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

Hi again! We are very very almost finished now. One last 'excuse' I want to deal with: "everybody else is doing it". OR ... "we're not as bad as they are". OR ... "those who condemn us are hypocrites". I'm talking of Apartheid, now, and the things that go with it. We could always find examples of other people doing the same sort of things, or worse.

Take the war in Angola, for instance. I called it 'South Africa's Vietnam' because in a way it was. But in statistical terms, it was not as bad as the Vietnam War. Not as many people died, not as much money was wasted, not as many soldiers were sent there, the ones who came back were not quite so messed up (or at least they kept their mouths shut about it), and we also did not have massive protests against it in South Africa itself. So, on all counts it was not so bad. And the Americans ASKED US to go to war there. They were to blame for Vietnam AND Angola. So it wasn't so bad and it wasn't really our fault either. AND we're still justifying it as necessary in the context of the Cold War as well.

Then Apartheid as a system of segregation for protecting us Afrikaners from a sea of hostile peoples. That is the same thing as with Israel - this point was made during the heyday of Apartheid by one of our presidents. The Israelis did it and do it! They made themselves a country in the midst of a hostile sea (of Arabian/Islamic peoples) as a REFUGE for a people who have no other home, and they go to some lengths to protect this homeland. How is that different from what we are doing? We Afrikaners have no other country. We are not like European colonists elsewhere in Africa. Every other kind of colonist here has a 'homeland' in Europe to which s/he can retreat if things in Africa don't work out. We don't. We are now an Africanised people, cut loose from the mainland of Europe, and we no longer belong there. No European country would want us anyways. So we have to entrench ourselves here and protect ourselves as a matter of survival. Like the Jews, we have been put in concentration camps ... true, not as many of us, and not as many of us have died ... but still, this proves that we also have powerful enemies, and we have a right to try and protect ourselves from them. We can only be secure if we have a country that is all our own. So, we have to segregate other peoples from us to keep ourselves pure and we have to take measures to keep our country and our people strong.

Israel does this … true, not exactly in the way we do … and what they do is fine, so why not when WE do it?

Even more … EVERYBODY does this, in some way or another. Every country in Europe is ethnically based. Germans have their country – Germany. The Dutch have their country – The Netherlands. The Italians have their country – Italy. So it goes. So why shouldn’t the Afrikaner have ‘his’ own country? It’s called ‘Self Determination’! How come everyone else can have it, but we can’t? It’s a recognized international right!

But to have self determination we need to have a territory where we form a clear majority. So we have to take steps to ensure that we have that. So we need to move ‘other’ peoples out.

So this idea can be used to justify a LOT of things, including things highly ‘unsavoury’ if you should look at them in themselves. Things that conflict with humanitarian ideals. Brutal things. Discriminatory things.

But come on! (So the next bit goes.) WHICH prosperous country that exists today, has NOT done equally unsavoury things in the past – things that have contributed to that country’s present power and prosperity?

Take the USA. FIRST OF ALL the colonists – whether they came from Britain, or from France, or from Holland, or from Spain – did what they could to wipe out or get the better of the native Americans. They were shot, or cheated out of land, or otherwise forced off their territories. Many died from disease, but even if they were not deliberately infected, it was seen as a bonus. The immigrants took the lands for themselves – and the original inhabitants are now a TINY minority. The same thing was done in South America, and in Australia. In those places the original peoples have all been reduced to a tiny remnant, and the colonists are now ‘the people’. We were not anywhere near as bad as that! It is BECAUSE we were good and kind to the native peoples, instead, that we are now STILL a minority in this country by numbers. If we did as the other peoples did we would have exterminated them and now would be the majority and the system of Apartheid to protect ourselves would not even be necessary.

But look at what the Americans did next. Having all but exterminated the natives, they then imported people from Africa to be their slaves. On a vast scale … thousands, maybe millions. Yes, we in South Africa also had slaves, but not as many as the Americans. We do not owe as much of our prosperity to the institution of slavery. We let go of it without protest when it was abolished in the Nineteenth Century. We did not fight a civil war amongst ourselves over it. What we did, was not as bad as that.

For that matter, look what other peoples did in Africa. The Europeans enslaved and otherwise exploited Africans in horrendous ways. In the Belgian Congo they would press people into service on the cocoa and coffee and other plantations, or force them to become ivory poachers … often they did this with mere children. And they were forced to meet quotas and if they came up short their hands were chopped off. The peoples were set against each other on the ‘divide and rule’ principle; civil strife was encouraged so that peoples could not act together to get rid of the oppressors. Nobody cared about how many people died as a result of this. Any attempt at resistance was published most brutally … guilty and innocent people together, and most of the time simply by killing them using ‘modern’ and ‘western’ weapons against which they had little defense. This was done in Africa by the Belgians … the Germans … the Portuguese … the French … even the civilized British. When they came here they became barbarians worse than the – according to them – barbaric natives. They invented this idea of the natives being barbarians to justify treating them barbarically.

And what about the Arabs? They, too, raided Africa for slaves or otherwise exploited the resources. They, too, treated the natives brutally. They were not quite as imperialistic as the Europeans but they have a proud history of discrimination and oppression over here. EVERYBODY gets to do it, except for us!!!

And while the Europeans brought the true and righteous religion of Christianity to this dark continent, the Arabs brought the twisted, mistaken, murderous religion of Islam … damning the souls of millions of naïve adherents on this continent to this very day!!!

(Note – still being sarcastic here in case anyone has any doubt.)

Look at what the British did in India, China and other countries in Asia. They imposed their rule on thousands of peoples … also using the ‘divide and rule’ principle, buying off and corrupting local despots to keep things ‘British-Empire-friendly’, exploiting the resources, destroying local industries, even trading and dealing in OPIUM, making enormous profits thereby irrespective of the millions who were laid waste by addiction, fighting wars against and inflicting severe punishments on all who resisted … same old story!

LOOK AT AMERICA AGAIN! Not only have they exterminated the native peoples … not only have they practiced slavery and enriched themselves by it … even AFTER these horrors were ended … they still practiced discrimination! And the white Americans were in an infinitely more secure position than us white South Africans. There was no question of their being in a minority. They were not surrounded by enemy states much larger than themselves. Instead, the USA had a white majority numbering in hundreds of millions and the strongest economy on the planet. AND STILL they felt threatened by non-white people – even little children! Look at how hard it was to stop school segregation! Look at the lynchings! Look at the racism, look at the riots … they have racial epithets just as we do, and they use these in the same mean spirit as the bad ones amongst us do. And there are less over racists here than in America. And look at how in America there are rampant inequalities. What percentage of black people are poor? What percentage prosperous? How many black billionaires are there? How many black prisoners? Look at the figures and you hardly see a society that is free and equal. We killed Steve Biko but they killed Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. And they dare lecture us!!!

So: anyone and everyone criticizing us is a hypocrite. They are the masters of ‘do as we say, not as we do.”

That goes for America and Europe and their ‘empires’ … and as for the ‘Communist block’ … they have killed so many people one doesn’t even have to mention or comment on it.

So: literally everybody is worse than we are.

That was our justification. So we could go on and didn’t even need to feel bad about what we were doing.

Right. Now for my comments on the above. I do not dispute the facts. HUMANS AS A WHOLE have AS A RULE behaved atrociously to other humans. Our history as a species is drenched in blood. We have honed it to an art to do the absolute worst things that we could conceive of, to living, feeling human beings, and to do it for the sake of power, and to call it righteousness, and/or to claim that we are doing it in the service of God. Or in the service of our own people, to whom our loyalty was due. In the name of God, for the sake of my people, I would go to war and call it glorious; to kill my enemies, even their children, is virtuous. And remind me, why are they my enemies, again?

This is our situation. This is still the way we do things. We disguise things better now, however. We divide people and set them against each other in more subtle ways now than according to the colours of their skins. We exploit each other with much greater sophistication now. We still enrich ourselves off others’ misery. We have our high and mighty principles of human rights, and we know of every way in which to sidestep them while paying them lip service, and we still believe that we are faithful to them in letter as well as spirit. We believe we only want what’s best. We now have many more tricks with which we can fool our own minds about our motives. We now have infinitely more distractions to prevent us from seeing others and their misery and how we are either causing it or contributing to it or to prevent us from seeing how easily we could alleviate it. We pat ourselves on the back these days for being ‘realistic’ and the truth is we are cynical, we are content with the status quo and defend it even while we see its evils, saying it is the best way, saying that the evils that remain are necessary evils, unavoidable, or for the sake of a greater good, or in the end simply because you can’t fight city hall, so there’s no point in trying, but the fact is we can’t be assed, we can’t even try to think of a way of making things better, let alone try to do anything. The system is sucking the life out of all of us, and still we would defend it, because we believe we need it, because we’re dazzled by everything it dangles in front of our noses, because we can’t imagine anything better, because we are already feeling worthless and powerless. We will speak loudly of individualism while we feel that a single person in this world cannot make a shred of a difference against the greater powers. We will defend the executioner while the rope is around our own necks. We will forget all our ideals and call them misguided and impractical and settle for a hollow sham.

This is the reality, it’s the reality all around the world. In Apartheid South Africa we simply had our own special way of making a glorious mess. Was it better or worse than the way other countries also made glorious messes? If others were worse than us in any way, does it make right what we did? Serial killers can congratulate themselves if they kill less people than Pedro Alonso Lopez, who might have killed over 300 people … they’re not as bad as that, so they must be good, right? Heck, forget serial killers … look at our greatest leaders. Their body counts number in millions and we honour and commemorate them! BUT IS THAT RIGHT???!!!

It is high freaking time that we start seeing how *nuts* all of this is. That we stop defending and settling for sh*t* whatever it might be and whoever might be doing it. How about *real* love for a change? How about *real* responsibility? How about not trying to be ‘not as bad’ as others, but instead trying to be as good as possible? And at the very same time WITHOUT making comparisons with others!

Amen.

When will humanity realise that its view of the world is a shared psychosis, and start getting better?

When will we realise that any and all attempts to revert to the 19th-century notion of the 'nation-state', with its single-ethnos basis, is an attempt to get back to an imaginary state of affairs, and not desirable in the least?

When will we see one another as individuals, and not as representatives of a 'type'? When will we start sharing, and stop comparing?

Willem
... and a chorus of

Q: When will we ... ... ?
A: At best inch by inch.
Two forward one back.

Hi Rod and Dmitri, thanks for the comments – I agree of course.

Right, so let me see if I can get this wrapped up as far as the history of Apartheid is concerned. I didn’t talk about *everything* but I think I gave you all a fairly good idea. I might have mentioned a few more things. Such as that the government embarked on a nuclear weapon development program. We had Israel’s help with this. We tested nuclear devices … I haven’t yet been able to determine if we ever actually detonated a nuclear bomb on the surface, though I’ve heard stories that we did that in the seventies in the Kalahari desert. We also had a chemical and biological weapons development program. Wouter Basson, known as ‘Doctor Death’, actually a cardiologist, was involved in this … he sort of got a reputation similar to Dr. Mengele though I don’t think he was quite as bad.

Our government never told us it had a nuclear weapons program. This only came out in the late nineties when we heard that the new government had pledged to destroy all the nuclear weapons it had. What. We had nuclear weapons???????

Then there were the assassin brigades … there were a few agencies that assassinated and intimidated people. This is a contentious issue since the government big-wigs deny ever having issued these people with orders to kill anyone. And yet, they were started up by the government … like, “okay guys, we’re giving you money and stuff, now do what you want (wink, wink) but don’t tell us or anyone else about it.” These assassins were actually, so it seems by what came out afterwards, idiots and nutjobs, and most of what they did made no sense at all. They were NOTHING like James Bond or typical Hollywood secret agents/assassins. But they did kill a few people, most notably Dr. David Webster (anti-Apartheid social anthropologist at Wits University) and Anton Lubowski (Afrikaans guy but against-us in Namibia). They tried, or planned … if getting totally blotto and raving incoherently could count as planning … to assassinate people with high profiles in politics like Dullah Omar, Ronnie Kasrils, Frank Chikane, Pallo Jordan, Winnie Mandela (estranged ex-wife of Nelson Mandela), Jay Naidoo and Oliver Tambo. They also put a bomb in the car of Albie Sachs (an advocate who defended people accused of breaking Apartheid laws) which went off and he lost one of his arms and sight in one of his eyes. He was later appointed a judge on our Constitutional Court by Nelson Mandela. They also harassed and tried to intimidate people like Max du Preez (Afrikaans ‘traitor’ for publishing the ‘Vrye Weekblad’ (Free Weekly) which brought to light some of the things our government was doing without telling us) and Desmond Tutu.

If you have any doubt that these people were froot-loops: they harassed Max, apparently by pointing a grenade launcher at him and forcing him to ingest large quantities of moonshine (we call it ‘mampoer’ by the way). They tried to intimidate Archbishop Tutu by hanging a baboon fetus in his garden, either under the impression that it would bewitch him or with the idea that he would think he was bewitched. I mean, these folks are superstitious, right?

Along the way they employed such noble tactics as infecting a well in a Namibian refugee camp with cholera, and bombing a kindergarten.

For more info look up Eugène de Kock, Ferdi Barnard, Dirk Coetzee, Craig Williamson, and Lothar Neethling.

But anyways, it all started coming apart in the late eighties. The violence in the country escalated, the sanctions campaign put great stress on our economy, Namibia became independent despite anything we could do, the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union fell to pieces, internationally our skunk image became worse and worse, and even the white people were noticing something was wrong, it was no longer possible to censor out the truth, even as I said amongst us Afrikaners there was Max and his newspaper that was publishing stuff the government was trying to keep hush-hush (and he got hit with lawsuit after lawsuit and eventually his paper folded – but still, along the way, people learnt a thing or two), and many began to question the idea of apartheid. When our president P.W. Botha (who functioned in a sort of a dual mode, on the one hand talking about the need for reforms, and on the other hand, acting to preserve the status quo) had a stroke in 1989, he was replaced by F. W. de Klerk. It is now apparent that the NP (National Party) government realized that things had to change, and considered Botha a bit of an embarrassment. De Klerk went to work with great rapidity. Before anyone knew what happened he had unbanned the ANC and released Nelson Mandela.

I still remember seeing Mandela for the first time. In High Apartheid times, we did not even know what this man looked like. It was forbidden to publish pictures of him. We did not know what he said, what he was like; the impression was that he was a rabid sort of terrorist, a black Osama bin Laden if you will. When I saw him waving his hand at a large crowd upon his release, he struck me as just a normal guy, not very dangerous looking. But it took a time to work out the ideas that were implanted in me. The thing that brought me over was Mandela’s sincere wish for reconciliation and harmony rather than revenge. He had been in prison for 27 years, and all the time we his enemies were oppressing and killing black people while he could do nothing about it, and he came out and he forgave us. He really, really went an enormous distance to try to get white and black – and every other colour – to get along.

So also, De Klerk did things like end the political censorship, and the death penalty was suspended. Also some of the petty Apartheid laws were rescinded. We had elections as well … I can’t remember the year, but there were countrywide elections during which the voters could somehow show if they still supported the NP knowing its new pro-reform position. They did not quite spell out to us how far this reform would go, but still, most whites voted for the NP. I myself was still right-wing then and I remember trying to tell people that if they voted yes for the reforms, it would be yes all the way, up to the point of us getting an ANC government and likely Mandela for president. MANY people who voted NP then did NOT believe things would go that far. They believed that somehow the NP would remain in power, even if black people were given the vote – as if they would be grateful to the government for the reforms while forgetting all that was done to them by that government prior to those reforms. Or maybe that black people could somehow be given the vote gradually and slowly assimilated into the system as it was. White folks were conservative. They did not like the idea of revolution.

In 1990 the negotiations began between the N.P. Government and the liberation movements, chiefly the ANC. In 1991 CODESA, the Convention for a Democratic South Africa, was started, a body with the aim of ensuring a peaceful transition to a fully democratic government. I think at this point people started realizing that democracy would mean full non-white participation and the end of white dominance. The government would be multiracial, the ANC and other resistance groups would be parties people could vote for, and also, South Africa was to be an undivided whole: no more Bantustans, and also, the prospect for a ‘white’ homeland such as some Afrikaner activists thought to be our only hope for self-determination, was ruled out.

In 1992 the negotiations were put to the test in a referendum of the white voters. Most voted in support of it.

In the negotiations a concept came out called ‘power sharing’. That essentially meant the NP was trying to cover its bases: it was trying to somehow retain a grip on power while letting the ANC also get some. The idea was doomed. And in retrospect it looks now as if the NP knew the score and was thinking, ‘sod it, this ship is sinking, let’s abandon it as quickly as possible while at least trying to save face’. Because they didn’t press very hard, and later many white people came to believe they sold us out. But the NP seems to have at least tried for a short while to maintain some leverage.

In the country itself in the years 1990-1994 the political violence continued and in some cases became quite horrific. Again one might speculate that this might have been due to some outside influence. INKATHA and the ANC fighting against each other was helpful in weakening the opposition to the NP.

But not all of it could be attributed to the government. In those years what especially came to the fore were the white resistance movements, several of them underground. I was briefly involved in a secret militant white resistance movement in … I think … the late eighties (I was in my last years of high school) … and I got out as quickly as I could when I realized what sort of things they were up to. So when the N.P. government seemed to be giving up, many whites felt they were abandoned and betrayed and that from now on they would have to fight their own fight. And these movements being secret, it is not known what stuff they did, but some of it must have been quite awful. ‘Unfortunately’ as I said I got away as far as I could from these movements and thus I cannot give you the inside scoop which I might have been able to had I stayed a while longer, at the risk of my soul.

One of the strongest and most popular of these movements – although this one was not secret – was the AWB or Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (Afrikaner Resistance Movement). Led by the charismatic extremist Eugène Terre’Blanche (his surname suitably being French for ‘White Earth’), this was a populist movement based around heavy rhetoric and inflammatory speeches against non-whites, and an almost complete absence of a realistic political viewpoint or strategy. Terre’Blanche was bearded, often appearing on horseback dressed like a Boer soldier of old, with an oratory style comparable to Hitler – though he was a much more imposing physical specimen than the Führer ever was – and the AWB’s emblem was just like the Nazi swastika flag except for its ‘swastika’ having three arms instead of four … hell, just have a look at it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Three_sevens.svg

Over and over they explained in public that it had nothing to do with the Nazis. The white symbolized … hell, everything symbolized something noble, and the three arms of the swastika were three sevens symbolizing the Holy Trinity.

But during my brief white resistance involvement I actually spoke with one of the people who had designed this flag and he said that from the start the resemblance with the Nazi flag was intentional. He said they wanted to be controversial. And the Nazi association was there. As much as many right-wing parties who considered themselves to be reasonable and enlightened wanted to deny it. There were right-wingers here who idolized the Nazis. There were groups here considering blacks to be inhuman or animals or even demons, there were people who felt themselves dedicated to kill non-whites.

Now those groups were small. Sometimes as small as a single deluded person. I still remember my reaction when Barend Strydom, a man announcing himself as the leader of the ‘Wit Wolwe’ (White Wolves) went on a rampage on Strijdomplein in Pretoria, my birth town. In broad daylight and amidst a crowd he flat-out shot a number of non-white people simply because they were. It was later determined that he was quite cuckoo and the White Wolves was comprised of him and him alone. That event was one of the first that I can remember that put me into a state of reality-denial. I couldn’t believe that it really happened. I mean literally – I started believing that reality itself must be some sort of illusion … surely things like that couldn’t really happen. I was at this point already distrusting what the newspapers were saying. I later had many more such incidents when there were even photos printed in the papers about atrocities that had taken place here or in other African countries. I just flat out did not want to believe that such things really happened. I would rather believe that all of outside reality was just an illusion and a fiction.

So anyways Strydom was one of the most extreme of the people who took it upon themselves to just kill non-white people without any (other) discrimination. I have to be fair here and say that most right-wingers were not like that and would have vehemently disapproved of the ones who were. In my own right-wing phase I fully considered non-white people to be worthy of equal respect and what was due to them, and as I said, I supported them having the right to vote and having a government that represented them. I was right-wing in the sense of having supported, initially, a separate small homeland for white people (Afrikaners, chiefly) because I doubted the possibility of peaceful co-existence in one country … because of intolerance from both sides. I knew many of my own people were intolerant and also that many black people were not exactly enamoured of whites. And I did consider my own people – Afrikaners – as being under threat, and I did want my own people to have a viable future. I am pro-culture and pro-language and I think the fact that there ‘evolved’ in Africa a new people coming from European roots but now being rooted in this continent, and having developed a new language, is great – and I want us to go on and to become better and to be a good example for other people. I want what’s good for us Afrikaners AND what’s good for other cultures and languages in this country, and having all in one state means an ongoing possibility that the majority could terrorize or oppress one or some of the minorities. I still think this is a problem but I now recognize that for better or for worse we’re together and will have to find a way to make it work, for all our sakes.

Back to the story. So during the period of negotiations there were pressures like black-on-black violence, mostly between INKATHA and the ANC, as well as a few white resistance acts. Chris Hani, general secretary of the South African Communist Party, was assassinated by Janusz Waluś of the AWB; the AWB also tried to disrupt the negotiations by driving an armoured car through the doors of the Kempton Park World Trade Centre where the talks were taking place; at the very end, in 1994, the AWB tried to defend the leader of the homeland of Bophutatswana against a pro-ANC coup, a disaster during which three AWB members were shot dead while arrested and unarmed and while someone was filming it. Seeing that was another stimulus towards reality-denial for me.

There were more acts of terrorism and violence, some against white people. All of this was intended to somehow influence the negotiations process.

But on 27 April 1994, we held our first election that included all racial groups. The ANC got just short of a two-thirds majority, the NP most of the rest. The ANC not having a two-thirds majority meant it could not change the Constitution (which was drawn up during the negotiations) on its own. This is still a concern here: that the ANC should at all costs be prevented from getting that two-thirds majority. More about that later.

But the NP’s death knell had sounded. They, the party that had invented Apartheid as a political doctrine, that had governed this country from 1948 to 1990 with an iron fist, finally just capitulated, gave up, and was consigned to the dusty archives of history. Trounced by the ANC in the first election, it held on until the next, along the way tried to transform itself and changed its name to the ‘New National Party’, then formed an alliance with the DP (Democratic Party) and others, but then it gave up. It doesn’t exist any more. I don’t even know what those prominent NP politicians that featured so heavily on the TV and in the newspapers in the eighties and early nineties are doing now, or where they are, or even if they’re still alive. They’re all gone now, it’s all faded away like a bad dream. We only ever hear from Pik Botha (our old minister of foreign affairs) from time to time in the newspapers when he has something to say that he thinks is witty. Adriaan Vlok, our old minister of defence, famously washed the feet of the reverend Frank Chikane (if you remember, one of those who had been on a hit-list in Apartheid South Africa) as a gesture of contrition. He also washed the feet of mothers and widows of anti-apartheid activist that had been killed by the military. He at least admitted to wrongdoings and asked for forgiveness.

So. That was Apartheid and that was how it ended. But … has it really ended? While officially it is over … we are still haunted by its ghosts. In many, many ways. So, while now we’re done with the history … there are still a few things to be said about the present and the future. Thanks to all for reading this far.

Willem, your thanks are not due to me for reading.
Mine are due to you for the writing.

Rod

Thank you for the brilliant work, here, Willem. As you've noticed, I included a link to this thread in this week's . That's because I'm seriously hoping that your writing here will be widely read and discussed, and so we have a permanent, archived link.

Those crazy assassins that you describe sound to me like they'd been staring at goats too long. I'm having uneasy thoughts that they might have learned some of these nutty techniques from other governments' secret agencies, naming no names, of course...

Hello all! Dmitri, thank you very much for the link and the mention ... I'm still thinking of perhaps doing something with all this because it was a huge effort to write and I do think people could learn a thing or two. You know, a thing I want to convey is how insane it is. Knowing what really happened in this country is like feeling one is in the Twilight Zone. It triggers cognitive dissonance. Surely none of this could really have happened - it is too far out to be true. But I've tried to check and double-check, apart from what I've *lived* ... and still it seems to *me* like the X-files. But the worst thing is ... if things had gone otherwise ... if the Old SA Government had somehow managed to *stay* in power, and none of this had come out ... we would be living in a different reality now and blissfully ignorant of these things that by all accounts *did happen*. And I ask myself ... how many countries are there in the world in which people *do* live with a false idea of reality because their governments have *not* been overthrown and their dirty secrets have *not* come out the way they have over here?

I'd like to read that book about the goat-starers by the way. I think I already know a bit of the stuff behind it.

Yeah, I know what you mean about the cognitive dissonance. I haven't read the book, myself, only seen the film.

The film is one I recommend. It's hilarious. Although as I said, I haven't read the book, I've read enough about similar projects (and heard a bit over the years) to know it isn't made up.

<>
- Yes, I can imagine some of that

<< and I do think people could learn a thing or two.>>
- Yes, and I know something of that.


Have a little rest, Willem.
...
...
...
then, tell us more

Rod

Hi again! Dmitri, I've been to the video store but they haven't the Men Staring At Goats one there. Maybe when I'm in Pretoria I'll be able to get it.

So. How are things in South Africa right now?

I would say not so bad. Not so good either, but not so bad. There's still a lot of hope for the future. But there are some things going wrong. Biggest problem to me is that the ANC as a government doesn't seem to really be doing its job efficiently.

We still have a massive poverty problem here. The ideal of course would have been to lift people up while not dragging any people down. However, the strategy of affirmative action as applied here, has not worked well. First of all it has helped very, very few black people. It has helped a small minority - and mostly those who had connections to the ANC leadership. So, relatives of ministers and other powerful figures have been given jobs - cushy, well-paying jobs - often for which they're by no means qualified.

This means first of all, a lot of important things that have to get done, are not getting done. There's for instance a lot of money that has *not* been spent, on projects such as building houses for poor people, or improving facilities and things like power, sanitation and electricity, because the people who are supposed to be doing it aren't doing anything. There's a lot of money just sitting there. There are lots of those in power as well who seem to be doing nothing better than sitting there.

Secondly in many cases, white people have been kept to do the actual job, while the black person who's gained the position by affirmative action, is getting the credit and (most) of the money. This isn't really fair in my view.

This all means inefficiency in much of what the government is supposed to be doing. And the government is still responsible for lots of things ... the 'setup' hasn't changed much since Apartheid. Some companies have been privatised but with them the policy of affirmative action has been applied in the same sort of way.

The problem simply is there are not really as many black qualified people as we need for this country, because our educational system hasn't been turning them out. Realistically we need a few more generations educated MUCH BETTER than they've been educated before.

Problem is, the educational system is not improving. I am not sure how many new schools have been built ... I have the idea private schools are increasing, and I do NOT mean super expensive elitist private schools or fundy religious schools. Yes, we have those, but we also have affordable, open private schools run by people with a real philanthropic bent. Many private individuals are working hard trying to make things better for everyone.

But then the government in 'revolution mode' has been changing things that didn't need changing. Such an example was changing the educational model to 'Outcomes-Based Education' which in itself is not a bad model, but it was inapplicable to the conditions in the country such as the number of schools, number of children per class/teacher, and the educational background of the teachers themselves. Teachers, themselves untrained in the kind of psychological methods assumed by the model, and with large classes, ended up unable to teach anything at all. So for a few years we had education that in many schools did nothing. Finally the model was dropped. But a LOT has been lost. For instance many school textbook publishers have been ruined. They had to produce textbooks according to the new model and then it was dropped before the books could get into the classrooms. There has been a lot of needless waste because of this.

Then there's also the anti-Afrikaans thing. We have had a flourishing Afrikaans educational infrastructure here, including excellent textbooks and teachers and schools with a history of successful teaching (I mean even despite the pro-Afrikaner propaganda: the overall education I got in school was excellent.) This has all been thrown in the trashbin. Afrikaans is under enormous pressure now: many schools that were Afrikaans are now English only, or English and Afrikaans, with Afrikaans on the way out. Now for some people this is not a problem. Of course since I am Afrikaans it is something I care about. I don't see why the language and its speakers must be penalized. We did a lot of wrong yes, but we had a model that worked and the bits that were wrong were fixable without destroying the entire thing. And also Afrikaans does not equal white or Boer. As I've said a few times before, the majority of Afrikaans speakers are the Coloured people. They also benefit from Afrikaans schools, teachers and textbooks.

What SHOULD have been done in my view is to leave Afrikaans schools and teachers to do their job educating children and ALSO to boost the other South African languages: more Sotho, Zulu, Xhosa and so on schools, teachers and textbooks. English doesn't need anyone's help - our other languages do. It's very easy for anyone to learn English, with all the TV, movies, magazines and newspapers. I find it really, really shocking that so little is done to promote and develop the other languages in this country. And in that regard, if it was handled right, Afrikaans could have been an example to the other languages of how to build themselves a vocabulary that can handle science and other jargon and the 'modern' life and world.

Another problem that is a legacy of Apartheid AND the Struggle against it, is laziness when it comes to education. During the struggle, education at all levels was disrupted, as part of causing chaos in the entire country to bring the system down. The slogan was 'Liberation before Education'. Now the Liberation is supposedly here, but still there's a bias against education amongst the people we're trying to educate. There's still a lot of disruption of education, especially at universities. And even teachers often go on strike. One might have sympathy because overall they have a rotten deal (paid far less than the importance of their position should warrant) BUT STILL. When they strike, children are not getting educated, and children that are not getting educated mean more people not qualified to do what needs to be done, more people in trouble needing help instead of more people able to help others.

And among pupils and students there still is not a culture of learning. There is not a culture of people wanting to become informed, rational and discriminating people. There is not a culture of WORKING for qualifications. Many pupils and students think that education OWES them the diplomas, certificates and things they need to get high-paying jobs without THEM having to do anything towards earning or deserving those.

Really, some people think back in the old days, this is the way it was for us whites: we could just get a superior degree or something without effort, and then we could land cushy jobs and get lots of money and whatever we wanted ... and now that the ANC is in power it is the black people's turn: now they should get the same benefits and get it quickly, cheaply and easily.

If you think I'm racist for saying this, there are many non-white people saying the exact same things, such as Prof. Jonathan Jansen of the University of the Free State.

So the education problem is still a long way from being solved.

Right, more later!

The things you're saying about education, Willem? It's a worldwide problem.

You're right, people want a 'quick fix'. They don't want to do the work to make sure their kids have a safe, affordable, and useful education.

Oh, and hint: copying whatever silly thing they tried in the US 10 years before is not a good idea. Learn from others' mistakes, don't imitate them. *double *

Education. Yes. It's something that's coming to the fore of mind more often as time goes on.

>>It's a worldwide problem<< ... yes, except for some places? Methinks we'll find out in 10-20 year's time.

Hi Dmitri and Rob! It's really depressing if what you say is true, that it's a *worldwide* problem. But over here we have less of a margin for error ... we are in desperate, critical need for ansolutely top-notch education.

Rob, I hope you're right ... there *must* be some places where it is done right! I'll wait and see how things look in 2032 ...

Moving on. Xenophobia, now ...

This demonstrates that prejudice is not just about 'race', crudely conceived. We currently have a fairly big problem with prejudice directed against people from other African countries.

First of all, South Africa is still one of the most prosperous countries in Africa. There's lots of money here, fairly good work opportunities, and a fairly stable political setup. As such, many people in other African countries consider this a nice place to come to.

Of course there are official rules as to who can come and how and so on. But these rules are not really enforced or enforcable. There are huge sections of our borders that aren't really guarded. The entire border of the eastern Limpopo, all of which lies in the Kruger National Park, which is mostly guarded by lions. People come through regularly from Mozambique, braving the lions. A few get caught every year, but many more do get through.

Now Mozambique is not such a bad country, there's just a lot of poverty, and occasional natural disasters. But north of South Africa there's the country of Zimbabwe, which is in a complete meltdown. The economy has been almost completely destroyed, money is almost completely worthless, and there are food shortages. So there has been a constant trickle of folks coming down into SA looking for something, *anything*, because *anything* is better than what they have up there.

I've met a number of these Zimbabweans myself. My parents worked with some at the school ... teachers and also children. I am assuming those were ones that managed to get in here legally. There was a Zimbabwean working on a farm of friends where I did some plant work as well, he was a very friendly man, eager to learn and with good plans of his own. Then I've also met a couple of refugees on their way ... they had hiked non-stop for five days when a couple of friends and I encountered them, having had no meals in that time, so the one guy said. They were making for *Pretoria*. We found them in the Soutpansberg Mountain region which is about 400 km (250 miles) away from Pretoria. So they had quite a hike still ahead and they had to watch out for cops as well.

There are vast numbers of illegal Zimbabweans in South Africa ... estimates range from about 5 to about 10 million if I remember right. The entire border between SA and Zim consists of the Limpopo River, which is typical of South African rivers in not always being recognisable as a river. In years of drought (of which we get quite a few) it is barely a trickle through a broad sandy bed, and that over a length of several hundreds of miles. There are, I think, just two or three 'official' border-crossing points that are patrolled by police/army folks.

Then there are people from other African countries as well. There are many Nigerians here. Now these come mainly legally, by airplane or ship mostly, since Nigeria is a tad far to hike from. Then we have Somalians (Somalia being perhaps the textbook 'failed state'- absolutely horrible civil war, social collapse and anarchy, like a real post-apocalypse here and now), Ethiopians, Malawians, Congolese, Rwandans, and plenty of others.

Whether legal or illegal, these people face some real problems. In spite of ostensible prosperity, there is in fact a severe shortage of work here. We have something like 40% unemployment amongst employable adults. There is a shortage of housing, water, sanitation facilities. The large numbers of immigrants we get, put even greater strain on our resources.

Also, Zimbabweans, especially, are willing to work very hard for very little money. South Africans on the other hand are now 'spoiled' in the sense that now that we are 'free' they expect to get nice jobs paying lots of money for which they don't need to work very hard. They belong to unions and they often strike, while Zimbabweans don't. So: Zimbabweans are often hired to work instead of South Africans. And the South Africans don't like that. A typical response is, “they come here and they take our jobs".

And when they don’t find work, they turn to crime, so it is believed. Never mind that native South Africans themselves are heavily into crime … outsiders will be blamed more easily.

In some cases the crime accusation is justified. Nigerians for instance tend to be heavily into a variety of corrupt schemes, and often into drug trafficking. But again it would be wrong to generalize, since there are many Nigerians with perfectly upstanding lifestyles. My parents had Nigerian colleagues both at the University of the North and at the school where they taught later on. But even people with *skills* are seen as a threat by locals.

Outsiders are also frequently accused of raping women and so spreading AIDS from the other countries into ours. Again, never mind that here in South Africa we’ve had, from the start, one of the highest incidences of AIDS in Africa, without outside help. And the same goes for our rape statistics.

A reason stranger than the above is that there has been a powerful nation-building initiative in South Africa. The aim of the government has been to bind the different peoples in South Africa together into a tighter unit. This has had the effect of uniting our peoples also against other peoples! I might add that whites, coloureds, and Asian peoples, have been neglected in this ‘nation-building’ enterprise … but I’ll speak of that later. For now just the problem of Black Africans against other Black Africans.

It also seems as if South Africans feel themselves superior to other Africans, perhaps because of our country being more prosperous and our society being more ‘modern’ in many ways. (I’ll write something sometime about how ‘modern’ or 'westernized' South Africa is … lifestyles, houses, clothes, cars and so on. You might be surprised. And other African countries are also very largely ‘westernized’. Whether this is a good or a bad thing is a different topic.)

Another thing is that community leaders are often young and unemployed. They often use the tactic of riling up the community against some scapegoat group as a tactic to boost their own popularity. Blame some group for whatever problems a community is having … they’ll be very willing to believe you, it means they can simply attack someone instead of doing something much more difficult to try and improve their own condition.

So: people from other African countries thus find themselves targets for various kinds of discrimination. They are called 'Kwerekwere' which is an onomatopoeic term implying they chirp like birds - because they speak languages unintelligible to the locals. Sometimes their houses, shacks or shops (many Somalis for instance open shops_ will be vandalized or burnt down. Sometimes they are physically attacked, sometimes even killed. Even the police would frequently target these ‘outsiders’ for raids or with brutal treatment. They are particularly vulnerable because of not being able to understand the local languages, and in some cases are physically identifiable due to features that are infrequently found among Native South Africans, such as particularly dark skins in people from more northernly African countries.

I am not sure how many people died as a result … perhaps about 100, since 1994. So not many compared to the total number of murder victims … but still. Not good, not nice.

Of course political capital has been made of this. Some parties blame the ANC or other parties for the violence; some insist that the borders must be patrolled better and that there should be a greater restriction on immigration. In practice, the government is very lenient. Even known illegal immigrants are rarely deported, and there have been facilities made to house them. The government also on occasion ordered the police into residential areas to protect these ‘foreigners’. So the government at least is not the main problem … mostly it is the intolerance of ordinary people. Here is an instance where ordinary people’s hearts need to change … but how? I hope to be able to write more on that topic …

You're becoming a melting pot without the melting part, Willem. Since I live in a multi-cultural country that has seen this happen over and over, I get you. (You do know that Italians were considered 'non-white' back in the early 20th Century?)

Good luck to all those folks.

That being said, somebody tell the border patrol over here thata all we need is to reintroduce the mountain lion. The mind boggles...

There's more in these 150-odd posts than is often the case in as many other conversations, Willem.

Mind you, a lot of it hurts, too...

Right, I'm going to try and get back with this.

Now to try and counter some stereotypes. So here are some things that are not 'sensational' but more to the point when it comes to what we really are and what everyday life is like.

I have been hard on my own people, the Afrikaner, here. But at the same time I wanted to show that we are not intrinsically evil but have made some mistakes. Mistakes that other people also made and that more people continue to make. In the days of Apartheid it was still the case that most white people respected non-white people and treated them well. Even the doctrine of Apartheid came from people with ideals they thought were good. The ideal was to uplift the Afrikaner people who had been cruelly downtrodden by the British. This in itself was not bad but that it had to happen at the expense of others was. This is still THE problem in the world. We still want to help 'our' people against 'them'. We must come to see that we are all just 'we'. (Don't you folks think one could make a song from that line?)

So anyways. Now, post-Apartheid, let me mention some more positives. Most people in this country BY FAR get along with each other. My province, Limpopo, is with Mpumalanga the most peaceful province in South Africa, and the population is something like 10% white and 90% non-white. Most of the people I come in contact with on a day-to-day basis are non-white. They include the shop employees, most of whom are very friendly, and most of the people who shop as well. You will see many quite affluent non-white people here. Almost everyone, young, old, and in-between, has a cellphone. The two people who work for me - Aletta, my housekeeper, and Andries, my gardener, both have cellphones and nice ones. They are both young and quite fashionable. I once saw Andries has a 'pin-up girl' as a background on his cellphone. Andries can speak Afrikaans and English very well, while Aletta can speak neither, but we still manage to communicate (most of the time). Most people here are Pedi, or Northern Sotho. We also have Vendas, a rather small ethnic group with a unique language.

You'll see people driving around with nice cars, wearing nice clothes, buying themselves nice food and stuff ... even though my province is also the poorest in South Africa, we have plenty of affluent people of all colours. You'll recognise many brands. We have a MacDonalds not far from where I live, a Kentucky Fried Chicken ... note that I don't frequent these places, I am no fan of fast food. Also not being rich myself I don't go out much or buy lots of stuff. But if I was I would have been able to name many brands you'd recognise. There's an 'outdoors' shop in the local mall that is Canadian. We have lots and lots of Japanese cars and electronics products ... lately, from Korea as well. And German cars and electronics as well. We have coffee shops, restaurants ... the movie theatre shows mostly movies from America, sometimes British movies, sometimes Bollywood movies, and sometimes local South African movies too. We make a few of those. Some are targeted at the general non-white majority, while several are targeted at Afrikaans people, and some are targeted at everybody. We have several TV stations, and LOTS of TV shows in Afrikaans and also other native South African languages. We have shows where they will speak several languages - as in real life - and these usually have English subtitles.

We have many radio stations. Music is big here, with many different genres. Many non-white people here like rap, and not just American style but 'home-made' as well. But traditional styles also remain popular and often get combined with more modern genres, such as jazz, pop, rock. In Afrikaans and English we have pretty much all styles ... traditional folk music a lot in Afrikaans, still.

School integration is complete, now, although most have Afrikaans or English or both as mediums of instruction. We have a local Islamic school as well. We have many Muslims in town - and in the country - and they vary from very conservative to very liberal and are of multiple ethnicities. We all get along very well. There are some shops run by strictly religious muslims and they give their employees time to pray every day and they celebrate Ramadan faithfully and so forth. There is no violence between Christians and Muslims here that I know of. In all my life here I have not heard of a single incident.

South Africans are somewhat crazy when it comes to sport. The big sport of us Afrikaners is rugby, but we also like cricket a lot. More and more non-whites are playing rugby although for the government it is still too few! But for instance Chester Williams and Bryan Habana have become hugely popular among white fans. We play rugby a lot against countries like New Zealand, England, Wales and France. Cricket is popular with white and non-white. We play cricket a lot against Australia, India, Pakistan and the West Indies. Soccer is not so popular with Afrikaners but very much so with non-whites and also many English South Africans. We don't play soccer against other countries so much because we are not so good! Popular soccer teams include the Kaizer Chiefs, Orlando Pirates and Moroka Swallows. We also are strong in track-and-field athletics, and swimming.

While in the cities the general culture is 'modern' and I would say most tourists would find it familiarly similar to where they come from, we still have lots of places where life is more traditional. Zulu and Xhosa culture for instance still retains much of what they were like prior to the coming of Europeans. Traditional leaders still have lots of authority and we also still have 'traditional healers'. There are still many ceremonies that take place in the 'old fashion'. Some of it includes things I don't like much, such as sacrificing live animals. There's also a bit of controversy about the initiation rites boys go through, since there are occasional deaths due to the hardships.

We also have here in my town a Northern Sotho museum showing how the Pedi people lived here around the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But nobody lives like that any more. Even the most remote rural communities will have many modern conveniences and people will wear modern clothes ... shirts, pants, dresses, shoes and so forth. And there will be supermarkets and cafe's and bars and so on.

Now poor people ... we still have too many of those. These mostly live in 'squatter's camps'. They make houses out of anything they can find, usually corrugated metal sheets but often also including wood and cardboard. The government is trying to supply such communities with water, sanitation facilities, and eletric power, but is not always succeeding. These camps often grow rapidly as people migrate from rural areas closer to the big, growing cities.

But even in these camps life is not all hardship. There will often be some nicer houses in between the shacks, and even the poorest shack will have a little space around it where some mealies (maize) will be planted. Sometimes there are even gardens with succulents or flowers. There will be open fields as well where often you'll see some kids kicking a soccer ball around. There will be many chickens and goats, and some cattle and a few donkeys, in and around these camps.

South Africa has a fairly good road system. The highways are mostly tarred but there are some highways especially around Johannesburg that look to me like they're topped off with concrete. Along highways you'll see huge boards advertising various things from cellphone services to toothpaste to political parties to bathroom tiles to automobile tires and everything in between. Most sizeable towns are still quite a distance apart: typically fifty to a hundred miles. But Gauteng is a huge urban jungle where you can drive for hours and still be in 'the city'. The residential areas spread over vast regions and the same is true of the industrial areas. In Gauteng you also find the 'headquarters' of most businesses operating in the country ... HUGE numbers of these.

Most rural areas only have 'dirt' roads and these are often not in a very good condition. Many places are only accessible by 'four-wheel-drive' vehicles.

The nature in South Africa: there are many places that are still in good shape. Game watching is popular not just among white people ... in the Kruger National Park and also in smaller reserves like our local game reserve here in Polokwane get more and more non-white local visitors. Yet, we have some major conservation problems ... I've written about many of them and will probably write more since it's a big concern to me.

I'd say we are in general not very 'cultured' in terms of high culture. That goes for people across the board: not many Afrikaners that I know are people who read literature or lots of non-fiction; not many consider themselves intellectuals. I'd even say there's a strong current of anti-intellectualism here. People are distrustful of people seen as 'clever'. To a degree, that is justified. I think English people may be a bit more cultured, and many of them look down on Afrikaners for not being so! Amongst the other groups, there are not many intellectuals either ... but there are some! And again this includes people from all ethnic groups.

OK. I think I've written enough to give y'all a taste of what 'regular' South Africa is like ... it's not so bad, I find it a nice place to live, generally. But still - we need to work on those problems!

Thanks for that, Willem. You've contributed mightily there to the theme of the month, which is 'living la vida local'.

It's good to remind ourselves that everyday things are what we are all about. I think Limpopo sounds like a very cool place to be.

Hi again Dmitri, I wish I could contribute *more*. But anyways ...

Okay. To get back to problems again. This is my own great big 'how about we just stop doing this, already, please' sort of thing: child sexual abuse. (And any form of sexual abuse actually...)

But. For some reason I cannot fathom, South Africa seems to be one of the world leaders when it comes to children being sexually abused.

And it's not a recent development.

I cannot tell you who it is that this happened to. I will also not tell you when this happened, but it was some time ago. One of his teachers in primary school fondled pretty much every single boy that was in every single class that he taught, and he did it *during* classtime. Ten to fifteen boys per class, several classes each day. This went on, I don't know how long it went on, but school teachers in those days had fairly stable employment, so we're talking of a couple or up to several decades. As far as I could determine, NOTHING was EVER done to or about this person. And this is just one person, responsible for, certainly, hundreds of cases of abuse, perhaps thousands.

Then there were also headmasters who had kids privately called to them ... you know, for heart-to-heart talks, alone in the office behind closed doors.

And combine this with the authoritarian kind of *complex* my entire people had that I spoke of in pretty much every posting here. Teacher and headmaster were kind benevolent uncles who always knew what was right and only did what was best for the children. A child dares not complain and if s/he did, is not believed over the word of a teacher or a principal. At least, this was the case until the eighties and nineties when at last we Afrikaners started realising that the authority figures were not as wonderful and infallible as we thought they were. Then, at last, children who spoke out about sexual abuse started to be believed.

But imagine before then, how *easy* it was to get away with this sort of thing. It was SO hushed up ... it's impossible to know just how much of it was going on, and I almost didn't know that it had happened to this person. But I remember one situation when this person was speaking about this, to a deacon or elder of the church we both belonged to, back when I still went to church. After this very sensitive and shocking revelation, the elder/deacon erupted in roaring laughter, as if it was a wonderful joke!

But with our naïvete gone, with people speaking more openly, we now know that this sort of thing was going on and we know this sort of thing is still going on. In all races. We know there are many people who rape their own children. There are people who make and sell sex videos starring their own children. Or hire them out as prostitutes. There are children as young as two years old being trained to perform oral sex.

There is also the myth that having sex with a virgin will cure AIDS. Taking in account the amount of sexual abuse and activity that is going on, the best shot at getting an actual virgin is to choose someone really, really young. As in, often, toddlers or even babies.

Imagine what this 'phenomenon' is doing to children and by extension to *everybody* in this country with its entire atmosphere of fear and insecurity and distrust and paranoia ...

That's just horrible, Willem. And it's so easy to believe, I'm afraid.

Everywhere in the world, people abuse their personal power over the helpless. Often, it is tolerated. I don't want to tell tales, but I've known of a couple of cases where I was outraged, but people sided with the male authority figure over his victims.

I think that's why Jesus said that people who do this sort of thing would be better off being tied to a large rock and drowned. I think he meant, before God gets hold of them...

Oh dear, oh dear.


The only thing that can be said is that to be reminded, now and again, is no bad thing.

Though not so good, perhaps, is the looking around and wondering...