The Horrors of the 'New South Africa'

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.