You’re
not free, Virginia. Your white baas gave you a job. You use his language and you
write what he tells you to write.
We take
it whence it comes, your tirade against Steve Hofmeyr. The truth is sometimes
brutal, but it remains the truth. Steve’s right of course – he knows his history
(his people had the written word so things can be checked) while the “others”
occupied this continent for millennia and did nothing, absolutely nothing except
kill each other and plant a few mealies. No wheel, no written word, no towns,
gardens, hospitals, railway lines, factories, shops or any other accoutrements
of a civilization worth its salt. Just check out what the early English
missionaries found when they ventured into the country’s interior in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They had no political agenda and they wrote
as they saw – they sketched primitive people with spears and loin cloths
standing outside straw and mud houses. They wrote about their wars and their
early deaths because of disease and internecine struggles. There were no title
deeds then, so claiming land is now a bit hit and miss, given that there were no
records of anything. The white man codified their languages (who else did it?)
so being “oppressed” by whites is hardly the way it was.
There is
no proof whatsoever that these Africans would have advanced one inch without
white influence. Otherwise why didn’t they create a civilization of their own?
They had the territory, they had the sun, the rain, the rivers, the green
pastures. Oppressed? Give me a break! I would think they should go on their
knees every day that the whites came to South Africa first. (What would have
happened if the Chinese or the Arabs had got here first? You should shudder to
think, Virginia.)
You talk
about the black “owners” of this land. How can they prove they owned anything?
They didn’t have the written word so no title deeds, no records, no nuttin’.
Where’s the proof, Virginia? Aren’t you supposed to back up your journalistic
integrity with facts? Or did your white baas tell you you can say what you like
because you’re “previously disadvantaged”?
So let’s
get down to the basics. Every single thing you own and consume was provided to
you by the whites and their civilization. Tell me one thing – one single thing –
that occurs in your life that is indigenous to black South Africa? Even your job
is courtesy of a white man. The language you speak, the clothes you wear, the
food you eat spring from a white civilization. The transport you use, the water
from the tap, the electricity lighting your house are not indigenous to Africa.
The fact that you are not standing on some dusty red earth watching the Ebola
health workers take out your neighbours for burial can be attributed to the fact
that you live in a developed South Africa, taking advantage of the solid,
first-world health system whose foundations were laid down by the forefathers of
the Steve Hofmeyrs of this world. For who else did it? The ANC? They are busy
destroying it but that is in their DNA. They are destroyers by nature. Why don’t
you fill your newspaper space criticizing them? (And by the way, why can’t
Africa look after the Ebola outbreak itself? Why must the white people (and
others) of this world rescue them from their cultural backwardness of not
knowing how to wash their hands properly?)
You bleat
about apartheid! Did you ever think what would have happened to this country
without apartheid at the time? As the post-war hordes streamed into the cities
looking for work (they can never create work, someone else must give them a
job!), where would it have stopped? Our cities then would have become like our
cities today, only fifty years earlier! We would have been sitting with a Kwame
Nkrumah or a Jacob Zuma fifty years earlier, with all that this implies! Where
did Eskom, Sasol, Iscor, our nuclear achievements and one of the world’s most
vibrant economies have come from except under apartheid? Unshackled by the huge
drain of a welfare state (as we have now), white creativity and entrepreneurship
flourished. Did you know that the rand was worth more than the US dollar at that
time, that investors streamed into our country because the non-Zumas were in
charge? That millions of blacks to the north of us tried to get into the
apartheid pariah country?
Like so
many of your ilk, you call the truth racial hatred. Well, the whole world must
be practising racial hatred because they do all in their power to keep blacks
from Africa out of their countries. Why do you think the Australians won’t let
aliens even touch their shores? Why are the Italians and the French and the
Greeks complaining about too many blacks in their countries? Check out Israel’s
policy towards blacks: they are deported en masse and attacked in the streets of
Tel Aviv. Why is this?
There are
reasons, Virginia and they can be found in the streets of our once pristine
South African cities. The fact is that when the blacks move in, the whites move
out and this happens all over the world. (Detroit is now filing for bankruptcy
for this very reason).
I just
loved your “we are twenty years into democracy, into freedom” platitude.
Democracy? You’ve got to be kidding! When the country is run from Luthuli House,
where not one parliamentarian is responsible to any constituent, and where the
so-called government is the worst the country has ever had, there’s not much to
be said for democracy. And freedom? Freedom to do what? Pee against someone’s
wall? Throw rubbish into our once clean spruits? Murder someone for a cell
phone? Live in crowded shacks in a squatter camp because you were “free” to come
to a city with no job for you? So that’s freedom is it?
You’re
not free, Virginia. Your white baas gave you a job. You use his language and you
write what he tells you to write. The “verkrampte regses” are right. Democracy
and freedom screwed up big time!
You ask
Steve to “pak op en trek”. Why don’t you do this if you’re not happy with the
white man’s legacy to this country? How about looking for a job in Zambia? Or
Rwanda? Hey, what about Liberia, home of Ebola! This is the country comprising
slaves repatriated from the United States. The country has been financed and
supported by America ever since – the US couldn’t get them back to Africa fast
enough! Liberia has freedom and democracy too, but they don’t even know how to
wash their hands. There are no whites in Liberia, and that’s the difference. Why
don’t you go there and you won’t have to put up with people like
Steve?
You talk
about being “onderdruk”. Yes, there was law and order and you couldn’t just go
into a park and defecate and throw your papers all over the show and leave your
takeaway mess under a seat. Which park do you take your children to now,
Virginia? Remember Joubert Park in Johannesburg? Christmas was a wonderful time
– the lights, the theatre shows, the decorations. Now it is home to Somali
squatters who live there, and hang their washing over the trees and use the
gutter as a toilet. Was it better under apartheid, or worse, Virginia? Now that
the park is for everyone, who wants to go there? What was wrong with control
under apartheid? Sweden for example didn’t have apartheid because it didn’t have
third world hordes. Now our cities are ringed with squatter camps. (I bet you
live in a gated community, or if not, your windows are barred and there’s plenty
of “security”. Security against whom, Virginia? Whites? No my dear, security is
against the “freedom of movement” you so like to punt.
Steve
doesn’t “staan alleen in die land”. Not at all. Millions agree with him,
millions. They just don’t say anything. But they curse as they drive through
Sunnyside in Pretoria, once a pleasant flatland with parks and nice shops. Now
the rubbish is on the streets, not in bins. The prostitutes roam from corner to
corner, waste is tipped out from flat windows and no one in their right mind
would be seen dead living there. The Sudanese and the Somalis have it all to
themselves. So was apartheid so bad, or is this better? Better for
whom?
And
Hillbrow? It’s not called Little Lagos for nothing. If you feel free, just go
and rent a flat there and then you’ll realize why there was apartheid. You say
footpaths were only for whites? I never saw that. People could walk where they
wanted in public places. There was no “one side for you, one side for me”. Where
did you see that, Virginia?
You can’t
have it all in South Africa, Virginia. You ask how it feels to experience this
and that. Does it not worry you that we experience things that are a hundred
times worse than not being able to go into someone’s restaurant? What about the
vicious crime? What about the wanton killing and torturing of farmers? What
about the unemployment and the terrible poverty, much worse than under
apartheid?
What
about the corruption in government? Who is stealing us blind? The whites or the
ANC? Who has destroyed productive farms in their hundreds in order to prove a
failed policy? Who is putting food security at risk? The whites? Who has turned
our once world class health system into a third world disgrace where babies die
and patients have to buy their own anaesthetics and medicines because the
hospitals have run out? The whites? Who doesn’t answer the phone, doesn’t reply
to letters and generally doesn’t give a rat’s backside for the people who pay
their fancy salaries? The ANC’s comrades occupying jobs for which they are not
qualified, or the Whites? Who are “deployed” somewhere else when they’re found
with their hands in the cookie jar? White employees or the others?
Your
freedom and democracy people can’t even run a post office, Virginia. They can’t
keep the country in electricity, and they can’t run the Johannesburg Zoo, let
alone protect our wildlife. They let their animals starve on farms they were
given on a plate by their pals in the government. They are unable to produce
books for school children. They steal from their own children’s school feeding
schemes. They steal from the social grants (read welfare payments) destined for
poor old people in the homelands who stand all day to get their
money.
They talk
nonsense with regularity. They promise the earth but do nothing. They are
charlatans of the first order. They refuse to admit they are wrong. They are
incompetent and useless. It’s always someone else’s fault – it’s the stolen
cable, its apartheid, it’s the weather, its colonialism, its racism. This is why
they are legal thieves under the guise of BEE. They need BEE because they can’t
even start a spaza shop in the township. They rob and assault the Somalis and
the Pakistanis who do start them. They are a disgrace and you would do well,
Virginia, to concentrate on this cancer eating away at a once beautiful and
prosperous country. Don’t worry about apartheid, Virginia, or Steve either.
There’s much worse on the way to focus your mind. Concentrate on crime, and our
window bars and our alarms and our palisade fences with the spikes on top. It’s
amazing how many commentators say that crime affects the blacks “as well”. But
when there were whites-only areas, there was hardly any crime. This is why there
were no bars on windows, no townhouse complexes (for security!), no boom gates
to keep who out? Whites? No, blacks dear Virginia. When they were not there,
there was virtually no crime.
So put up
or shut up. Concentrate on bringing to book the criminals (both government and
freelance), and leave Steve alone. He’s telling it like it is, and so should
you. Ask those venal creatures in the ANC to move to black residential areas, to
send their kids to black schools, to use state hospitals, to go to black doctors
and to buy their clothes in Soweto. The sins of apartheid are pisswilly compared
to the wholesale pillaging of our country by the charlatans calling themselves
the government of South Africa.
– Sic
Transit Gloria, Gauteng
