. For as long as I can remember, she has been telling us, her children, that “they” are out to get us, that “they” will break into our houses, “they” will beat us, rob us, rape us.

And now “they” have.

I try, and fail, to get on with my day

The first thing I did after hearing this news was call a close friend, a fellow South African expatriate who lives in New York. Attempting a tone of world-weary irony, the tone with which, like mental tongs, we’ve been passing bits of political information to each other lately, I said: “Want to hear a bulletin from the ‘new South Africa?’” I don’t know why I was trying to sound blase, nor why I imagined I could. My friend later told me that, as soon as she heard my voice, she thought someone had died.

The next thing I did, numb and blank as if stun-gunned, was wash and dress for work, put lipstick on my bloodless face. Still numb, I headed out of the house to the subway, remembering, as I passed the bank, that I was flat out of cash. At the bank door, a panhandler stirred in his nest of newspaper to ask for change. I glanced down at him. He happened to be black. “Why should I give you anything,” I thought, viciously, before I could stop myself. Inside the bank, as if in retribution, the machines were down. I went over to someone’s desk, the manager’s, I think. “May I help you?” he asked. “I need …” I said. Covering my face with my hands, I burst into tears.

So now “they” have – have beaten, robbed, raped – and where does that leave me? Since, as a child, I first began to be prickled by doubts about the way we were living – “But why does the maid live in a room in our backyard and her children live somewhere else?” – I’ve resisted my mother’s racism, her birthright (and mine) as a white South African. Resisted it, often, in confused, inchoate ways indistinguishable from acting out, but resisted it nonetheless. I’ve spent years outing my mother as a racist so that I didn’t have to be one – though of course (see above) I am.

I left South Africa in 1978 because I didn’t want to face long-term jail or house arrest, like so many of my friends, but the truth is I would have left anyway. You didn’t have to do much to be arrested in those days: You just had to speak against apartheid, demonstrate against apartheid, write against apartheid, all of which I did, and was duly arrested for. (And then arrested again when I returned, 13 years later, as a reporter, to the wrong place at the wrong time: a large demonstration in central Johannesburg which the police broke up with machine guns and dogs.)

I left to go to graduate school. I left to read books, see movies, write without censorship, talk on an untapped telephone. I left because I wanted to put 10,000 miles between myself and my family. I left because I couldn’t stand the guilt. I left because I could, because I have a document, dated 10/04/1973, numbered (0178) BUN 10047, that advises the reader, in English and Afrikaans, to “Please note that – SHUTE, JENEFER PATRICIA, Identiteitsnommer – 560711 0049 00 1, has been classified – AS A WHITE PERSON.” I left, brandishing my British passport, because I wanted to shed my South African identity like a skin. I left because I hated white South Africans, though I’m one myself – which causes problems with pronouns, among other things.

All these years – as an angry adolescent, as an anti-apartheid activist, as an exile separated from family and country for 13 years and as a writer – I have labored hard to prove my mother wrong. I thought, finally, that I had – that history had. But now, with the violation of my family, I see that she has, in a sense, been proved right. Right for all the wrong reasons, perhaps, or for reasons more complex than she could ever acknowledge, but nevertheless, in a sense, right.

So now I wonder, what does that make me? Wrong? How, I wonder, are my smug political certainties, forged during the anti-apartheid struggle of the ’70s and ’80s, going to accommodate the violent reality of post-apartheid South Africa? And if my mother and I could ever talk about this, what would I say?

A few days after my mother’s call, I managed, finally, to get Ben on the phone. He and Annie were staying at her sister’s house, Annie under sedation but still crying all the time, unable to be left alone for a second. In a tone of grim composure, he narrated the whole story, the exact sequence of events, of which I’d heard only fragments so far, flashes, with dark, terrifying stretches of the unknown in between. Even though what he told me was heart-sickening, it was somehow better to know all the details, not to have to imagine them, as I had tried to do over several sleepless nights. Now all I had to do was assimilate them.

A few details haunted me, not necessarily the most brutal. It haunted me that, when the gunman first stepped out of the darkness, he yanked Ben’s sweater over his head from behind, so Ben saw a face, a gun and nothing more; it haunted me that the robbers ripped the shoes right off Ben’s feet, the wedding ring off Annie’s hand. It haunted me that they branded the carpets with their cigarettes. And it haunted me that they kept asking Ben where his gun was, knowing no white South African household would be without one. (It was in his car.)

I had also forgotten that Ben is severely claustrophobic – won’t even enter an elevator – and so, in being gagged and hooded, swaddled and bound, for several airless hours, he was, along with all the other terrors being visited upon him, making his own private trip to George Orwell’s Room 101.

Two things pained me the most, though, two things that he said. In that same tone, measured but grim, he kept repeating, over and over again, that he could never have imagined such terror, “Just sheer terror, Jen – being afraid, every single second, that you were about to die.” He also, as he told his story, kept saying, almost matter-of-factly, to establish chronology, “That was before they raped Annie,” or “That was after they raped Annie.”

To hear those words coming out of my brother’s mouth, referring to the woman he’d so recently married with such joy, cut me to the core. Those words made it all real, irreversibly real, allowed me to glimpse, like a parallel universe of pain, what the statistics must mean: 62 murders, 73 attempted murders, 136 rapes, 174 armed robberies and 606 assaults on an average South African day. On a single warm Johannesburg night.

If you become a victim, try to remember details

Tips for tourists from the South African police:

* Never walk the streets at night, especially in Johannesburg, Cape Town or Durban.

* Do not invite attention by wearing exposed jewelry or watches.

* Keep 20 rand ($4) at the ready for muggers at all times.

* Be particularly alert near house gates, driveways and garages. When entering or leaving the property, look out for suspicious vehicles or persons.

* Be wary of suspicious activity at traffic lights and stop signs.

* When stopped, be ready to accelerate quickly if approached by strangers.

* Ignore anyone indicating that there is something wrong with your car. Drive immediately to the nearest police station or garage for a check.

* Beware of people seeking directions, particularly in a parking lot.

* If you become a crime victim, try to remember as many details as possible.

In recognition of recent crime trends, the police might have added: Don’t get out of your car to investigate a flat tire on a nail-strewn street; don’t stop in rural areas for cattle lying in the road; don’t take a bathroom break in the bushes beside a major highway, otherwise your children will have to sit for hours with your corpse and no one will stop.

For full disclosure, they might also have added: On any given day, according to a recent survey, about 10,000 of us officers will fail to show up for work, fewer than a third of us will be doing any active policing, and, oh yes, if you call, it might take us a while to get there – say, about four hours.

This wasn’t, I must add, Ben and Annie’s experience with the police. The police were there within minutes and treated Annie with exemplary sensitivity (something rape victims in South Africa can’t take for granted). But Ben and Annie, as I’ve mentioned, are white, and the vast majority of victims of every kind of crime in South Africa are black.

I have to keep reminding myself of this, as I fixate on Ben and Annie’s trauma, reminding myself that criminal depredation and lack of police protection are rampant, out of control, in the areas where black people live. So are guns – the country is awash in light weapons, legacy of the freedom struggle and of regional wars; you can buy an AK-47 on the streets of Johannesburg for about 40 bucks, and most of them end up in black neighborhoods, terrorizing the poor. Black women and children are also, overwhelmingly, the victims of sexual assault and domestic violence in South Africa, which has the chilling rate of 124 rapes per 100,000 females (compared to about 39 per 100,000 in the United States).

Certainly, crimes against whites in their suburban citadels attract the most attention, the most outrage – as, for instance, in this essay – because they’re bad for business and worse for tourism. But the affluent can always buy better insurance, build higher walls, install shriller alarms, pay private guards to escort them to their doors and sit in their living rooms overnight (which is what Ben and Annie have done). The poor can only continue, in silence, to be preyed upon.

I knew all this, of course, before Ben and Annie were attacked, understood, in theory, all the factors contributing to South Africa’s high crime rate (which I was quick to label the “legacy of apartheid”) – a rapidly swelling population, now approaching 38 million; an unemployment rate variously estimated at 20 to 40 percent; an inefficient and discredited police force, which was used mainly for political repression under apartheid; lack of adequate housing, education, health care; deep economic divisions; and, in certain areas, the true legacy of apartheid, a complete rupture of the social fabric.

I knew all this, in the abstract. I just didn’t want to, didn’t have to, confront it. I wasn’t ready to admit that crime and violence on such a scale were not, as advocates for the dispossessed might say, a kind of crude social justice. And anyway, we never expected it to be Utopia, this “new South Africa” of ours, I’d claim: For us it was miracle enough that it existed at all.

But now, as violence erupted vicariously into my life, I had to confront the fact that such lawlessness might, in the end, imperil the very freedom and democracy South Africans have struggled so hard for. For if you’re not free to walk the streets, then what is your freedom worth?

My mother’s worst fear made flesh

When, after my conversation with Ben, I talked to my mother again, she was obsessed with AIDS. Annie’s rape had been, quite literally, my mother’s worst fear made flesh – the fear that had restricted bicycle-riding and sunbathing for my sister and myself growing up, that had governed the length of our skirts – and she could speak, for a while, of little else: What the rapist had and hadn’t done, what Annie had and hadn’t said, and so on. There are, of course, objective grounds for her anxiety – almost 3 million South Africans, most of them black, are HIV positive – and Annie was already being treated prophylactically with protease inhibitors.

But as I listened to my mother speak, as I attended to the hushed, horrified thrill in her voice, I realized that what obsessed her wasn’t disease but contamination, a sense, almost, of cellular miscegenation. A worse nightmare for her, perhaps, than rape itself.

My mother was born into an English-speaking family, of, as far as I can tell, spectacularly ill-matched parents: Her mother was South African, with dour-faced Afrikaner Calvinists not too far back in the bloodline, her father an immigrant Welsh Jew, with, it turns out, interestingly olive-skinned North African antecedents. World War II kept the couple apart for five years, and then, as the marriage foundered, they separated for good.

What little I know about my mother’s childhood – something else we can’t talk about – suggests a makeshift family, headed by a flighty and unfit single mother, hanging on to the lower middle class by its fingernails. My mother was smart, skipped two grades at school, but there was no money for college – hence, I think, much of her lingering bitterness and class resentment, her fear of falling. (Hence, too, the overachieving daughter with the Ph.D. and the peculiar guilt that comes not only from surpassing the parents but from turning the parents’ gifts against them.)

My father, likewise excluded from a college education, is an Englishman who came to South Africa in his early 20s for work and never left. He met my mother on the job; she was a bookkeeper, he was a flirt. I don’t think he ever intended to immigrate: I think one day he just looked around him, at the job and the wife and the kids and the servants and the house, and realized that he had.

Like so many of his compatriots, he retains to this day his BBC diction, his navy blazer and his stiff upper lip; he pretends, after 40 years, not to understand Afrikaans; and he decided decades ago that, in public as in domestic life, silence was the key to survival.

I think my mother has always been afraid. Afraid, as a child, of not having enough. Afraid, as an adult, of having too much, which might then be wrested away. Afraid of being home alone, while “they” lurked outside, but equally afraid of leaving the house. Afraid of driving, of car accidents. Afraid of losing her husband to heart attacks or younger, slimmer women. Afraid of the servants – the maid, the nanny, the gardener, the laundry woman – who, she knew, hated her. Afraid, all her life, of “them,” who inhabited her nightmares and her backyard.

So we lived in a cage, with bars on the windows and dogs at the door; every few years, prompted by some inner clock, my mother would grow to loathe the house we were living in and put it up for sale, as if moving equaled mobility, as if changing the cage would make her feel free.

And so, as I listened to my mother speak with horrified fascination about the rape and the AIDS risk, instead of compassion, instead of concern, I felt the familiar irritation rising up, the urge to lecture, to dismiss. The same urge I felt, a few years ago, when she told me, with terror, of having her handbag stolen off the hall table in the middle of the afternoon – and I wanted to laugh, as if it were somehow comical, the intruder in the afternoon, the hall-table handbag snatcher.

The same irritation I felt when she would compulsively retell her favorite horror story: the night that my sister, alone in the house with two small children, awoke to find a pair of knife-bearing burglars at the end of the hall. (She called the police, they fled). A bad experience, yes, a close shave, scary, I always wanted to say, but surely, in your racist paranoia, you exaggerate, Mom. Don’t you?

Awaiting an epiphany that never comes

I could have gone back, for good, in 1991, when Nelson Mandela was released, the ANC was legalized, and everything, incredibly, seemed possible. But I didn’t: I went, notebook in hand, for a five-week visit, an alien revisiting the planet of my own past, awaiting an epiphany that never came. I could have gone back in 1994, when, even more incredibly, apartheid was over, the ANC was in power, and a new post-apartheid society was scrambling into existence, full of hope and need.

But I didn’t: I didn’t want to, couldn’t face it, thereby, in a sense, giving the lie to a lifetime’s worth of politics. Without the alibi of exile, I’d run out of excuses. I just didn’t have the courage and generosity to live there again, that was all.

Instead, I’ve made a series of visits since 1991, each one followed by a bleak depression: visits for Christmas, for book tours, for Ben and Annie’s wedding and for my parents’ 40th wedding anniversary, where, marooned in a remote beach cottage by record-breaking rains, a never-before assembled family group (my parents, my sister, her husband, their two sons, Ben and Annie, an uncle whose wife had recently died, and myself) gradually decompensated, like something out of Bergman, over 10 bitter days. I returned to New York with pneumonia.

So, no, I don’t get back much. And when I do, I’m struck by how little (outside the inner cities) people’s daily lives have changed. You see black faces where you didn’t before; white South Africans are poorer and more afraid. And human life, which apartheid made cheap, has become, unthinkably, cheaper.

That Christmas, two months after the assault, we exchanged gifts as usual, Ben and Annie and I. I gave Ben a new wallet to replace the one that had been stolen; Annie got the NYPD sweatshirt she’d asked for. They sent me some notepaper made of elephant dung, a new local craft, ecologically correct. A joke, perhaps, on the writer in the family.

Ben and Annie have moved back, with great reluctance, into their home, refurnished and redecorated with insurance money. They’ve talked about moving, possibly to Cape Town, where the crime rate is lower, but Ben’s work depends on the arts scene in Johannesburg, so they feel stuck.

Annie is back at work, at her marketing job for a hotel chain, but she only recently started driving again – she feels too vulnerable in her car – and still can’t be left alone. They’ve hired a private guard to meet them at the car when they get home, and escort them to their front door. The condo complex has also hired a guard to monitor the gate, another to patrol on foot.

Yet Ben and Annie still don’t feel safe, are still swamped, several times a day, by rage and pain and fear. They’re seeing a counselor, of course, and waiting, patiently, for time to do its work, to let them get on, if they can, with life and love and babies.

In the meanwhile, this is how they live. This is how millions of South Africans live now, white South Africans and black South Africans, in fear.

I don’t know what to say to Ben and Annie except – given our Anglo emotional training – stilted words of love and comfort. I don’t know what to say to anyone who asks why this happened: It’s clear that the old “legacy of apartheid” line isn’t going to work much longer, not even for me. And least of all do I know what to say to my mother. I don’t think I can face another conversation about how “they” all have AIDS.

But I wonder whether, one day, we might not be able to have another kind of conversation. And if we did, if we could, what would I say? That, my South African mother, you lived your whole life afraid – and, in the end, it turned out there was something to be afraid of? Not what you thought it was – not “them” – but what we South Africans, all of us, have wrought.

salon.com | March 28, 2000

Source:Salon.com

SA is a dangerously self-deluding country, one in sore need of a sharp dose of reality. Much as he may enjoy public affection, the sooner Nelson Mandela bows out, allowing us at last to bury all the fantasy and fairy tales, the better for all concerned.

The different approaches of the SA media reflected the fantasy and the reality. The Johannesburg Star, a publication where sound judgement has never been king, devoted no less than 23 mind-numbing pages, including a 20-page commemorative issue, to Mandela, his life and times.

The glorification was excruciating, the rapturous adulation and soggy sentimentality ominously reminiscent of the superhuman status conferred on “Uncle Joe” Stalin, Ceausescu, Castro and Kim Il-sung (not to mention Bokassa and Idi Amin).

Opposed to that, The Financial Mail, in a single short leader, deplored the overkill, describing this latest bout of Mandela mania as “embarrassing.” Unquestionably, the ANC’s sharp-suited PR people did go overboard. What’s worse, we’ve been here a good many times before. Who will forget when our martyr-hero was released from Victor Verster Prison on February 11, 1990?

Though some of us White troglodytes had grave reservations, for most South Africans the freeing of Mandela was an intensely exciting, long-sought historic event. Measured against the gigantic global furore, the exultation created almost equated with the Second Coming, with Mandela himself about to descend from the Pearly Gates like some unscheduled fourth member of the Holy Trinity. For a while, SA was a nation delirious with joy and relief. Arising from his many and earlier private discussions with De Klerk and other Nat cabinet ministers, it was predicted that Mandela would be a decisive force in promoting reconciliation and constructive dialogue. Then, as now, he was universally delineated as a man of peace.

Blessed indeed are the peacemakers. But I seriously doubt that Mandela has ever really shown himself as one of the blessed. Effectively, on that all-important day, in his opening salvo, Nelson did not declare peace, but war. Almost the very first words he uttered were a high-octane, anti-apartheid chant, not in English, but in Xhosa: “Amandla! Amandla! I-Africa mayibuye!” . . . “Power! Power! Africa is ours!” Not a very convincing display of moderation, if one understands the sub-text: “And the Whites must take their chances.”

Even more disturbing, he continued: “I salute the SA Communist Party for its steady contribution to the struggle for democracy. I salute General Secretary Joe Slovo, one of our finest patriots. We are heartened by the fact that the alliance between ourselves and the party remains as strong as it always was.” Hardly a declaration that what he had in mind for the coming “New SA” was a Periclean democracy.

Certainly, he has built no Parthenons for us. Undeterred, De Klerk and a psychopathic media continued to assert that Mandela’s sole platform was indeed love and peace, that what our saintly crusader envisioned and sought was a stable, productive and safe SA, a reign of justice, prosperity and multi-racial harmony. In other words, universal suffrage in a unitary state, a halo for Mr Mandela and we would all live happily ever after.

Peace and prosperity? It was an offer SA could not refuse. Of such illusions (dubbed, without irony, “miracles”) tragedies are born. In the event, Mr Mandela’s “New SA” is that tragedy. No country ever entered the community of nations to such international jubilation. Sadly, as the ruinous state of our economy testifies, we have blown it. But – a tribute to the incredible power of sustained propaganda – Mandela himself remains, probably permanently, one of the most persistent media-manufactured folk heroes of our day.

Let’s put him under the spotlight. He is universally presented as the supreme statesman, abounding with intelligence, wisdom and sagacity. Measured against all reasonable criteria, he projects more as a satyr than as a saint, more as sublime political opportunist than a political genius. His engaging cherubic smile notwithstanding, he seems caught in an antique world of “liberation movements” and “African socialism,” as much out of his time as the Nats were out of theirs.

It is one thing to bask in the glory of exaggerated global idolatry. It is quite another to change a nation and create a peaceful, just union of some 43- to 62 million people (no one knows the real size of SA’s population) where all, Whites, Blacks, Asians and Coloureds, enjoy freedom, prosperity and equal opportunity. Well might we today ask: Has he measured up to the legend? Has he repaid the vast faith invested in him?

To that, we might answer: Was it ever realistic to suppose that a single man, one moreover in jail from his 40s through to his 70s (and suffering a bad case of Karl Marx disease), could deliver a democratic, free market society enjoying harmonious multicultural democracy, even supposing he had so wished?

There is little merit in accepting the PR version and not looking at the historical record. If someone is the subject of hero worship on an intercontinental scale, his record of achievement must be critically evaluated. On that basis, we cannot disguise that Mandela and the ANC have failed, a failure terrible in its character and terrible in its consequences. To suggest anything else is analytically preposterous.

The raw reality is that SA today is a broken country, trapped in a vicious cycle of massively declining State capability. Their skills and managerial genius properly harnessed, the Whites could have played a felicitous role in helping create a viable post-apartheid society. Their help was spurned. Crudely applied affirmative action and renewed, blatantly racist policies blocked it, to the point where Whites now are a frightened, heavily marginalised people, their numbers declining all the time through brutal murder and migration.

To repeat, we are today a corrupt, sick and increasingly dirt-poor society. No hype or hoopla can change that. The ANC’s performance has been so inadequate to its great task that SA society is now fraying at 1 000 edges. A very different picture to that The Star presents. Unfortunately, a huge part of the blame for the disaster rests with Mandela and his communist connections. Is he himself a card-carrying communist?

That has always been denied, but slice it as you like and despite all the compendious published material on him, no one really knows what he is or what he stands for. All we know for sure is that for most of his adult life he has been a committed communist fellow traveller. And, as such, made a variety of stupendously damaging decisions.

In the late 1950s/early 1960s it was Mandela who agreed to join forces with the old Communist Party SA (CPSA), something Stalin had long sought. In Moscow in 1928 Communist International (the Comintern) directed: “The CPSA should pay particular attention to the ANC. Our aim should be to transform the ANC into a fighting national revolutionary organisation.” Mandela was the man who finally made that possible, his first big sell-out of his own Black brothers: a classic case of what Lenin termed “revolutionary defeatism,” which means that, to facilitate the revolution, the proletariat must defeat and destroy their own country.

From then on the communists, led by Joe Slovo, long fingered as “Moscow’s man in Africa,” virtually hijacked the entire ANC organisation, linking it formally to Moscow’s star. Despite the window dressing assumed for Western benefit, that situation – the SACP jockey riding the ANC steed – obtains to this day. The communists never made any secret of the fact that they were using the ANC for their own purposes.

The December 1982 edition of the Soviet journal, World Marxist Review, stated: “The national liberation movement in South African owes its present scope and clarity of purpose to our party’s tireless activity in the organisation’s political and ideological structures.” Slovo himself admitted the parasitical relationship when he said in Angola in 1985 that his communist revolution could “only be won under the banner of the ANC.”

In September 1985 the ANC’s official magazine, Sechaba, described how the SACP and ANC were “two hands in the same body.” Mandela’s next great mistake was to endorse violence, which in the end meant terrorism: a seriously bad idea. Together with Slovo he founded Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) in 1961, this to act as an armed revolutionary group to foment violent, nation-wide insurrection. Mandela was commander-in-chief, Slovo a deputy commander.

It was the communist conspiracy to overthrow the SA government of the day via violent revolution that eventually brought Mandela (on a CIA tip-off) into the Pretoria Supreme Court as Accused No 1 in the Rivonia trial. The chief prosecutor, Dr Percy Yutar, produced ten documents, all in Mandela’s own writing. These presented some pretty arresting statements and concepts: in particular, his preference for communism.

At no time did the defence challenge the authenticity or authorship of the documentation submitted. In one 62-page document, How To Be A Good Communist, Mandela declared: “In our country, the struggle of the oppressed people is guided by the SA Communist Party and inspired by its policies. We communist party members are the most advanced revolutionaries in modern history. The people of South Africa, led by the communist party, will destroy capitalist society and build in its place socialism. One must be a revolutionary . . . not a reformist.”

Is that what inspired him to assist Joe Slovo in founding Umkhonto? Some years earlier Mandela had spent time in North Africa, studying terrorism and revolutionary insurrection. He paid particular attention to the bloody Algerian underground movement, its structures and tactics. These lessons he incorporated in war plans for SA.

In conformity with the Algerian practice, he advocated that “traitors and informers” have their noses cut off. At the end of the protracted Rivonia proceedings, Mandela made a 4H -hour address from the dock, ever since hailed as one of the great political testaments of the 20th century: and a major plank on which his formidable reputation was founded. But, contrary to the propaganda, it was neither spontaneous nor all his own work.

Only many years later did Basil Sampson, a former editor of Drum, disclose that the speech was in fact a carefully contrived document which he himself edited and polished at the request of Mandela’s counsel, Bram Fischer, an Afrikaner and probably the most fanatical communist ideologue this country has ever known.

In his book, Rivonia: Operation Mayibuye, H H W de Villiers concluded that the Rivonia conspiracy was not caused by apartheid: “the revolt was inspired by communists. The pattern was copybook communist strategy to create chaos by sabotage, riots . . . to manipulate the indigenous population.” It is the still-largely untold story of the ANC’s communist connections that remains the greatest threat to SA. Even here a passionately partisan media has twisted things.

The more the communists gained a stranglehold on the ANC, the more it was presented as a “nationalist” movement concerned only with justice and advancing the cause of SA’s Black people. Of course there are and always have been many in the ANC with no Marxist/socialist aspirations whatsoever and who, knowingly, would have nothing to do with communism.

But, on the whole, the more prominent of these got short shrift. Mandela, in an interview with the Cape-based journal, South, just before his release from prison, made that adequately clear: “Co-operation between the ANC and SACP goes back to the early 1920s . . . even within the ranks of the ANC there have been at one time or other, people – and some of them were highly respected and influential individuals – who were against this cooperation and who wanted SACP members expelled from the organisation.

Those who persisted in these activities were themselves expelled, or they broke away in despair.” (APN emphasis). Which tells the whole sad story. Final thought: If adulation must be tolerated, it should be reserved for pop stars and soccer players. When they fail, as indeed they eventually must, they leave behind a trail of bitter-sweet memories. But politicians who fall from grace leave only a bitter harvest behind them.

When the Mandela legend is finally exposed to the gaze of a less adulatory public, he will join the likes of Nkrumah, Nyerere, Kaunda and Mugabe. The smouldering ruins of the nations which fell to their tender mercies will speak more poignantly than the practised hacks of The Star and its gauche sisters. -Source http://www.matriots.com/apn/219/index.htm

Source:South Africa the truth

1% van alle blanke Zuid-Afrikanen zijn vermoord sinds 1994.

Als we dit afschuwelijke gegeven omzetten naar ons eigen land, Vlaanderen, zou dit neerkomen op 64.000 mensen die vermoord zijn, gedurende 14 jaar of meer dan 4.500 slachtoffers per jaar. Het gaat in Zuid-Afrika heel vaak over sadistische moordpartijen, gepaard gaand met nietsontziend geweld.

Niet te verwonderen dat er zovelen zijn, die wensen uit te wijken, althans zij die het zich kunnen veroorloven. Anderen blijven koppig in wat ook hùn land is. Leest u ook dagelijks in uw kwaliteitskranten deze gegevens ? Ja, toch ?

Oorsprong:Angeltjes Blog

By Alan Gold | The Australian

July 11, 2008

ON an overcast day in London’s Hyde Park, dozens of the world’s most famous glitterati recently came together to join with a crowd of 50,000 adoring fans to shower Nelson Mandela with their love and unquestioning devotion on his 90th birthday.

When presidents, prime ministers and Hollywood superstars line up to wish you happy birthday, and when your bash is hosted by superhero Will Smith, you know you’ve reached the very zenith of international recognition and are already inscribed in the annals of hagiography.

There are very few international statesmen or women as famous as Mandela. Since his time in prison and his subsequent presidency of South Africa, he has superceded Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Theresa and pope John Paul II as the moral conscience of the world. All Mandela has to do is to speak out against something he perceives as evil or wrong, and it immediately becomes holy writ for journalists, politicians and tens of millions of idolising disciples who see him as a rock of integrity standing firm against a tidal wave of straw men.

While the rock concert was in full swing, I received an email from a South African friend, somebody who has long been mystified by the international reverence of Mandela.

“Why,” my friend wrote, “are these kids cheering for him and treating him like some messiah? Don’t they know his history, that he was an advocate of violence and sat idly by while his organisation committed murder and torture?”

It’s remarkable how time can ameliorate history. What the congregation rocking in Hyde Park probably didn’t know was that long before most of them were born, Mandela was one of the leaders of the African National Congress, who created an armed wing called the Umkhonto we Sizwe or Spear of the Nation, which was dedicated to bombing civilian, industrial, military and government targets. South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission has accused it of torture and executions without due process.

And far from being a prisoner of conscience during his time as inmate 46664, Mandela was jailed for advocating the violent overthrow of the government. In his quarter of a century in prison, Mandela refused to publicly renounce terrorism as a weapon.

The universal hatred of the apartheid regime in white South Africa has blinded us to the reality of the acts of murder, torture and terrorism committed by the Spear of the Nation, which Mandela and his colleagues presided over in their leadership of the ANC. This helps to explain why, until the beginning of July 2008, Mandela was still on the US list of terrorists.

Of course, it’s easy to understand why Mandela is so revered. He’s the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, and in the past four decades has been awarded more than 100 prizes, citations and degrees. Nor should his accomplishments since being released from his prison be diminished.

More than any other, he is the leader credited with bringing down the hated and racist apartheid regime.

But before he is accorded the same Mahatma status as Gandhi, who peacefully reclaimed India from the British and a man whom Mandela says was his guiding light and inspiration, it’s important to examine his record as a freedom fighter. What it shows is that like so many black Africans fighting the evil of apartheid or colonialism, he has a record of advocating and condoning violence.

During his presidency of South Africa, he deliberately courted leaders of nations who abuse the human rights of their citizens. It’s by examining his often overlooked past that Mandela is revealed as anything but a saint. And it’s all too tempting to forgive him and his colleagues their excesses because they were fighting a brutal and oppressive white racist regime that treated blacks as subhuman.

But were we to justify the means in light of the end result, then we would have to condone every act of terrorism and the carnage of every freedom fighter’s atrocity. Gandhi showed the world that non-violent non-co-operation is a far deadlier weapon than bombs and bullets.

Since he stepped down from the leadership of a nation with rising tides of crime and infection, his legacy can be divided between the man who ended white racist rule and the failed leader who left South Africa far worse off than when he was elected.

Yet he is still elevated to near sainthood by a largely unquestioning West, an icon carried aloft on the idealism of the young and the shoulders of those who hate racism.

Because of the reverence in which he is held, few in the media ask him why it is that he has made a profession of befriending and supporting those dictators who are the declared enemies of the West.

During his time as president, Mandela was a strong supporter of Uganda’s insane dictator Idi Amin, of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, of Hafez al-Assad of Syria, of Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, of Fidel Castro of Cuba, of the theocratic leaders of Iran, and many other dictators. This may be viewed as guilt by association, but when he became president and apartheid was demolished as an instrument of government, Mandela rarely publicly acknowledged that it was the sanctions and disinvestment by Western governments and corporations, and the voices of men and women of conscience in the West, who had been largely responsible for the overthrow of white rule.

Yet despite his nation’s debt to America, Europe and nations that went out of their way to oppose apartheid, Mandela has been hugely critical of the West, associating instead with its enemies.

It’s a pity that so few people looked beyond the iconic image when he emerged from incarceration and questioned Mandela’s actions and principles. If they had they done so, it’s likely that his 90th birthday flock would have been much smaller.

Alan Gold is an author and was a delegate to the UN World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa.

Source: The Australian

Monday, 30 June 2008

By Sarah, Maid of Albion

It is often said that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, however, this usually means that the other man has been less than fastidious in his choice of hero, or that the “freedom fighter” in question was on the crowd pleasing side.

On the 27th of June, London’s Hyde Park played host to a concert in honour of Nelson Mandela’s 90th birthday and as expected it received wall to wall coverage from a star struck and worshipping media, who continue to laud Mandela as one of the greatest, or indeed the greatest, heroes of our time.

The beaming old man appeared on stage in one of his trademark multi-coloured shirts and cheerily acknowledge the cheers of the adoring crowd, most of whom have been taught to believe in his sainthood since their first days in primary school, which, for many of them, will have occurred around the same time their hero walked free from Robben Island.

The unquestioning belief in Mandela’s universally admired saintliness was again on display in the gushing media coverage and by the unending line of politicians and dignitaries from presidents to Prime ministers who queued up to genuflect before him and sing his praises. It is a brave politician or journalist who would dare to question the godliness of this legend and consummate showman, and hence no such questions were raised, nor were his much vaunted “achievements” subjected to any objective scrutiny.

No matter how many speeches are given or how many news articles are written, it will be a long time if ever before the truth about Mandela is told.

In fact the truth about Mandela is so hidden in mythology and misinformation that most know nothing about him prior to Robben island, and those who do tend to exercise a form of self censorship, designed to bolster the myth whilst consigning uncomfortable facts into the mists of history.

For most people all they know about Mandela, prior to his release in 1990, was that he had spent 27 years in prison and was considered by many on the left at the time (and almost everyone now) to be a political prisoner. However, Mandela was no Aung San Suu Kyi, he was not an innocent, democratically elected leader, imprisoned by an authoritarian government.

Mandela was the terrorist leader of a violent terrorist organisation, the ANC (African National Congress) which was responsible for many thousands of, mostly black, deaths. The ANC’s blood spattered history is frequently ignored, but reminders occasionally pop up in the most embarrassing places, indeed as recently as this month the names of Nelson Mandela and most of the ANC remained on the US government’s terrorist watch list along with al-Queda, Hezbollah and the Tamil Tigers. Of course the forces of political correctness are rushing to amend that embarrassing reminder from the past. However, Mandela’s name was not on that list by mistake, he was there because of his Murderous past.

Before I am accused of calumny, it should be noted that Mandela does not seek to hide his past, in his autobiography “the long walk to Freedom” he casually admits “signing off” the 1983 Church Street bombing carried out by the ANC and killing 19 innocent people whilst injuring another 200.

It is true that Mandela approved that massacre and other ANC killings from his prison cell, and there is no evidence that he personally killed anyone but the same could be said about Stalin or Hitler, and the violent history of the ANC, the organisation he led is not in question.

According to the Human Rights Commission it is estimated that during the Apartheid period some 21,000 people were killed, however both the UN Crimes against Humanity commission and South Africa’s own Truth and Reconciliation Commission are in agreement that in those 43 years the South African Security forces killed a total of 518 people. The rest, (some 92%) were accounted for by Africans killing Africans, many by means of the notorious and gruesome practice of necklacing whereby a car tyre full of petrol is placed around a victim’s neck and set alight. This particularly cruel form of execution was frequently carried out at the behest of the ANC with the enthusiastic support of Mandela’s demonic wife Winnie.

The brutal reappearance of the deadly necklace in recent weeks is something I shall reluctantly focus upon later.

Given that so much blood was on the hands of his party, and, as such, the newly appointed government, some may conclude that those who praised Madela’s mercy and forgiveness, when the Truth and Reconciliation tribunal set up after he came to power, to look into the Apartheid years, did not include a provision for sanctions, were being deliberately naive.

Such nativity is not uncommon when it comes to the adoring reporting of Nelson Madela, and neither is the great leader himself rarely shy of playing up his image of fatherly elder statesman and multi-purpose paragon. However, in truth, the ANC’s conscious decision to reject a policy of non-violence, such as that chosen by Gandhi, in their struggle against the white government, had left them, and by extension, their leader, with at least as much blood on their hands as their one time oppressors, and this fact alone prevented them from enacting the revenge which might otherwise have been the case.

As the first post Apartheid president of South Africa it would, be unfair if not ludicrous to judge Mandela entirely on the basis of events before he came to power, and in any event there is many a respected world leader or influential statesman with a blood stained past so let us now examine Nelson Mandela’s achievements, and the events which have occurred in South Africa in the 14 short years since he took power in following the post Apartheid election in 1994, and the new South Africa which he created after coming to power on a surge of worldwide optimism and hope in 1994, when, following the end of Apartheid, he and his followers promised a new dawn for what became termed the Rainbow Nation.

Today South Africa stands out as one of the most dangerous and crime ridden nations on Earth which is not actively at War. In 2001, only seven years after the end of Apartheid, whilst the city of Amsterdam in the Netherlands with 5,6 murders per 100,000 population was declared the “murder capitol of Europe”, Johannesburg, with 61.2 murders per 100,00 population and remains the world’s top murder city.

In South Africa as a whole, the murder rate is seven times that of America, in terms of rape the rate is ten times as high and includes the ugly phenomenon of child rape, one of the few activities in which South Africa is now a world leader. If you don’t believe me, you can read what Oprah Winfrey has to say about it here.

All other forms of violent crime are out of control, and Johannesburg is among the top world cities for muggings and violent assault, a fact seldom mentioned in connection with the 2010 World Cup which is scheduled to be hosted in South Africa.

As always with black violence the primary victims are their fellow blacks, however, the rape, murder and violent assault of whites is a daily event, and there is more …

As with the Matabeleland massacres, news of which the BBC, together with much of the world media suppressed for twenty years to protect their one time hero, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, another secret genocide is being ignored by the world media, the genocide of white Boer farmers, thousands of whom have been horribly tortured to death in their homes since the end of Apartheid. Anyone who clicks on this link should we warned that it includes some very gruesome images as the savagery of these attacks belie the authorities attempts to dismiss them as nothing more than a “crime wave”.

Given that it is now all but illegal in South Africa to report the race of either victim or the perpetrator of a crime (unless the perpetrator is white and the victim black) and as modern South Africa’s official crime statistics are notoriously massaged, it is impossible to know the exact numbers of farm murders that have taken place. Many reliable sources estimate the figure as close to 3,000, but even if we take the more conservative figure of 1,600 quoted in the politically correct South African press (but not quoted at all in ours) this is three times the numbers killed by the South African security forces over a period of 43 years, and which the UN calls a crime against humanity.

To put this in perspective, the population of South Africa is 47 million, (13 million less than Britain despite its far greater land mass) of which the 4.3 million whites account for 9.1%, about 1% less than the immigrant population of Britain. Can you imagine the outcry if 1,600 (let alone 3,000) members of a minority community in Britain were tortured to death by the native population?.

Yet when the victims are white, there is hardly a peep in the South African press and silence from the international media. Compare this to when a white youth is the killer, such as in the case of Johan Nel, who shot three Africans, a story which became instant world wide news with the predictable screams of racism and machete wielding mobs baying for his blood.

(And they accuse us of hate?!! Don’t such people nauseate themselves with their hypocrisy?!)

Crime aside, Mandela and his ANC inherited the strongest economy in Africa, indeed, despite economic sanctions, South Africa was still one of the richest world nations, and indeed initially there was a brief post Apartheid boom, resulting from the lifting of sanctions and due to the fact that until affirmative action forced most of the whites out of their jobs to be replaced by under qualified blacks, those who had built South Africa were still in place.

However, any optimism was to be short lived. Now, after just 14 years of rule by Mandela and his grim successor Mbeke, corruption is rife, the country is beset with power cuts and the infrastructure is crumbling.

The nation’s great cities like Durban and Johannesburg, which could once rival the likes of Sydney, Vancouver and San Francisco, had descended in to decaying crime ridden slums within a decade.

And in recent months we have seen the so called Rainbow nations ultimate humiliation, as xenophobic anti immigration violence spreads across the country. (“xenophobic” is what the media call racism when blacks do it) As poverty and unemployment explodes and is exacerbated by the floods of immigrants flooding in to escape the even more advanced Africanisation of the rest of the country, the mobs turn on those they blame for stealing their jobs, their homes, and their women.

Thus the cycle turns, and, like watching some barbaric version of “back to the future”, on the news we see exactly the same scenes we saw on our televisions twenty years ago, wrecked buildings, burning vehicles, mobs brandishing machetes, axes and knives hacking at everything and everyone which comes within their reach. Most horrific of all, we see the return of that most savage symbol of African brutality, the necklace where, to the cheers of a blood thirsty crowd, some poor trembling soul, with a tire around his neck, is dragged from his home and set alight, exactly as all those other poor souls were set alight throughout the Apartheid years, when we were told it was all the evil white man’s fault.

As nothing else the return of the necklace exposes the failure of Mandela’s revolution, and those who fought for him should weep.

Under Apartheid, blacks and whites went to separate hospitals but they received world class health care, whatever their colour, now the facilities are collapsing or non-existent. Black children went to different schools than white children, but they received an education, something which is now a privileged luxury. When they grew up, their bosses may have been white, but they had jobs and a living wage, as the recent violence shows us, such security is but a memory for most South Africans.

Eighteen years after Nelson and Winnie made their historic walk towards the cameras, and 14 years, since Mandela assumed power on a tide of optimism, a once proud South Africa slides like a crumbling, crime ridden, wreck towards a precipice created though greed, corruption and incompetence.

For all his gleaming smiles, grandfatherly hand gestures, and folksy sound bites, tomorrow night, when crowd cheers the retired terrorist in the gaudy shirt, they would do best not to focus too closely upon his much admired legacy, as they might just find that the Xhosan Emperor has no clothes. For Nelson Mandela’s lasting achievement is that, in the face of a wold wishing him well, he, and the party he leads, have shown the world that, for all its flaws, Apartheid was a more benign system than what replaced it, and that the average South African was immeasurably better off under the hated white rule than they are under the alternative which black rule has created.

That is quite an achievement, even for a living legend.

Source: Sarah Maid of Albion Blog

Een correspondent uit Den haag (NL) vat in het volgende artikel de huidige situatie in Zuid-Afrika goed samen.

Ook hij roept op om de ogen te openen en Zuid-Afrika dringend van de ondergang te redden. Alleen, hier is politieke moed voor nodig, iets wat de meeste Westerse regeringen niet kunnen opbrengen, omdat zij vanuit een linkse doctrine redeneren en regeren.

Maar voor de blanke Afrikaners – en mede ook voor de ganse zwarte bevolking – tikt de klok verder…

De ondergang is nabij, en de wereld zal getuige zijn van het volgende menselijke drama!

Ik hoop althans mijn steentje te hebben bijgedragen aan de bewustmaking van de hoge nood, die in Zuid-Afrika heerst, hoewel ik hierin veelal alleen sta en wellicht voor een rechtse racist zal versleten worden.

De waarheid heeft echter haar rechten en de toekomst zal ze aan het licht brengen… maar dan zal het te laat zijn!

John Vrancken

08/03/2007

Tijd om het zwijgen te verbreken

Op 20 december 2006 werd Zuid-Afrika opgeschud door de zoveelste daad van wreed, weerzinwekkend barbarisme.

Stelt u zich het volgende tafereel voor. Een jong gezin, bestaande uit een vader, moeder, zoontje, dochtertje en een vriend van de familie, gaat een dagje hengelen langs een meer. In Zuid-Afrika is het nauwelijks mogelijk zomaar langs een meer of in een park te wandelen. Je bent nergens je nog veilig voor je leven. Niet eens je eigen huis biedt je veiligheid. Een uitstapje met de familie kan je duur te staan komen, maar zo vlak vóór de Kerst en de heersende feeststemming gaan de remmen los, zelfs voor de meest veiligheidsbewuste Zuid-Afrikaners. Moeder heeft haar vijfjarig dochtertje in de armen, een blond meisje met gekruld haar, dat in het nieuwe jaar voor het eerst naar school zou gaan. Moeder en vader hebben al de nodige spullen gekocht voor deze grote stap en het meisje zegt een popje te willen hebben voor de Kerst. Ze denkt ook aan een cadeau om aan Jezus te geven voor diens komende verjaardag.

Vanuit het niets komen er twee gewapende mannen op het gezin af. “Overval!” roept er één en schoten beginnen te vallen. Chaos, kabaal, iedereen zoekt verwoed dekking, en dan valt de stilte. Vader rent naar zijn auto om de daders achterna te zetten, maar zijn autobanden zijn lek geschoten. Hij beseft niet dat een kogel zijn hemd scheurde. Moeder beleeft de ultieme nachtmerrie. Zij merkt nauwelijks op dat haar vingertopje door een kogel werd geschampt. Haar dochtertje, dat in haar armen ligt, kreeg een kogel door het hoofd. In jassen gewikkeld, probeert het gezin wanhopig het meisje naar het ziekenhuis te brengen, maar dat zou niet baten. Het lichaampje wordt kouder en het meisje is bij aankomst doodverklaard. Vader kan zijn tranen niet tegenhouden als hij zijn verhaal voor de pers doet. Hij heeft last van een enorm schuldgevoel en zegt nooit meer een hengel aan te zullen raken. Hij zal nooit meer zijn engeltje terugzien. Het zwembad dat hij speciaal voor de feestdagen heeft opgeschoond zou nooit meer een bron van vreugde worden voor zijn dochtertje, dat graag zwom. Iedereen hoopte dat zij ooit op tv als nationale zwemster bekend zou worden, maar nu zullen ze niet eens de Kerst met haar meemaken. De kerstdagen zullen voortaan een zeer macaber karakter krijgen, gevuld met onmetelijk verdriet…

Deze tragische gebeurtenis overkwam het Esterhuizen gezin in Randfontein, zowat veertig kilometer ten westen van Johannesburg.

Op 8 februari 2007 komt een groep betogers vóór het gerechtsgebouw van Randfontein samen om te protesteren tegen het geweld dat Zuid-Afrika teistert, en om hun woede over de laksheid van de overheid te uiten. Protestborden met teksten als “Ons sê nee vir misdaad. Genoeg is genoeg” en “Danielle se wrede dood lê ek voor die regering” worden voor het gebouw omhooggehouden. Danielle Esterhuizen is de naam van het vermoorde meisje.

Zuid-Afrikanen vragen zich af in welke maatschappij zij zich bevinden, waar een moeder beschrijft hoe een kogel haar kind fataal verwondde, terwijl het bij moeder op schoot zat. Het geweld is zo algemeen geworden dat slechts af en toe een dergelijke tragedie in de kranten verschijnt. Het is schering en inslag geworden, en niemand lijkt er zich werkelijk druk om te maken. Grote bedrijven zwijgen, buitenlandse media houden zich buiten spel en politici, voornamelijk in het ANC, knijpen een oogje dicht.

Men dient te zwijgen over de ruim 50 baby’s en peuters, die dagelijks slachtoffer worden van verkrachting. Deze afschuwelijke daden van kinderen seksueel molesteren is ontstaan uit een bijgeloof dat zoiets het HIV virus geneest. De kinderen die een dergelijke daad overleven zijn niet alleen ernstig verminkt, maar ook naar alle waarschijnlijkheid met het HIV virus besmet geraakt en ten dode opgeschreven. Een paar weken geleden verkrachtte een veertig jarige man zijn eigen baby’tje zo heftig dat het later aan zijn verwondingen overleed. Toen de moeder de man van het kind af probeerde te duwen sloeg hij haar, en zelfs toen de politie kwam opdagen dreigde hij de politie aan te randen – terwijl hij bezig was met de verkrachting!

Dit zijn daden die zo ondenkbaar zijn dat ze in Europa ongetwijfeld tot tbs en dwangverpleging zouden leiden. In Afrika rust hier geen zwaar taboe op. Zelfs de bekende Aartsbisschop en Nobelprijswinnaar Desmond Mphilo Tutu wist onlangs in een krantenartikel een krankzinnig verband te leggen tussen het apartheidsverleden en deze gruweldaad. Tutu probeert ons wijs te maken dat de scholen, ziekenhuizen, universiteiten, infrastructuur en thuislanden die Hendrik Verwoerd voor de zwarten had opgericht de redenen zijn waarom deze mannen baby’s verkrachten!?

Daarenboven is de politie uitermate inefficiënt. Op kerstavond heeft de hoofdcommissaris van de politie – een veroordeelde bommenlegger en moordenaar, Robert McBride genaamd – zijn auto in de prak gereden en was volgens ooggetuigen duidelijk onder invloed van alcohol. Agenten, die hem van het toneel afvoerden, begonnen nieuwsgierige omstaanders te beschimpen en aan te randen. Men werd afgeraden aangifte te doen. Was het niet voor het feit dat McBride een anti-apartheidsstrijder was en terreur gezaaid heeft onder het publiek, had hij waarschijnlijk nooit zo een hoge functie bekleed. Je zult maar bij hem aankloppen om aangifte te doen over een misdrijf.

Als zulke daden niet zout in open wonden smeren, dan behoort de recente uitspraak van president Thabo Mbeki zeker tot verontwaardiging op te roepen. In een recente toespraak stelde Mbeki dat het hoge geweldcijfer slechts een perceptie is. Amerika heeft ook een hoog geweldcijfer, aldus Mbeki, waarmee impliciet bedoeld wordt dat Zuid-Afrikanen niet moeten zeuren over de volksmoord op de landbouwers of de ruim 30 000 tot 50 000 moorden per jaar in hun land. Het is ironisch dat Mbeki nu zelf een grote muur ter waarde van 9 miljoen Euro om zijn huis laat bouwen, door blanke bouwkundigen nog wel. De grote leider, die misdaad ontkent en een fervent voorstaander is van bemachtiging van zwarten, laat zich door een gigantische muur beveiligen en gebruikt hiervoor blanke kennis en arbeid. Hij heeft kennelijk niet veel vertrouwen in zijn eigen mensen, maar zodra blanken als gevolg hiervan het land uit vluchten, worden zij als “onpatriottisch” of – tot niemands verbazing – als racisten bestempeld.

Terwijl al deze gruweldaden plaatsvinden, bagatelliseert Mbeki deze misdaden. Het is alsof hij niet in staat is te begrijpen hoeveel leed hij zijn land aanricht – door zich hier niets van aan te trekken – en focust in zijn toespraken alsmaar op het apartheidsverleden, dat steeds grimmiger wordt afgebeeld. Hij is een fanatiekeling, die al de heersende ellende op het verleden – met name het blanke bewind – wil afschuiven. Hij is zelfs zo ver gegaan te beweren dat de Afrikanen de beschaving aan de Europeanen gebracht hebben via Griekenland (hij gelooft namelijk dat Egyptenaren zwarte Afrikanen waren), en nu verwijt hij de Europeanen dat zij Afrikaanse vluchtelingen terugsturen, “nadat de Afrikanen de beschaving aan de Europeanen gebracht hebben”. De reden waarom Afrika vandaag in zoveel ellende verkeert is het gevolg van het koloniale verleden, volgens de president van Zuid-Afrika.

Door de zwarte bevolking voortdurend in de rol van slachtoffer van blanke agressie te dringen, is Mbeki bezig de bevolking op te hitsen tegen hen. Onder de vlag van algemeen geweld, begint het geweld in Zuid-Afrika een onmiskenbaar anti-blank karakter te krijgen. Als voorbeeld heeft ene William Kekana, de moordenaar en verkrachter van een jonge moeder, haar eenjarig dochtertje en diens oma in 2004, in een rechtbank verteld dat hij zijn daad pleegde omdat de slachtoffers blank waren…

Veel anti-apartheid schrijvers en intellectuelen beginnen zich te verzetten tegen het bijna stalinistische bewind van Mbeki. Het tij lijkt zich van nature te keren, maar of dit genoeg zal zijn om de wereld te mobiliseren tegen het bewind van Mbeki, lijkt te hoog gegrepen. Niemand greep in toen Mugabe zijn land uithongerde en in een regelrechte ellende stortte. Men stond erbij en keek ernaar. Veel landbouwers in Zimbabwe zijn Britse paspoorthouders, maar vanuit Engeland kwam er weinig animo om de eigen onderdanen in veiligheid te stellen. Dit stelt blanke Zuid-Afrikanen niet erg op hun gemak, vooral sinds gebleken is dat Mugabe in de jaren ‘90 al wilde beginnen met landonteigening. Hij werd echter door Mbeki tegengehouden omdat de blanken op dat tijdstip in Zuid-Afrika te veel macht in handen hadden en Mbeki vreesde dat de blanke Zuid-Afrikanen niet zomaar de macht zouden overhandigen, als buurman Mugabe zijn ware despotische aard liet zien. Pas toen de blanken alle macht ontnomen werd, was de kust veilig om met de landonteigeningen door te gaan.

Het is niet overdreven te beweren dat de blanke Zuid-Afrikanen vogelvrij verklaard zijn. Slechts een zeer klein percentage moordenaars wordt ooit opgepakt en niet meer dan 6% belandt in de gevangenis. Van dit aantal komt er een groot deel in ieder geval vervroegd vrij. Er wordt eveneens geen woord gerept over de moorden op de meest vitale sector van de economie, namelijk de landbouw. (In een brief van het Nederlandse Ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken wordt gesteld dat het moordcijfer onder de zwarte bevolking hoger ligt dan onder de blanken, waardoor de genocide op de blanke boeren niet als zodanig erkend wordt. Men is echter vergeten dat zonder boeren die voedsel te produceren de spiraal van geweld alleen verder zal toenemen onder de gehele bevolking). Er wordt steeds weer gezegd dat de blanken ruim 90% van alle vruchtbare grond in hun bezit hebben, zonder te melden dat de blanken juist het land vruchtbaar maken door het te bemesten en besproeien. In de rest van Afrika, en nu dus ook in Zuid-Afrika, wordt het land niet meer bewerkt van zodra de blanke boer er weggehaald wordt: dít is de reden waarom Afrika, na het einde van het koloniale tijdperk, terugglijdt in een toestand van prekoloniale hongersnood.

Het hoofd van de organisatie Genocide Watch, dr. Gregory Stanton heeft geconstateerd dat er zich een genocide op het Zuid-Afrikaanse platteland aan het afspelen is. Volgens Genocide Watch bestaat genocide uit een achttal te onderscheiden fases, te weten: 1. Classificering, 2. Symbolisering, 3. Ontmenselijking, 4. Organiseren, 5. Polarisatie, 6. Voorbereiding, 7. Uitwissing en 8. Ontkenning.

De boeren in Zuid-Afrika bevinden zich in fase 5, aldus Stanton.

Kort geleden had de minister van Landbouw, Lula Xingwana, gemeld dat de blanke boeren hun zwarte medewerkers beter moeten behandelen, ook al verklaart 93% van de zwarte medewerkers een gunstige relatie met de blanke boeren te hebben. De relatie tussen zwart en blank in Zuid-Afrika steeks complexer in mekaar dat het ANC wil doen geloven. De Afrikaners en de zwarten hebben een lange geschiedenis van samenwerking en zijn nog dagelijks nauw met elkaar betrokken om de productiviteit van het land hoog te houden. Vanuit het ANC wordt er echter voortdurend teruggegrepen naar koloniale stereotypen tussen blank en zwart en deze worden gebruikt om de post-apartheid zwarte jeugd te indoctrineren dat de blanken slecht en onbetrouwbaar zijn. Een groot deel van de zwarte opstandelingen is sowieso te jong om zich de apartheid te herinneren, maar juist deze generatie zorgt voor het meeste geweld. (Men vraagt zich af of het hoge misdaadcijfer onder de tweede generatie allochtonen in Europa niet op een soortgelijke manier verklaard kan worden als dat van de zwarte jeugd in Zuid-Afrika). 

Vanwege de voortschrijdende ellende en uiterst onzekere toekomst, zoekt men naar een leiderfiguur, die belooft een einde te maken aan de ellende, iemand die hoop en vertrouwen inboezemt. Niemand in de overheid steekt echter een poot uit. De wanhoop wordt groter. In plaats van een leider, die zich ontfermt over het lot van zijn burgers, krijgen Zuid-Afrikanen te horen dat als het geweld ze niet bevalt, zij het land maar moeten verlaten. Dit zijn niet de woorden van een losgeslagen lakei in de regering of een ambtenaar onderaan de bureaucratie, maar van de minister van Veiligheid en Securiteit zelf, ene Charles Nquakula.

Leiders vanuit de eigen gelederen hebben niet veel politieke macht en kunnen zich niet adequaat mobiliseren tegen het geweld, vooral omdat de blanken te dun bevolkt zijn, te wijd verspreid over het land en nergens een meerderheidsgroep vormen. Dit veroorzaakt verdeeldheid onder het volk en de leiders kunnen geen duidelijk, eenvormig beleid voeren om tot actie over te gaan. Daarenboven hebben de Afrikaners de christelijke plicht, om te zorgen voor de anderen, met de paplepel ingelepeld gekregen. Om de zwarte bevolking helemaal aan haar lot over te laten en voor zichzelf op te staan, lijkt voor velen de enige logische uitweg, maar botst met de waarden die ze van huis uit gekregen hebben. Voor vele jaren bestond het beleid van de Nasionale Party erin om de anderen te helpen ontwikkelen. De NP is blijkbaar de enige politieke partij in de moderne geschiedenis geweest, die zendingwerk op de agenda had staan.

Het geweld, waarmee het NP bewind gekenmerkt werd, had veel te maken met de strijd tegen het communisme (en ipso facto tegen het ANC). Soldaten en politieagenten waren veelal onervaren en hadden weinig middelen om oplaaiend geweld behoorlijk in te dammen. Daarenboven was het net het doel van het ANC om Zuid-Afrika te destabiliseren en onregeerbaar te maken.

In The African Communist van 1963 (Vol. 2 nr. 2, Jan-Mar) staat:

In order to extend the gains of the revolution, particularly in the conditions of South Africa, the utmost vigilance must be exercised against those who would seek to organise counter-revolutionary plots, intrigues and sabotage, against all attempts to restore White colonialism and destroy democracy … a vigorous and vigilant dictatorship must be maintained by the people against the former dominating and exploiting classes. Towards this end, the Party will propose the disbandment of the police and military forces maintained by white colonialism. A new people’s militia and people’s liberation army, composed of and led by trusted representatives of the people, must be created.

Enige staat, die met zulke revolutionaire oogmerken te maken heeft, doet er goed aan zulke elementen een halte toe te roepen. Indien de blanken zwichten voor deze agressie zouden zwichten, dan zouden zij als opgejaagd wild behandeld worden door de nieuwe machtshebbers. Eveneens zouden deze oogmerken de blanken enige rol van betekenis ontnemen om apartheid op een vreedzame manier te ontmantelen. Het hoort dus weinig mensen te verbazen dat zoveel blanken zich liever achter de apartheid schaarden. Landen ten noorden van Zuid-Afrika zoals Mozambique, dat in 1974 een marxistisch bewind kreeg, werden in ongekende armoede gestort waardoor zwarte Mozambikanen massaal probeerden om Zuid-Afrika binnen te komen. Het is erg ironisch dat de communisten apartheid als een misdaad tegen de mensheid hadden uitgeroepen, terwijl hun eigen onderdanen hun leven op het spel zetten om naar het land van de apartheid te vluchten.

Zuid-Afrika gaat nu steeds meer de stalinistische kant op. De moorden op de boeren blijven stijgen, het geweld in de steden stijgt navenant en Zuid-Afrika verkeert volgens de hoofdzakelijk zwarte vakbondsbeweging COSATU in de grootste ban van hongersnood in 150 jaar.

Het is de hoogste tijd om het zwijgen te verbreken. Nederland heeft jarenlang het ANC royaal gefinancierd en lijkt niet in staat de ware toedracht van de zaken te begrijpen. Alles wat het ANC zegt, wordt voor zoete koek opgegeten, op een klein aantal verschillen na, zoals het omstreden aidsbeleid van Mbeki. Het geweld in Zuid-Afrika wordt puur vanuit het apartheidsverleden verklaard, zonder te beseffen dat apartheid juist een manier was om te beschermen tegen stammenconflicten en een totalitaire heerschappij. Veel Europese landen reageren instemmend en ontkennen met name het probleem in de landbouw. Er moet actie komen, vooral vanuit Europa om de druk op de regering Mbeki te verhogen en een einde te maken aan de ellende. De kans bestaat dat Europa over Zuid-Afrika zwijgt om de minderheden in het eigen land niet te vervreemden. Men moet zich wel realiseren dat de situatie in Zuid-Afrika niet zonder de nodige nuances gegeneraliseerd kan worden naar allochtonen in Europa. Er zijn bepaalde overeenkomsten maar ook cruciale verschillen, met name in de demografische samenstelling en in de heersende cultuur.

Als men werkelijk fundamenteel een einde wil maken aan de eeuwige hongersnood en ellende in Afrika, dan is het belangrijk de blanke boeren zoveel mogelijk te beschermen. Zij hebben de oplossing in handen. Helaas is het verlangen naar onteigening groter dan het besef dat er morgen wellicht geen voedsel meer zal zijn. De ellende van Afrika is grotendeels een mentaliteitskwestie. De mentaliteit is niet bevorderlijk voor rijkdom onder de mensen van Afrika. Het is hier dat de verandering moet beginnen, tezamen met de cultuur die deze mentaliteit in stand houdt. Eveneens moet men zich realiseren dat het ANC jarenlang gebruik gemaakt heeft van het oproepen tot geweld en het onregeerbaar maken van Zuid-Afrika om de blanke regering op haar knieën te dwingen. Een organisatie, die jarenlang zulke middelen gebruikt heeft, kan onmogelijk bij politieke toetreding opeens gaan praten over vrede en democratie, vooral niet als “Kill the Boer, Kill the White” hun motto is. Dan nog niet te vergeten dat het ANC met de stembusgang gefraudeerd heeft tijdens de eerste twee verkiezingen. Er is niets democratisch aan Zuid-Afrika. Misschien alleen de grondwet, maar als de regering de bepalingen in de grondwet niet nakomt, en zelfs niet eens meer naar de rechter luistert om dat wel te doen, is het duidelijk dat Zuid-Afrika hard op weg is naar dezelfde ellende als elders in Zuid-Afrika.

Waar Moskou en St. Petersburg destijds de centra waren van de Bolsjewistische Revolutie, die een einde wilde maken aan standenverschillen, zullen Kaapstad en Pretoria wellicht de centra zijn, waarin het nieuwe Bolsjewisme, gebaseerd op ras, zich zal afspelen. Vanwege de miljoenen doden, die veroorzaakt worden door zulke revoluties, moet er een manier bedacht worden om dit te stoppen. Op een klein groepje wereldvreemde intellectuelen na, is niemand hierbij gebaat.

Hoe sneller hier iets aan kan veranderen, hoe meer levens er kunnen gered worden. Verdriet bij het verliezen van een kind, kan alleen een beetje dragelijk gemaakt worden als het niet voor niets geweest is. 

Joseph Secrève

Den Haag

07/03/2007

Oorsprong:www.john-vrancken.org