h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hi there everyone! Rod, no, we don't speak Swahili here. Most people here can speak Afrikaans as well as English. Afrikaans may in fact be called a lingua franca ... it is a simplified form of Dutch with many words and phrases borrowed from other languages. But we also have a lingua franca used mainly by mine workers, Fanagalo. It is based on Zulu and English, with a bit of Afrikaans. It is spoken up to the Democratic Republic of the Congo - probably in a bit of an altered form - but not in Uganda or Kenya.

Elektra, I can't manage to make that video work! But I think I have the gist of it ... in my case I *have walked* in the shoes of racists for so long. There must be some prejudices in my mind that are so ingrained it would kill me to efully xtricate them. But I do my best ...

Yes, Willem,James Earl Jones just said that his granny was Choctaw-Cherokee Black hybrid who was a defensive racist. She was the most bigoted person he knew and it wasn't till he got to school and met other white,black and Indian people and realized they weren't the devils that she made them out to be.It showed him that he had to think and not allow things like people's predjudices effect him.

He played being a brother to Robert Duval (a bubba) in a movie made in 1996 called 'A Family Thing' that was very realistic and touching.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116275/plotsummary

Thanks, Willem.

Hello again Rod, Elektra and Dmitri! Elektra, I'd like to see that movie.

OK today's bit of nastiness: the Sharpeville Massacre! This happened on the 21st March 1960. It started as a mass protest against the Pass laws. Those were laws requiring all adult black people to carry pass documents whenever they were outside of their 'rightful places' (those being the homelands or special compounds for workers around the cities). It really restricted their freedom of movement, and was humiliating as well. Both the ANC and the more newly creatued PAC (Pan-Africanist Congress) wanted to organize mass protests ... in the event the PAC tried to get the jump on the ANC to boost its 'popularity'. The PAC managed, by convincing and perhaps also intimidating people, to get a crowd of thousands to assemble before the police station at the township of Sharpeville. They actually offered themselves up for arrest for not carrying the passes. So certainly this was a kind of passive resistance, demonstrating the injustice of the pass laws.

Trouble was, the police were edgy, and the crowd turned militant.

The police remembered an incident not long before, where some other policemen were trying to keep the calm during conflict over forced removals as well as illegal beer brewing. The mob killed 9 policeman, white as well as black. They also mutilated the bodies (among other things castrated them and stuffed their genitals in their mouthes) and then dragged the corpses through the streets in a grisly parade).

Now all right: the cops were there to uphold laws that were unfair, but the cops themselves could do nothing more than uphold the laws. They didn't write those laws. They were just doing their job. So basically, those nine cops were killed for doing what they had to do.

Another thing: cops are human beings as well. Even if they serve a repressive state ... they're still human beings, and they do not wish to die - even if they are willing to die for the sake of certain principles. There are cops like that all over the world, who willingly go into dangerous situations because that is their duty.

But even cops who are willing to die, do not want to die like *that*. It's not nice to think of your body being mutilated like that whether before or after you're dead.

So, when the huge crowd assembled at the Sharpeville police station the cops there remembered what had happened at Cato Manor. And also many of them remembered the bit about Piet Retief that I'd told earlier, about how in good faith he went to see Dingaan and was then killed most horribly with his entire party. And as the crowd swelled and became more confrontational, the nerves of the police were tested to the utmost.

The situation turned more and more militant on both sides. The police called in reinforcements. Initially there were 20 cops and a crowd of about 5 000; as the crowd swelled to 20 000, about 130 more police officers were called in. They had submachine guns and were supported by armoured cars. Military jets also flew over the crowd to try and intimidate it into dispersing. This didn't work; the crowd simply got angrier.

Now once again it is not possible to say beyond a shadow of a doubt exactly what happened. Some accounts say that some of the protestors threw rocks at the cops. There was also the idea among the whites that the black people were inherently violent and incapable of peaceful protest - this idea makes people feel very threatened and it is an idea that persists to this day! Then, some accounts speak of one protestor who was drunk and fired a gun into the sky. By one account the crowd pressed themselves up against the fence around the station, and when it was opened to admit someone, the crowd surged in.

The cops - vastly outnumbered - panicked. Without orders they opened fire. They shot indiscriminately and kept on shooting even when the protestors were running away. The official deathtoll is 69, including 8 women and 10 children. Many more were injured.

But this incident was the first of outright slaughter of black people by 'official' white forces. After this the PAC and the ANC were banned, and a State of Emergency declared. This comes down to a war. Now it was war. More and more black people protested and the police responded more and more brutally. In reaction, amongst the resistance movements, the principle of peaceful resistance turned into that of armed resistance. This is where the whole thing really started to turn nasty.

More to follow ...

What a sad story.

Indeed. Why, I ask myself, does it have to be that my country, the place where I was born, the place that I love, and where I will probably die, has to be freaking crazy?

OK ... I am here going to try roughly to stick to chronology, but not strictly ... more organizing in terms of certain themes.

But anyways, chronologically, not long after the Sharpeville massacre, in 1961 South Africa broke ties with Britain and became a Republic. We long celebrated the day as 'Republiekdag' (Republic Day). We don't celebrate it any more, and we are now again a member of the British Commonwealth, but we are still a Republic.

Like I said, after the massacre, the first State of Emergency was declared. This basically entailed banning organizations like the ANC and the PAC, and arresting lots of people. Many times they were detained without being charged, were beat up, their families didn't know where they were, they had no access to lawyers, and so forth. We didn't hold with fancy, sentimental, liberal notions like fair trials for everybody (back to the theme of your original posting). Steve Biko was prominent and his death could not completely be ‘whitewashed’ (if you would pardon the expression) but there were many less prominent people who just disappeared.

In 1976 there were the Soweto Riots. Children were compelled to be instructed in Afrikaans (not alone, alongside English) in schools, and this was felt to be intolerable. It was the start of the ‘demonisation’ of Afrikaans that continues to this day. So, thousands of students and children demonstrated … and this time the police didn’t hesitate but just opened fire on them. And here also starts a sinister obfuscation. The ‘official’ death toll was 23 … while news agencies independent from the SA government estimated the number as high as 600. It is fairly certain that the true number is indeed in the hundreds. Hey ho, whaddaya know, our government was lying to us.

It might be difficult for ‘modern’ American or British or European folks to appreciate just how significant that was. Remember what I said earlier: our leaders were traditionally presented to us as kind uncles. We even called them – as all older men – ‘Oom’ (Uncle). This avuncular appellation also reflected our attitude: we regarded them with intimate, familial respect and trust. Our kind uncles WOULD NOT lie to us – so we were certain. Like I said, the hippy revolution was never in South Africa … not the counterculture, not the distrust of officialdom, not the rebellion against authority, not in the sixties, not in the seventies, not in the eighties even – not among us upstanding and dutiful Afrikaners. In a way we had not lost our innocence yet. But that innocence of ours got raped – and we didn’t even realize it at the time.

And so, many of us never knew what was going on. REALLY we didn’t. Not until too late.

I was born in the seventies. In those years for most of us Afrikaners things seemed just dandy. The country was prosperous despite all our enemies in the world. Our leaders were in control. All our people were happy. Sure, as a kid I learnt that the world was a mess, but I counted my people as the ‘sane’ ones. The world was threatened by those mad Americans and Russians with their nuclear bombs who would blow us all to kingdom come. My own country was just peachy.

But in the eighties things started unraveling.

This became personal to me, to my family, when my father accepted a job as lecturer at the University of the North. This university serviced the northernmost tip of South Africa … it was a facility dedicated to non-whites, primarily the homelands of Lebowa, Venda and Gazankulu. But students also came from further afield. It was an excellent university, the grounds and facilities were extensive and modern and the educational standards were high. Despite negative attitudes towards Afrikaans (which is the subject my father taught) there were hundreds of students enrolled in the Department. In particular, all law students had to take Afrikaans. They didn’t protest *that*. There were many hard workers and there were even Afrikaans stage and radio plays performed by the students.

So, we moved to Pietersburg (now Polokwane) in 1980. My father was rather liberal of sentiment but at the university he became disillusioned. Politics became quite nasty. There were massive demonstrations and disruption of classes, getting worse and worse as the eighties progressed. Many times he and my mother (she also started teaching there in 1985) got goosebumps and chills as they arrived at the University to be confronted with a sea of protesting, dancing students … goosebumps and chills at how beautifully they were singing, and also because they were singing about killing the whites and driving them out of the country.

But there was little actual violence against lecturers. Sometimes they threw stones at cars. But there were no actual killings. Not of lecturers. Of fellow students, sometimes. There were contending political factions and things sometimes got ugly.

Now in this climate in 1985 a second State of Emergency was declared. This enabled the police and army to go into ‘disturbed’ areas. Such as university hostels. There were many such police raids and this seemed to provoke more violence and disorder. Many of the lovely buildings and facilities at the University were burnt down. Classes were disrupted and standards plummeted. And the riot police went in and beat up students. A cop one day told me how at a time they warned students over the bullhorn to leave a certain hostel or face the consequences. After giving them time, they went in and sure enough there was a guy sitting in a room. They warned him again and he just sat. Then they went in and beat the living snot out of him. He just sat and bore it stoically. Then they realized he couldn’t walk. He didn’t have a wheelchair or anything, he needed the assistance of friends but they all ran when the warning sounded. The cop who told me this laughed as if it was one big joke.

But anyways, at the University things got quite hectic. They got even more hectic at some other places. More on that in the next installment …

Keep talking.

Righty-ho. Continuing with how 'hectic' things became ...

It is still difficult today to try and sort out exactly what happened and what was who's fault. But in the eighties what started to happen is that black people turned against each other. Now what one wants to know is if our government had anything (or a LOT) to do with that.

First ... the informants and collaborators. I know the police did this, they did what they could to turn people into spies. Coercive tactics, I wouldn't be surprised if this included torture and threats against people's families. The thing was, though, if you turned someone into an informant or collaborator you might sentence that person to death. That is what it came to in many cases.

In the mid eighties this led to the horrifying method of lynching called 'necklacing'. This entailed a rubber automobile tire being fastened around the person's neck, and it, with the person being doused with gasoline and set alight. I can't find figures right now but I believe the victims numbered in the hundreds, most on mere suspicion of collaborating with the police. Famously, Archbishop Desmond Tutu once rescued a man from being lynched by a crowd.

The next thing is more controversial. There was a heck of a lot of fighting between rival black groups, of different struggle movements, or sometimes apparently purely ethnical. Especially brutal was the fighting between the Inkatha Freedom Party and the ANC. Inkatha were mosty Zulus while the ANC had a very strong Xhosa base. These two groups raised armies and often 'invaded' each other's areas committing outright slaugher.

Now where it gets controversial. Inkatha was viewed sympathetically by whites, by the police and the government. Remember the Zulus after Piet Retief's murders and how the Boers made a deal after Dingaan was ousted, with his successor Mpande, after which the Boers and the Zulus were at peace with each other? So we were basically on Inkatha's side against the ANC.

Where it becomes more ominous. There are credible allegations that the police and the army actively colluded with Inkatha against the ANC. And realise now what this meant. Inkatha 'soldiers' went into ANC residential areas and *butchered people*. Pretty indiscriminately. Women and children as well. And because 'we' were on their side, the Police did nothing. I mean, they knew about it - people getting freaking butchered by rampaging 'armies' and they did nothing, because the soldiers were our allies and the victims were politically undesirable!

There are even allegations of police dressed as Inkatha soldiers going along ... of the Inkatha 'impis' being driven to their target areas by police or army vehicles ...

Now need I say that this is not 'on'?

But it's difficult to get clear facts. Personally I am pretty sure the government colluded with Inkatha and so 'allowed' the murder of a great number of people - hundreds or even thousands, maybe. Also I suspect with a fairly strong suspicion that the government had infiltrators in various movements with the express goal of turning them against each other. Or that they used other subtle ways of influencing them. And this brings us to a particularly nasty justification ...

AFTER having done a lot of work to turn different black groups and peoples against each other to the point where they were openly waging war against each other, murdering and lynching each other ...

... we could point to them and say: see? See? They're savages! See how they kill each other?! Such people are not fit to govern themselves or even to have any say at all in the politics of the country! All we can do is keep them in line by whatever method, violent or oppressive as it might seem! For their own good!

Nice, so we could score political points from all of that carnage. AND the infighting weakened our opponents, politically - heck, in every conceivable way, actually.

Our 'opponents'? Our fellow South Africans! Our fellow human beings!

Sorry just another thing, I speak of Inkatha there, but of course the ANC fought back and often used the same methods. They, too, sent fighters into Zulu territories and indiscriminately slaughtered people. But just because they did it didn't give the right to the police to ignore it when Inkatha did it. Fairness means the police should have prosecuted both sided - murder is murder. But the support of Inkatha by the police/government was still because Inkatha was fighting against the main 'enemy', the ANC. Turning a blind eye towards the injustices committed by your friends against your enemies IS NOT ON. You should guard your worst enemy's rights as fervently as your own, or your friends'.

Here's a view of the situation by TIME magazine. While I can't say there are errors of fact, the article seems to be a bit partial ... see if you conclude the same:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,145854,00.html

But it is accurate in conveying a sense of the mess things were.

Hi Willem,

I was a bit puzzled by when that Time article was published - the only date on the page is "Sunday, June 24, 2001" at the top. But later it quotes Oliver Tambo (who died in the early 90s) speaking two weeks ago.

(Very interesting discussion, I'm following it but I don't have much to say.)

Hi KB, thanks for dropping by. I estimate that article, from what it mentions and the way it does it, as having appeared in the late eighties. I dunno why there's a 2001 date on it.

I disapprove of Time Magazine on principle. They employed Whittaker Chambers. They flog dead horses. They will not admit that there was anything wrong with the execution of the Rosenbergs.

Cum grano salis.

But you're right, Willem. We were far away at the time, but I remember reading these stories.

Ugh - that is the problem with web pages - no-one insisted that they be dated. I pity the poor teacher who has to explain all this to their students. I find this bad for research and pity the kids. They have no idea when anything happened. Just like you Willem, they have to piece it together and come up with cause and effect for totally irrational behaviour on every front. Nobody much can escape the blame here -- it really does very little good to blame anyone. The real questions are if the very real problems of lawlessness and poverty can be addressed with people working together rather than against each other. If you honour yourself, you will admit that you don't know everything. If everybody shares what pieces they have --the puzzle might be put together in a way that helps everybody rather than a few. Nobody will share out of anger or hatred, violence just begets violence.

OK ... and here is more history that's difficult to piece together: the so-called 'Border War'.

This is the war we had in Namibia and Angola. The Angolan part was kept secret for long.

It all went back to the bit I alreay spoke of, about German West Africa. A German colony, after Germany's defeat in World War One, it went over to the Allies, with which South Africa fought, and so came under South African control and became South West Africa. The country was for long considered a de facto part or province of South Africa. Also us Afrikaners viewed the whites in South West as 'our people' - some were German but there were also Afrikaans-speaking people. Including a strong contingent of non-white Afrikaans speaking people.

There were hassles about the 'ownership' or governing of SWA and at some point the non-white people of the country started a resistance because the Apartheid mindset of the SA government also had oppressive repercussions in South West. So around the sixties the movement SWAPO (South West African People's Organisation) became militant in its opposition to the South African government and the white minority of South West. South Africa sent in police and troops to fight against them. Meanwhile the ANC and its military arm Umkhonto We Sizwe also sent in troops to aid SWAPO. Thus this was in a sense a double civil war.

And it got dirty and messy quick. Meantime over the border there was a struggle for liberation of Angola (Portuguese colony at the time) as well. The Portuguese eventually abandoned the country. SA for a while tried to help the Angolese, but when they left, there was a power struggle between rival liberation movements, and SA decided to aid one of them, UNITA, against the others. This turned into yet another war which somehow got blended in with the SWA war.

I'm getting tired, I've had a busy day, so I will halt here and try and explain the tangled mess in the next posting ...

Rest, take it easy, and come back and tell us more.

Yes, Willem. Take a break. We'll still be here

thank you willem...

Hi again folks! Thanks everyone. Now for the atrocious mess that was the war in Angola ... so incredibly bad one might expect it to be a parody in a story, except that it really happened.

Folks I want to make a point here and it may seem a pretty damn obvious point but some people seem to miss it. COUNTRIES AND PEOPLE IN AFRICA ARE REAL. Not a TV show or a movie or a dream or even a nightmare BUT REAL. The wars and the atrocities and stuff here HAPPEN TO REAL PEOPLE. And those people matter every bit as much as Americans or Brits or Europeans do. When you think about that and what happened in Angola ...

Some background. Angola is quite a large African country, a bit bigger than South Africa. It was a Portuguese colony ... so was the almost-as-large country of Mozambique. Both are MUCH bigger than Portugal is. So anyways, the Portoguese were not very nice to the folks they colonised, and the locals mounted resistance in SEVERAL DIFFERENT resistance movements: the MPLA, FNLA, UNITA and FLEC (only in Cabinda which was disjointed from the rest of Angola around the mouth of the Zaire river). The struggle was brutal - tens of thousands of people died. By all accounts the Portuguese were brutal as well. About half a million of the people fled to Zaire (now the DRC).

Just a little thing. The Portuguese were I think nastier than us Boers here in South Africa, in their treatment of the indigenous people and also in how many they killed during the war. There were many very nasty Europeans during the colonial times.

But anyways. During the struggle the leader of the MPLA, which had a sort-of socialist credo, went to look for allies. He visited Che Guevara, and gained the support of Cuba, The German Federal Republic (East Germany) and Russia. Uh-oh.

Meanwhile one of the other movements, UNITA, was more pro-West. Its leader was Jonas Savimbi, and actually at first it was a bit Maoist but later made overtures to the USA and South Africa to aid him against the MPLA ... and so the war in Angola became a mini-Cold War with one side representing the Russians, Cubans and communists in general, and the other the capitalist and supposedly freedom-loving USA. Us Boers went in as allies of the USA.

From the mid-to-late sixties, UNITA carried out guerilla attacks in Angola as well as Zaire and Zambia (which traded with Angola - so the attacks were to sabotage this.) Meanwhile the MPLA and the FNLA also fought each other. South Africa came in around 1967. At first we fought all the liberation movements including UNITA. We also were fighting in South West Africa, to the south of Angola, where the native peoples were also struggling for independence.

And now this: officially South Africa did not admit to being in Angola! We had no right to be there and it was a secret war. Our kids were called up to fight 'on the border', the idea being they will stay in South West Africa (remember this was a de facto province of South Africa back then) patrolling the border and watching from insurgents trying to cross from Angola.

But in truth we were going into Angola and taking the fight there.

America seems to have had interests all over the place. They had good relations with the regime in Portugal. They had ties to Mobuto Sese Seko of Zaire, which functioned as a base and a source of support for the FNLA. (The MPLA being consequently kicked out of Zaire went to Brazzaville (neighbour country to Zaire) for support.) President Ford considered Jonas Savimbi 'his man' and wanted to make sure he got the country. The US also wanted Cabinda to be taken over by Zaire to safeguard the supply of petroleum resources. The Kennedy administration pledged support to the FNLA. There was talk of actually causing the disintegration of Angola (i.e. its splitting into several countries). Holden Roberto, leader of the FNLA, was in the CIA's pay since 1963. The CIA was distrustful of the MPLA and didn't want the US to have to deal with them.

In 1975, after a revolution in Portugal, Angola was granted independence. But the different liberation movements were so hostile to each other that no stable new government could be formed - it was now a civil war.

Now for the first time the US started to support UNITA as well. Money, arms and training were given - covertly. The CIA worked closely with the South African military as well. Mercenaries were recruited and a propaganda war launched against the MPLA. Did you folks know the Americans were fighting in Angola? At the time they did not let the Americans know. The official policy was that the US was against the supplying of arms to any of the fighting factions - while in truth it was itself fully involved in giving arms to the factions it saw as being conducive to its interests.

I don't know how many actual American troops were fighting there, but I know a heck of a lot of us white South Africans were called up for military service and then sent there ... to fight and die in a war that didn't really have much to do with us. Those who died there ... it was never acknowledged that they were there, the circumstances and the places of their deaths could not be revealed ... to me there is something very shameful about that.

Britain, France, and Israel, also secretly helped the FNLA and UNITA. It might surprise you that China also aided the FNLA. Along with Russia, East Germany and Cuba, Yugoslavia and Romania also aided the MPLA.

I'm sorry if all this is confusing. But it WAS confusing. The important thing to know is that the USA was supporting two movements and Russia and some of its allies the other, and this is how the Cold War got into this civil war - with very nasty results.

Next - Cuba's involvement and more confusion.

As I believe the late Walter Kelley said, 'You can't tell the players without a scorecard.'

Disgust. Profound disgust.

i didn't know this stuff
i am an american

thank you willem