Sub-Saharan Africa in general, but South Africa in particular, suffers from Africa’s historically established killer diseases of ethnicity, racism and threatening genocide with at its root the continent’s age-old curse of ethnic rivalry and its extraordinary fixation on power.
The latter can be justified with reference to King Shaka’s violent subjection of many an African tribe during the 18th century through the power of the assegai, King Dingane’s massacre of Boer Trekkers in 1838, Idi Amin’s reign of terror of the mid-twentieth century in Uganda, the Rwanda and Sierra Leone massacres of more recent history and Mr Mugabe’s apparent genocide of something in the order of 40,000 members of the Ndebele tribe who did not see eye to eye with him and his Shona people, to mention just a few examples.
On 21 March 2004, Faraday Nkoane, the leader of the Uhuru Cultural Club, incited youngsters at the Human Rights Day celebrations to stop stealing from blacks because…”they will bewitch you and you will get crazy”, but to turn onto whites instead, who have ‘stolen’ from blacks since 1652 (sic), because it “…is the right thing to do.”
He refused to withdraw his statement because, he claimed, the government was not doing enough to provide employment for the youth. However, what Mr Nkoane forgot to tell his audience is that the government he was criticizing had by then already been post-apartheid, black and ANC for the best part of a decade.
His audacity makes a farce of the myth of ubuntu on which so many black South Africans dare to pride themselves. It also makes little of so-called human rights when whites are explicitly categorized as the enemy on a day that is supposed to embrace all people of this earth with ubuntu, regardless of race, colour or creed.
This kind of idiocy has far-reaching consequences if harmony between the races in a country that was lucky not to be destroyed by the ideology of social engineering called apartheid is really important to the government. There are troubling signs that Nkoane’s kind of incitement to get people to commit ‘justifiable’ hate-crimes has a devastating effect on racial relations and attitudes in a land that is, in many respects, still licking its apartheid wounds. Almost three years after these words were spoken, their negative consequences are still surfacing across the nation. One example is a recent case in the city of Nelspruit.
Patrick Lucky Malinga (25) who allegedly robbed a woman of her handbag containing R30,000 (approx. £4,500) outside a bank in the city, apparently claimed that he should be freed because he had not robbed a poor black person, but a rich white woman.
A police sergeant told the court: “He told me this was a free country and he didn’t deserve to go to jail for robbing a white person, only a black person.”
Nkoane is not the only black South African who, as a matter of course, takes to this kind of anti-ubuntu sentiments. “Kill the Boer! Kill the farmer!” is yet another of black-on-white hate-talk’s popular slogans that is often used in public by the very prophets of ubuntu. Mangaliso Kubheka, national organizer of the Landless People’s Movement, for example, used it in a speech. He also refused to apologize.
“Kill the Boer! Kill the farmer!” is, to this day, still the most popular anti-white chant at political rallies and funerals, particularly of political figures. It is often used in the presence of ANC leaders like ministers and ANC Presidents, past and present. It is seemingly quietly tolerated by them, as was the case in 2002 at the funeral of ANC Youth League leader and a government minister, Peter Mokaba, that was attended by the then President of the country.
The same applies to a Zulu song by Mbongeni Ngema that calls upon “strong and brave Zulu men” to confront Indians. Another is the inciting chant directly associated with the discredited but frighteningly popular Mr Jacob Zuma, Awu, leth’umshini wam (Oh, bring me my machine-gun). More than a decade after democracy, ANC style, a group of black adolescents at the historical Ulundi Battlefield site in KwaZulu-Natal taunted a white visitor to the country, calling him a “white baboon.” This is apart from scores of tourists who from time to time are attacked, robbed and raped in various parts of the country. The Biehl murder in the Cape of some years ago is a well-known case in point.
Black robbers often tell their white victims that killing white people is their intention and their “job.”
During March 2007, on the ANC website, Mr Thabo Mbeki, the President of South Africa, wrote in his regular weekly newsletter that racism was still a “…daily feature of our lives, a demon that must be exorcised” to achieve national reconciliation. “…(P)erhaps the one issue on which we do not spend enough time listening to one another, the challenge we should debate honestly and fearlessly, is the scourge of racism that permeates so much of the fabric of our society”.
He asks: “Why do whites frighten themselves?”
Mr Mbeki answers this question himself: “The favourite words used to close down and prohibit any discussion on racism in our country are ‘don’t play the race card.’ It is also argued that such a discussion is inimical to the task of achieving national reconciliation.
“It is not something we should put out of sight, and therefore out of mind, by responding to all attempts to confront it as ‘playing the race card.’ ” Mr Mbeki continued by saying there is “…(s)till a significant proportion of people among the white minority, but by no means everybody who is white, that continues to live in fear of the black, and especially African, majority.
“…the problem is that entrenched racism dictates that justification must be found for the persisting white fears of ‘die swart gevaar…’”
The question arises whether Mr Mbeki’s view is not a case of the pot blaming the kettle. Of special interest of late is his new and narrow use of the term ‘African’, in its restricted racial – indeed racist – context to refer to blacks only.
The Afrikaans language newspaper, Rapport (see Perspektief (Perspective), quotes Mr Mbeki’s well-known and highly acclaimed 1996 “I am an African” speech, which was now squarely contradicted by his latest use of the term, viz:: “I owe my being to the hills and the valleys, the mountains and the glades, the rivers, the deserts, the trees, the flowers, the seas and the ever-changing seasons that define the face of our native land.”
Mr Mbeki continued as follows at that stage:
“I am formed of the migrants who left Europe to find a new home on our native land. Whatever their own actions, they remain still part of me.
“In my veins courses the blood of the Malay slaves who came from the East. Their proud dignity informs my bearing, their culture a part of my essence. The stripes they bore on their bodies from the lash of the slave master are a reminder embossed on my consciousness of what should not be done.
“I am the grandchild of the warrior men and women that Hintsa and Sekhukhune led, the patriots that Cetshwayo and Mphephu took to battle. Note that Mr Mbeki is using the term “African” to refer to blacks only, i.e. to refer to them specifically as a racial group. soldiers Moshoeshoe and Ngungunyane taught never to dishonour the cause of freedom.
“My mind and my knowledge of myself is formed by the victories that are the jewels in our African crown, the victories we earned from Isandhlwana to Khartoum, as Ethiopians and as the Ashanti of Ghana, as the Berbers of the desert.
“I am the grandchild who lays fresh flowers on the Boer graves at St Helena and the Bahamas, who sees in the mind’s eye and suffers the suffering of a simple peasant folk, death, concentration camps, destroyed homesteads, a dream in ruins.”
This, conversely, defines African in its widest sense to include all South Africans who are African through the right of birth, regardless of race and in line with the best qualities of a non-racial, non-racist (democratic) society. Furthermore, it encompasses equality in every sense, regardless of race, colour or creed.
However, if Mr Mbeki’s ANC government then introduces affirmative action and allows its ministers, including recently the ministers of Labour and Finance, to state that affirmative action is “here to stay” or “forever”, how then does it differ from the so-called separate development of the previous Nationalist government? Is it not merely a covert revival of race-based apartheid, especially if “affirmative action” is meant to advantage the majority permanently by, conversely, disadvantaging the minority permanently, precisely what affirmative action has nowhere ever been meant to accomplish?
It thus differentiates permanently between first and second-class citizens, on the basis of race. Add to this the system of racial quotas in many walks of South African life, for example, in sport (with the apparent exception of soccer: there is apparently no pressure whatsoever on the soccer administrators to select any minimum number of ‘white’ South Africans to the soccer team, which has traditionally always been almost exclusively ‘black’).
South Africa has always been one of the leading countries in many fields of sport. In 1995 the Springboks became the world champions in rugby for the very last time. Then the ANC government started interfering with the selection of sports teams. They imposed their politically inspired artificial racial formula on most types of sport as part of their authoritarian programme of forced social engineering. Rugby and cricket, both areas in which South Africa used to excel, then started going downhill at an ever-accelerating pace. South African sports teams are nowadays often humiliated on the world scene, as was recently the case with Graeme Smith’s Proteas at the 2007 Cricket World Cup.
Apartheid gave the world-renowned Basil D’Oliveira to British cricket on a golden plate. By the same token, reverse apartheid, ANC style, with its racist quota system lost Kevin Pietersen, regarded as today’s best batsman in the world, to the British.
For what possible reason does an ever-increasing majority, that already outnumbers an ever-shrinking minority more than tenfold, need ‘affirmative action’ forever?
An ANC member of parliament and chairman of the portfolio committee on sport, Butana Komphela, went so far as to threaten that if the rugby team for the World Cup was not going to be racially “representative” (!), he would ask the Department of Home Affairs to withdraw the passports of both the management team and the players! This gentleman repeated his threat when Jake White, the Springbok rugby trainer, insisted on 6 May 2007 that his team for the World Cup would be chosen on merit. The threat was made notwithstanding the fact that the right to a passport is guaranteed by the Constitution. Does this not prove that even the constitutional rights of South Africans have to take a back seat when it comes to the enforcement of the ANC’s anti-constitutional racist policy of social engineering?
To add insult to injury, government has fairly recently throughout the public service and in other bodies controlled by it, such as the Health Professions Council of South Africa, introduced a system that requires everyone who applies for service, work or registration to complete a form that includes the following degrading item:
Indicate whether African White Coloured Asian
For whatever reason is classification, explicitly along racial lines, required in a society that claims to be democratic and non-racist – that, in the face of an ANC Freedom Charter that, inter alia, guarantees the following rights:
“In the liberated South Africa:
• All people shall have equal rights to use their own language and to develop their own folk culture;
• All laws which discriminate on grounds of race, colour or belief shall be repealed; while
• The preaching and practice of national, race or colour discrimination and contempt shall be a punishable crime.” Why must non-black South Africans, because of the colour of their skins, be distinguished from their fellow-Africans on the basis of Africans vs. the racially defined rest of the population?
Why are all South Africans not simply Africans?
The only possible answer is: the ‘new’ South Africa has politically been turned into an unacceptable haven of reverse apartheid, ANC style.
How could Mr Mbeki and the ANC with their new, restricted use of the term ‘African’ and apartheid that has through ‘affirmative action’ merely been reversed, sugar-coated and entrenched, expect non-blacks to participate in the farce of ‘national reconciliation’? It does not only fly in the face of the ANC’s own Freedom Charter, it also goes against the grain of the country’s post-apartheid Constitution.
The claim that SA is a non-racist country is, therefore, merely misleading lip service to a political lie.
The system has obviously been engineered socio-politically for ‘reconciliation’ to take place under conditions where the playing field has not really been levelled, to use one of the ANC’s many favourite political clichés.
The force that divides the races in 21st century South Africa is the escalation of neo-racism, fathered by the ANC government. Mr Mbeki recently initiated a Native Club, which is, on the one hand, nothing but an exclusive black Broederbond; on the other, it ‘quietly’ confirms the restriction of the term “African” to the new and narrower meaning assigned to it by the ANC. Another of the ills of the old NP regime from the days of white supremacy is now enjoying its reversed resurrection in the Native Club, for which only meticulously selected black Africans will be handpicked, as white Afrikaner males were handpicked for the old Broederbond. Prof Jansen, Dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Pretoria, himself a coloured, takes a grim view of the Native Club, calling it “senseless.” Jansen says it gives him visions of a brilliant Trevor Manuel, Minister of Finance in Mbeki’s cabinet, who is indeed “too white” to become the country’s President, and of a white minority outnumbered by a vast black majority that keeps on complaining about escalating black domination.
He concludes that what both the USA and the RSA need is a political conscience that includes rather than excludes; that brings together, rather than separates; that takes the other party’s interest to heart, rather than its own.
Source: - Terminal Africa: The Curse of the Ancestral Cord - Book: Terminal...
by P F Erasmus
URL http://www.authorsonline.co.uk/book/Terminal+Africa:+The+Curse+of+the+Ancestral+Cord/sample/
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