Much of Adriaan’s argument turns on one point. Afrikaners might be a numerical minority, but they are not minority in the sense that they are potential victims that need protecting or special treatment from the state. That is because they are well to do Adriaan argues. Lets for the moment forget about the fact that a significant number of Afrikaners live in poverty. Is Adriaan’s a good point?

No. Adriaan’s argument is too simplistic. It does not take into account the things that make most people truly happy in life. At its essence his is a right wing argument. One I am sure he does not intend.

One line of argument is easily dispatched for six. Adriaan quotes the UN in support, “In most instances, a minority group will be a numerical minority, but in others, a numerical majority may also find itself in a minority-like or non-dominant position, such as blacks under the apartheid regime in South Africa.”

But apartheid is no more. Many progressives like John Pilger like to claim that apartheid is still alive, but Ferial Haffagee, Adriaan’s own editor, does a grand job of dismantling this argument herself: ‘Its only harvest is to keep us from the honest answers and the hardest analyses. It is sound-bite activism, good to raise a “Viva!”.

She continues to list many of the problems the country faces but says:

Awful, all of it. The reasons for this are more complex than a simple
pretence that the change of power did not happen in 1994. ‘

That many Afrikaners are relatively wealthy vis-a-vis the majority of South Africans is true. In fact the new South African government (not intentionally, but by way of non government) has provided them with ample opportunity to become more wealthy. And many of them have.

But are we to judge the sense of happiness and well-being of a group of people in terms of the money they are making? A growing body of evidence suggest that what people want in life is not only money, but a sense of fulfillment, recognition and belonging. A sense of inclusion in a society, a sense that your skills are put to good use and valued and a sense of security (which I will deal with later). There comes a point in life where more wealth does not make people more happy. And happy societies are not societies where inequality is the norm.

Adriaan argues that events like the Klein Karoo Kunste Fees is a sign of the vitality of Afrikaans. But the reverse is true, the strength of Afrikaans festivals in the country is precisely because of its demotion in public life. It’s the privatisation of a previous public identity. In the words of sociologist and lead singer of the Brixton Moor en Roof Orkes, Andries Bezuidenhout, we are giving the language “a beautiful funeral”.

The impact of the loss of Afrikaans in the public sphere can not have but been and is no less than an experience of collective existential trauma for Afrikaners. One could argue that this process was unavoidable in a country with so many competing languages. One could argue that the ascendancy of English as the language of the public sphere is not only normal, it is desirable.

However one can not argue that it has not been at the cost of Afrikaner’s sense of being or belonging. Arguing that Afrikaans still plays a massive roll outside the public sphere is to discount the importance of identity to you and me. Identity must have a public component.

It also completely ignores the nature of Afrikaner identity in particular: Unfortunately the history of Afrikaans and Afrikanerdom is tied to the language, and its acceptance as a language in the public sphere is tied to Afrikaners sense of self, and self worth. Professor Melissa Steyn points out with respect to Afrikaners and their responsibility for apartheid:

…ironically, it would be a mistake to read the racial domination thus entrenched as emanating from a group that felt secure in their power. Afrikaners contended with the more powerful forces of the British empire throughout a history that was experienced as a long and bitter struggle for freedom from white-on-white overlordship. The self- esteem, indeed the very self-image, of Afrikaner nationhood was forged within a mythology that celebrated the courage of a people who refused to be subordinated to the British empire on more than one occasion in their history.

This is not an argument on my part for the recognition of Afrikaans alongside English. This is me pointing out that there is severe collective pain being felt that is not recognized by the South African community at large. Steyn analised letters to the editor at the Rapport newspaper, she concludes:

“Deep-seated anxieties about identity and loss of self are discemable in the letters. Unlike English South Africans, however, whose in-group has an international ideological center which gives the “we/us” a stable continuity, Afrikaners are contending with a profound existential crisis (De Klerk, 2000; De Lange, 2001; Louw, 2001; Slabbert, 1999), grappling with the question “Who are we?”… The answer would have to reassure the deep fear that activates the soul searching: “Will we—our language, our religion, our identity—disappear?”"

In a fantastic article that I recommend every south African read, Rustum Kozain makes the point even better. Kozain surfed many an Afrikaner right wing website and his conclusion will surprise:

…if one looks past the racist language and past the sensationalism, the emotional tones of many of the posts and comments of white dissatisfaction are hard to ignore. There is rage, yes, but also heartbreak. In a culture that has in its history a strong agricultural connection with the land and a strong literary celebration of landscape and belonging, it is not difficult to see and understand this rage as a product of heartbreak, among other things. An easy, cynical and unsympathetic analysis would be that this heartbreak and rage is simply the product of a loss of power; that all of this are the hysterical fulminations of a segment of South Africa struggling to come to terms with a loss of political power. It certainly is this, but it is also more than this. And it is heartbreaking.

The argument that the well to do can’t be an opressed minority is bogus. The jews in Germany suffered a terrible fate largely because of their perceived superiority and wealth and in Africa similar thing happened to the the Tutsi’s in Rwanda.

Each time I visit South Africa I am surprised by the levels of fear and anxiety amongst South Africans of all races and cultures. Amongst whites however this fear is often irrational and qualitatively different. It is however not even remotely without basis. I would like to use two examples to explain how violence against whites are not only perceived as a threat, but driving them from public spaces.

A few years ago, on a crowded day in the town of Zeerust, Constand Viljoen and his wife, who was deep in his seventies was attacked as they went shopping. He managed to fight off his attackers after a struggle, but what is important is that none of the many onlookers came to his rescue. That an elderly couple can be attacked in a busy town without anybody helping is very odd and not normal societal behaviour I’m sure you would agree.

A similar thing happened to my dad, who used to be a doctor in Krugersdorp and was attacked when he was in his 70′s. He always went to that bank machine, but when he was mugged in front of many people, yet nobody helped. The community just looked on.

I know this is odd even in the South African context because I have spent many hours in South African townships and in predominantly black places like Yeoville. I know the crooks and skabangas dont ply their trade in broad daylight or where many people are. The community won’t allow them. Their revenge can be swift.

The reason is I suspect it happened here was because the community see Viljoen and my dad as “other”. They see them as being part of a privileged group, and the attackers part of a group that are the real victims, just like Adriaan describes. So why intervene? The result is that white South African faces are disappearing behind walls.

So what bothers most is not actual violence against whites, but what it means. The fact that whites by and large can not move in public spaces in South Africa’s cities any longer, without becoming a target of crime is delegitimizing them as citizens. Their whiteness marks them as wealthy targets and removes the protection one would normally find in a society at large. The result is that they are confined to a life spent behind high walls, shopping malls, and cars.

To the Afrikaner identity this loss of being able to move around in public, to go to the park, to walk in the city center, to become non citizens, but getting in turn an ever bigger fancy house, is a grand Faustian bargain. And my anecdotal experience says that they hate it.

Recently, as part of an exhibition of South African photographers in London, Roelof van Wyk explained why he thought his pictures of Afrikaners were a more up to date and sympathetic take on them than earlier, often non sympathetic pictures taken by non Afrikaners of Afrikaners, like that of Rodger Ballen and David Goldblatt.

Van Wyk’s pictures show their subjects without any context, even without clothes, he wanted to play with the idea of the oppressive hand of the colonial ethnography. Afrikaners being objectified, analyzed like natives of yore. But he claims, they are natives, and whats more, Afrikaners are now free to do what they want, they can for exmaple sleep with who they choose he said.

What he achieved is something entirely different. And the contrast with what Goldblatt did is instructive. Goldblatt says of his work on Afrikaners:

“Travelling through vast, sparsely populated parts of the country with my camera became a major part of my life at that time. I think that our landscape is an essential ingredient in any attempt at understanding not just the Afrikaner but all of us here. We have shaped the land and the land has shaped us. Often the land was unforgivingly harsh. Yet, the harsher the landscape the stronger the Afrikaners’ sense of belonging seemed to be.”

Van Wyk’s pictures are completely devoid of any link to place, or to any attachments of culture. If he had chosen to show context, he would have had to show Afrikaners in their big houses behind their big walls, or their 4 by 4′s, or in a shopping malls and perhaps one or two in a squatter camps.

Afrikaners don’t belong anywhere except in a glitzy anglo world that could be anywhere, but considering who they are, it is hell.

Related deployments:

1. So what’s the relationship between the Dutch & Afrikaners?
2. Making sense of South African corruption

Four years later and we don’t have a half bad team. In fact, in some respects its even better. But four years ago the agressive racial and purposefully unreflective debate – that the team were too white – even included threats of withholding visas by the minister of sport. Depressing stuff.

But its not on the rugby pitch that I see progress. It is the political climate that gives me glimmers of hope. Yes the country has huge problems with an incapacitated state, a corrupt government and huge inequality.

But South African politics is maturing. In a country like South Africa a populist like Julius Malema can wreak havoc. He has not. In fact institutions are prevailing just when we need them to. Crime figures are slowly improving year on year. Business is starting to wake up and realise that inequality is a time bomb and that they cant wait for government to fix the problem. Small victories have been made against a secrecy bill the government was hell bent on passing with its huge majority in parliament.

And then you find black South Africans Retweeting Tweets like this on Twitter.

No related posts.

If we are a problem, we should perhaps concentrate on recovering and rehabilitating our selves. I shall suggest that because of peculiarities of the South African situation, this personal, inward-directed project should be cultivated with humility and in (a certain kind of) silence.

I can hear Thabo Mbeki shouting “Halleluja sister!”.

Over the next couple of weeks I hope to return to this piece, to try and make sense of it, to critique it. It is rather dense and I simply don’t have the time and the capability to do it quickly.

But I would like to make a few initial observations. Vice acknowledges and I completely agree that this is a piece of philosophy within the western tradition. Firstly, that is because she is not so much concerned with what whites do, but rather how they be:

For despite our context, no life and no self is only political; no one can think of herself as only a citizen or as only and essentially constituted by factors external to her. The concern with the quality of the self that is so central in the origins of the western philosophical tradition seems even more important in a land that has denied the privacy and nonpolitical reality of individual lives.

The author does not seem to think it is ironic that she uses western philosophical positions considering the subject matter. Whether other cultures in similar positions, like the Malaysians vis-a-vis the Malaysian Indian population, the Chinese vis-a-vis the Tibetans, or even the Kikuyu in Kenya versus other Kenyan ethic groups would see themselves in their position of dominance in a similar fashion is unlikely. This is a western pre-occupation. She further ties her position on whiteness to the well know rhetoric of western white dominance. Whites are special, because they are so dominant they don’t even realise how dominant they are. She calls this whitleyness.

One of the key ways of theorizing whiteness is as a global norm that is invisible, working in the background as a standard, not of one particular way of being in the world, but as normalcy, as universalizibility, of just being “the way things are.”

Before I get to the nub of the matter I’d like to touch on something Vice just mentions in passing, which I think illuminates her whole piece a great deal. She says:

I talk from a personal, but what I hope is still a fairly representative position. While I am not an Afrikaner and so have escaped the taint that identity brings with it, I am a white South African, undeniably a product of the Apartheid system and undeniably still benefiting from it.

It suggests the author has a simplistic understanding of South Africa’s history. It also rather ironically suggests she suffers from a version of whitelyness, which I will suggest is common under English speaking white South Africans. It is the topic of a blog post in itself but suffice to say that Anglo white South Africa, is the only group of South Africans that don’t have a name. They are not English South Africans, in the sense that you can be an Zulu, or Afrikaner South African. Their identity has always been strongly tied to the western Anglo community but recently not expressly so. They are so universal that they are only South Africans. This seems to be Vice’s point of reference.

This is important because I don’t think Afrikaners experience whiteness in the way she describes. Does Vice know that there was a time in South Africa’s history that Afrikaans speaking whites were expected to doth their hats when English speaking whites went by? A time when English newspapers in the Cape compared the ‘Dutch’ to slaves? A time barely 100 years ago when respected British writers compared Afrikaners to black South Africans in reference to their lack of civility? That a third of them lived below the poverty line in the 1930′s. And that the destitution and fear of gelyksteling – equalizing with blacks – were one of the main concerns of the Afrikaner Nationalists?

She may or may not, but Afrikaners had and many still have a deep sense of inferiority vis-a-vis English speaking South Africans. Being an Afrikaner is not the standard or the way things are. It is an identity based partly on deep insecurity. It is not a normal way of getting around the world. The impact of this is still around today. Just one recent example. Keo is the website of South African Rugby – traditionally the Afrikaner (and Coloured) male’s religion. While you might see many comments on blog posts written in Afrikaans, not a single one of Keo’s staff writers are Afrikaners or Coloured. This is seen as quite normal. In fact Keo feels quite free to write on his blog like this:

Vodacom, as the primary sponsor of rugby in South Africa, is celebrating the year of the fan. His name is Jan, he is player 23 in the team and he is a clone of the 1970s white Springbok rugby supporter – a walking caricature of what has always repulsed. Only they’ve given Jan a personality of being a jovial and hugely popular bloke, but perception is stronger than fact and the physical appearance of Jan and what he represents in the stands adds to the perception that rugby in South Africa is still a game supported only by grossly overweight brandy and coke potbellied types.

My argument is this. There is not one white experience in South Africa, and much of the white experience that is often maligned or tainted is not the white experience the author claims to be universal.

My last comment today will focus on the problem. We are the problem Vice says with reference to Alcoff:

“What is it to acknowledge one’s whiteness? Is it to acknowledge that one is inherently tied to structures of domination and oppression, that one is irrevocably on the wrong side?” I think the answer to Alcoff’s question in South Africa is fairly obviously “yes.” Whites in South Africa ought to see themselves as a problem.

She continues that there are habits of white privilege -

Because of the brute facts of birth, few white people, however well-meaning and morally conscientious, will escape the habits of white privilege; their characters and modes of interaction with the world just will be constituted in ways that are morally damaging…

…in South Africa, the working and effects of privilege are starkly apparent; one cannot in good faith pretend they do not exist.

This I would argue is the nub of the matter. It is unquestionably true that the effects of white privilege are visible. It might be unevenly spread, but it is there. Whether whites are only a problem, whether they are still oppressing, and who should be held responsible for this if this oppressive situation does not get rectified is another matter altogether.

When I read pieces like Vice’s I yearn for a philosophical look at the colonial / apartheid crime. It is of course a mammoth task. But we need to know what is the nature and extent of the colonial and apartheid crime. The TRC failed spectacularly in this task. But it is perhaps naive to have expected them to be able to do so. It was too soon.

Now however years have passed . We must ask ourselves how can one have this discussion without a proper look a the root cause? We need to know who did what when and why. Only then can we start to know how to be, or not.

For another, and better argued take on Vice’s paper, go here.

Related deployments:

1. The unbearable whiteness of being

This is why, in the past, when newspapers received these kinds of leaks that Wikileaks are now recieving, more often than not they published them. And democratic governments in the West had no choice but to except the newspaper’s right to do this. Or else they would face the wrath of public opinion.

Newspapers normally made this judgement on what they perceive to be in the public interest. So when a crime has been committed it is almost always deemed to be in the public interest to expose this. Where the public had been willfully mislead as in the case of the Vietnamese War era Pentagon Papers, the papers were rightly published.

So far, when reading the latest batch of leaks from Wikileaks the case for the public interest is not always that clear.

While it seems to me to be quite clear in the case of the revelations about the Saudi’s asking the US to bomb Iran that the public does have a right to know. Especially with the constant threat of war and the misleading that lead up to the Iraqi conflict is taken into account.

It is less clear to me why its in the public interest to know that the mayor of Beijing had a dinner conversation with the American ambassador about the difficulties of governing the city, and where it was discussed whether he will stay in the city or be moved to another post by the Communist party. This only serves to satisfy western voyeurism. It certainly does not help Chinese citizens.

But a much harder example would be a case like the secret South African talks.

Did secrecy help kill apartheid?

From 1985 South Africa’s National Intelligence were working behind the scenes (Great Radio 4 interview behind that link) to seek out and meet with the ANC, to explore the possibility of a negotiated settlement.

At the same time Thabo Mbeki had come under the impression that the armed struggle was not achieving much and other avenues had to be explored. A precious possibility for a tete-a-tete was suddenly there to grasp.

And so it came that some in the Nationalists and a few in the ANC started an intricate dance – to find possible steps for peace – that very few knew about.

The tango was top secret, and if those that were involved were to be believed, there were elements in both the ANC and inside and to the right of the government, as well as the military that would have wanted to scupper any contact between the sides.

And besides – the level of rhetoric against each other at the time would have made a revelation of talks unpalatable to the public it was thought. Especially to the white electorate, which had swung towards more conservative groupings in the previous election.

These secret meetings continued for some time. And at a point the British got involved and helped arrange secret meetings in the UK.

Eventually PW met Mandela in secret in 1989, Barnard the head of National Intelligence famously tying Mandela’s shoe laces just before the meet.

Now there is no way of telling exactly what would happened if the white voting public knew about these meetings. Or if Thabo would have handed the ammunition to Hani and Slovo to unseat him in the ANC if they knew about it right at the beginning.

But my guess is it would have set the negotiation process back at best, if not endangering it.

If Wikileaks found cables in which it became apparent that Benjamin Netanyanu’s government were having secret talks with Hamas, should Wikileaks or a newspaper publish this? Especially if it though that the information would perhaps scupper it all?

Clay Shirkey explains why he thinks full transparency can scupper negotiations:

…human systems can’t stand pure transparency. For negotiation to work, people’s stated positions have to change, but change is seen, almost universally, as weakness. People trying to come to consensus must be able to privately voice opinions they would publicly abjure, and may later abandon. Wikileaks plainly damages those abilities.

A few other consequences of these events that has me worried (or just thinking).

DDOS and the end of freedom?

It is now patently clear that it is quite easy to mount a DDOS attack and be untraceable.

And as this article points out, none but the most well resourced hosts will be able to repel these. This has serious consequences, which will probably lead to organisations having two choices. Being vulnerable to attack or submitting to the control of theses large super hosts. Suddenly the internet does not seem so free, so unfettered.

Mr Ego

Julian Assange seems like an arrogant egotistical chap, with a very strong ideological bent. I gathered as much after I read the Live interview with him at the Guardian. This does not inspire much confidence in him. As this blog post points out he would do better if he tried to take more of the public with him and used the power of social media in a more democratic fashion.

The ideologue

Julian Assange has a very western-lefty (think Chomsky) view of authoritarianism – which is in my opinion fails to draw the distinction between real authoritarianism and excess state control. In an earlier essay, as this excellent blog post points out, he describes the US as a kind of authoritarian state.

Authoritarian regimes give rise to forces which oppose them by pushing against the individual and collective will to freedom, truth and self realization. Plans which assist authoritarian rule, once discovered, induce resistance. Hence these plans are concealed by successful authoritarian powers. This is enough to define their behavior as conspiratorial.

The problem then for this conspiracy is how do you keep things secret but still communicate to various arms of the state, so the conspiracy can function?

Wikileaks is therefor an attempt to short circuit the secret channels of communication of these states and organisations.

Assange goes on to say:

“The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimization of efficient internal communications mechanisms (an increase in cognitive “secrecy tax”) and consequent system-wide cognitive decline resulting in decreased ability to hold onto power as the environment demands adaption. Hence in a world where leaking is easy, secretive or unjust systems are nonlinearly hit relative to open, just systems. Since unjust systems, by their nature induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, mass leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance.”

Now that is where his reasoning falls down in my opinion. It is precisely in democracies where leaks are most prevalent. It is precisely from democracies that Wikileaks have gotten its most leaks. Are democracies the most unjust then? There might be many reasons for this abundance of leaks from democracies, but that they are most unjust is not one of them.

The fact that many proper authoritarian states are developing countries and information is harder to leak for reasons of lack of infrastructure could be one reason we see more leaks in democracies.

But another reason might be this – some authoritarian regimes don’t hide their unjustness. They are quite open about their unjustness. China has not tried to hide the fact that the nobel prize winner has been locked up for campaigning for democracy. Neither does it apologise for or tried to hide the hundreds of executions each year.

Yet it has been highly sensitive to allegations of corruption, executing top party officials and businessmen alike that are caught. The Government has even set up an anti-corruption line. Some call China a Developmental Authoritarian state because of this.

Does Assagne then distinguish between these power obsessed Developmental Autocracies and the excessively horrible Predatory States?

Remember almost all Predatory States are de facto authoritarian.

And what about a distinction between Predatory States and Democracies?

Surely a state that is purposely dysfunctional so as to feed off its population for the benefit of an elite (the definition of a predatory state), is a different proposition to the government of Germany and even China?

Mr Assagne’s theories is a little unsubtle, and not nuanced enough for the complexities of this world it would seem. They are the product of I suspect a rather naive & cosseted politics.

More ideologues

Lastly, many in the tech industry have drunk on the cool aid that the internet is a place outside of our world. For them the net somehow escapes normal social rules and politics. Ideologies are dangerous because it causes us not to know what we know, as Zizek puts it.

Richard Barbrook described elements of this ideology – a weird mix of lefty counter culture and right wing economic utopianism, wrapped up in technological metafors he calls The Californian Ideology.

This way of thinking is so wide spread that you see many knee jerk & unthinking defending of Wikileaks from techies. One of the high priests of this kind of thinking, John Perry Barlow, his Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace was circulated this week:

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.

My short answer to all that is that Mr Barlow had too much LSD and read too little Marx when he wrote this.

The Border War

I’d like to end my thoughts with another anecdote in praise of openess.

South Africa and Cuba were in semi-secretive talks about the war in Angola for a couple of years. When a number of South African troops died around the time of the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale, the government could not longer hide the extent of the conflict. Die Kerkbode – the newsletter of the main Afrikaner church expressed it doubts about war for the first time. A few days later a deal to end the war was done. I’m not suggesting that public opinion was the only factor that focussed the minds of the Nationalists. But it certainly played a large part.

Related deployments:

1. Could internet access be a basic human right?

Interestingly enough, my dad was born during the great depression, and died during the current crisis. He was by no means a perfect man. But he was reasoned and reasonable. I never heard or saw him treat any stranger with anything but respect, no matter who they were. He spoke isiZulu fluently.

In this video he talks about Tom van Vollenhoven as the greatest Springbok he ever saw play. Wikipedia has an interesting piece on him.

My dad was a verligte Nasionalis. He supported the reform of apartheid. He regarded it as both unjust and unsustainable. But he certainly never voted anything but Nationalist during apartheid as far as I am aware.

He once told us that we could learn a lot from everybody. Including those who “swept the streets”. On another occasion he told me he does not care what job I did when I grow up, as long as I do it well.

That summed him up quite well. He was’nt ostentatious or materialist.

After he completed his degree in medicine he worked for short time as a GP in Johannesburg. He hated it. He became friends with a number of jewish doctors. They advised him to specialise in orthopedics and to do so overseas, preferably in a place like Edinburgh. That way he could easily find a job anywhere. And warned the doctors, South Africa’s future was uncertain as white rule will increasingly come under strain.

My father duly completed his degree at Edinburgh, but he returned to South Africa straight after. Only to return overseas twice. Once for his honeymoon with my mom. And once for the World Cup rugby with me.

He met my mom at the University of Pretoria. He was driving a Porsche (the one occasion where he was flashy) and she had just been selected to be Lente Koniging (Spring Queen). All rather glamorous.

My dad became head of orthopedics for both the whites only Paardekraal hospital (now called Dr. Yosuf Dadoo) and the black Leratong hospital, a position he held for quite some time during the apartheid era. My dad was very proud of both these hospitals and the service they offered.

He often talked in disparaging tones of the new private Krugersdorp hospital that was built during the late 80′s. He called it “die piek paleis” (the pink palace) and declined offers to work there.

Shortly before he died he told me that both Leratong and Dr. Yosuf Dadoo are now in a terrible state. And its ironic, the last time I saw him alive he was a patient in the Pienk Paleis.

No related posts.

Fact 1

The Dutch state, the Netherlands, never decided to colonise the Cape, South Africa’s Southern most province.

Fact 2

A Dutch company based in Amsterdam, the Dutch East India Company (bigger and more powerful than Wallmart today – it even had its own warships) decided to build a “halfweg stasie” – a refueling station for its ships – where modern day Cape Town is.

Fact 3.

The majority of the employees, were not Dutch, but German. There were also, Swedish Danish, employees and a few Portuguese.

Fact 4

There was an industrial dispute, the employees of the company claimed this Wallmart paid them too little, went freelance – and started the colonisation process. Each time the company increased the size of the area under their control to bring the errant workers under their control, the workers scampered over the border.

The British tried the same later and also failed, and them let them be. Until gold was discovered.

Fact 5

The company brought slaves from the East, Malaysia and Sri-Lanka today, and the Governor of the company that created Stellenbosch, Simon van der Stel was Javanese himself. Most coloureds – the majority of inhabitants of the Cape – are their descendants and they speak Afrikaans.

Fact 6

More than 10% of Afrikaners were in fact French Huguenots who arrived around 1700.

Fact 7

The first guy to call himself an Afrikaner was Hendrik Biebouw. His father was German and his sister a coloured. He was pulled off his horse by a Dutch magistrate after speeding through Stellenbocsh drunk.

The Dutch magistrate hit him with a cane. Biebouw who – unlike the Magistrate – was born in South Africa protested, “you can’t hit me, I’m an Afrikaner”. As was customary at the time for disciplinary matters Biebouw was deported to Australia.

Fact 8

The Dutch King asked the British to protect the company in 1796 from the French during the Napoleonic wars. When the British arrived they were not received with open arms, but were shot at by the settlers (not the last time), who disliked the Dutch King who had never held any sway, and never showed much interest. They supported Napoleon and spurned on by the Americans, were Republicans to boot.

Fact 9

The Dutch had very little contact and cultural exchange with Afrikaners from 1806 – when the British took over completely – until today. Boer War leader and later prime minister Jan Smuts was educated in the Netherlands(actually he was educated in the UK – thanks to Piet – see comments), and so was some Afrikaans writers in the 1950′s and 1960′s during an era of burgeoning cultural contact, but apartheid, which the Dutch vehemently opposed – put paid to any further contact.

Update: But Prime Minister H F Verwoerd, seen as the most important instigator and ideologue of apartheid, was born in Amsterdam and moved to SA with his parents when he was two years old. (See comments – Thanks Nick)

Fact 10

Very few towns founded by Afrikaners, especially significant ones, had any link with Dutch ones, quite unlike towns in Spanish, British and Portuguese colonies. They had by and large home grown names and indicative of the cultural disconnect.

Fact 11

The Dutch, like the Germans and the French did not support the Boer republics during the Anglo Boer War (even after being begged to), being scared of the mighty British empire. The Germans did supply weapons, and the Dutch sent a ship to pick up Paul Kruger, Transvaal president and ship him to exile. Kruger however preferred to spend exile in Switzerland.

Fact 12

The Dutch supported the ANC and liberation movements like SWAPO during the apartheid years. The Afrikaner Nationalists despised the Dutch for this.

Fact 13

Afrikaans – contains very many Dutch and Dutch based words. But its negation is based on French, the so-called dubbel nie. Afrikaans verbs don’t conjugate like Dutch ones and is much simplified. Afrikaans also contains much by way of Malaysian words like baie and quite a bit of Zulu.

Fact 14

The Dutch mangle their words with a nasal twang which sometimes makes even understandable words incomprehensible to Afrikaans speakers.

Fact 15

The first written Afrikaans is a translation of the Koran.

Fact 16

The Ducth were, for a long time, rather embarrassed about Afrikaans & Afrikaners. Recently there has been a subtle mood change with increasing interest in Afrikaans music & culture.

Update – Fact 17

I had not known this, but last week I went to the apartheid museum in Johannesburg. There it is claimed that one of the influences on D F Malan, the first Nationalist prime minister and a theologian, re apartheid was Abraham Kuyper, a Dutch theologian and Prime Minister.

This is from Wikipedia:

There, his Christian-National conception, centred upon the identification of the Afrikaner Calvinist community as the kern der natie became a rallying position for the Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk and the Gereformeerde Kerk, the South African offshoot of his own Gereformeerde Kerken during and after the Boer war. As Christian-Nationalists, Kuyper’s adherents in South Africa were instrumental in the building of Afrikaner cultural, political and economic institutions to restore Afrikaner fortunes following the Boer War. One key creation was the Afrikaner Broederbond, the anti-British and White Supremacist political secret society whose foundation was explicitly Christian-National. It was the Afrikaner Broederbond, in course of time, loyal to its specifically Kuyperian Christian-Nationalist ideology, which created the Afrikaner National Party, with its Apartheid plans. Throughout the Apartheid era, party and state officials swore oaths affirming the ‘sovereignty and guidance of God in the destiny of countries and peoples’ and to ‘seek the development of South Africa’s life along Christian-National lines.’ Dr. Vorster’s 1961 essay on the biblical foundations of apartheid quotes Kuyper 6 times.[4] Yet Harinck argues that “Kuyper was not guided by the cultural racism of his day, but by his calvinistic creed of human equality”.

Related deployments:

1. Let Afrikaners be African
2. The Boers & the making of modern Britain

This excellent article sets out where it comes from, the PAC, who renounced it, only for it to be taken up by Peter Mokaba after apartheid had ended.

The truth seems to be that words to the same effect first were chanted in Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) circles in the early 1990s along with their infamous slogan of “one settler, one bullet”. Shortly thereafter, the late ANC youth leader Peter Mokaba borrowed the slogan and began chanting his “kill the Boer, kill the farmer” version in 1993 after the murder of ANC and Communist Party leader, Chris Hani.

Ayesab’ amagwala (Cowards are scared)
Dubula! dubula! dubula nge s’bhamu (Shoot, shoot, shoot them wit a gun)
Dubul’ ibhunu (Shoot the boer)
Dubula! dubula! dubula nge s’bhamu (Shoot, shoot, shoot them wit a gun)
Mama, ndiyeke ndidubul’ ibhunu (Ma, let me shoot the Boer)
Dubula! dubula! dubula nge s’bhamu (Shoot, shoot, shoot them wit a gun)
Ziyareypa lezinja (These dogs rape)
Dubula! dubula! dubula nge s’bhamu (Shoot, shoot, shoot them wit a gun)

Related deployments:

1. Clive Derby-Lewis on the wrong side of history

Following on from Breyten Breytenbach’s remarkable piece in Rapport, where he lambasted the current South African regime and called for another, ex-foreign minister Pik Botha has responded to Breytenbach.

Here is an extract of what Pik Botha’s said:

“Die wit mense en in besonder die Afrikaners staan voor strawwe uitdagings.

Eerstens moet die onderskeid tussen “wit” en “bruin” Afrikaners
verdwyn. Gelukkig is dit besig om te gebeur.

Tweedens moet die verbitterdes in ons geledere oorreed word om saam te
trek in die nuwe groot trek wat op ons wag, naamlik om die land se
swart regering te oortuig dat ons mekaar nodig het om ons land te laat
slaag.

Dit klink vir my dít is ’n kampanje wat Breyten Breytenbach in gedagte
het. As dit so is, het hy my volle ondersteuning.

En moontlik is dit ’n debat waaraan wyle Chris Louw ook sou wou
deelgeneem het. ”

Trans: “Whites but in particular Afrikaners are facing huge challenges.

But first the differentiation between white and brown Afrikaners should
disappear. Luckily this is starting to happen.

Secondly, the bitter amongst us should be convinced to join in the
second great trek that is awaiting us, that is to convince the black
government that we need each other to make this country work.

It sounds to me that this is the campaign that Breyten Breytenbach has
in mind. If true, it has my full support.

Possibly this is a debate that Chris Louw would also have wanted to
take part in.”

Earlier in the piece Pik hints at and basically accuses FW de Klerk of not following his suggestions during the negotiations. Botha claims he wanted guarantees for Afrikaners but De Klerk fobbed this off by suggesting that the Bill or rights in the Constitution can deal with his concerns.

Botha also claims that in 2007 he, De Klerk and a few ex ministers had tried to contact the ANC.

After speaking at the trade Union Solidarity in 2007 and saying that there would not have been a new constitution if the ANC had been open about how they would apply affirmative action, Rapport published a front page “The ANC lied to us“.

Two days later Thabo Mbeki delivered via courier a 7 page letter, who according to Botha contained strong and crass language. Mbeki disagreed vehemently.

On the 19th of July Botha sent Mbeki a six page fax, where he claims he said:

“You know that we could not have agreed to a process based solely on racial demographic representivity … You also know that internationally, affirmative action is based on a time frame.”

Botha claims he asked in the fax whether he and De Klerk could meet Mbeki. They never received an answer.

Not long after Mbeki was unseated at Polokwane.

In August 2008 Botha claims he called De Klerk and told him he is very concerned about the ANC’s pronouncements on land reform, affirmative action, the judicial system and other issues that Botha felt went against the Constitution. This besides crime problem and the lack of service delivery.

Botha suggested that a number of politicians that were involved in the negotiations from 1990 to 1994 should meet the new leadership of the ANC, to tell them of of their concerns, and to tell them what contributions they could make to help solve these issues.

FW agreed. Their team would consist of Dawie de Villiers, Roelf Meyer, Leon Wessels, Chris Fismer and Botha.

They met twice in Cape Town where they discussed their agenda.

On the 3rd of September 2008 FW sent a letter to ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe, where a meeting was sought with the ANC’s leadership.

This was followed up with enquiries on the 24th of October 2008 and the 11th of November 2008. Also messages were left with Mantashe’s secretary as to when they can expect an answer.

By January 2009 no answer had been received, and it was decided that in the light of the coming elections not to send any further requests.

Until this day there has been no reaction to FW’s letter says Pik.

What do I make of all this?

1) It’s weird that none of the South African English language press have reported on Breyten’s article, and none yet on Pik’s. The suicide of Chris Louw did get some attention from publications like Politicsweb. So why the lack of coverage on the much bigger stories of Pik’s letters and Breyten’s clarion call?

Any regrouping of Afrikaners would potentially threaten the Democratic Alliance and the English language press is scared any coverage would only encourage it further. It is a World Cup Year after all and any major social unrest could upset a massive apple cart.

It’s either that, or the Afrikaans press is really not considered of import at all.

2) Is this a storm in a tea cup? I don’t think so.

Related deployments:

1. Thabo Mbeki – bookending failure with two great speeches
2. Chris Louws death and what it may mean

The truth is of course that all South Africans are not very safe. Especially those perceived as having things of value and easy pickings. Like African migrants and now priests. (A recent study found that black South Africans, are actually three times more likely to be the victim of homicide than whites.)

I surfed the web to find out more about the Hermanus case and discovered that four catholic priests had been murdered this year in South Africa. The 70-year-old Father Louis Blondel of France was shot. Before him Fr Lionel Sham, 66, was abducted from his home and found a couple of days later, murdered.

The first priest to be killed this year was Fr Daniel Matsela Mahula, in the Diocese of Klerksdorp, killed on 27 February while driving his car, by four highwaymen near Bloemhof. He was stabbed, bundled in the boot of his car and then buried in a shallow grave.

And in May Ernst Plochl, 78, was bound and strangled to death.

But then I found a fifth. Clive Newman wasn’t a catholic priest like all the others. He was Anglican. And he had cheated death when he survived a brutal and bizarre attack in 1991, only to be murdered now.

The Eastern province Herald put up this link to clippings of the original attack. Poor man.

South Africa is so depressing sometimes that I sometimes seriously consider giving up on blogging about it.

UPDATE:
Weddings and other religious ceremonies have also been targeted.

Related deployments:

1. Being a farmer in SA your 125 times more likely to be murdered than a Brit

One thing struck me most when seeing it was the posh words of TRC Commissioner and the ex Head of Black Sash, Mary Burton.

“Everybody that worked for the Truth Commission was changed by it, to some extent.”

Posh yes. True – oh yes. Particularly in my case.

Alot of things have been said about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, most of them positive.

To me the TRC was a bitter disappointment and the moment I first thought, against hope, that the new SA won’t work. It was the impetus behind my leaving South Africa at the end of 1998.

But I almost never joined its hallowed ranks.

When I finished my LLB at Tukkies I had my sights on touring Europe. I had, like many of my friends, never been outside of Africa. (I had toured Africa after 1994 extensively, but never left the continent.)

I would not be denied the world any longer.

I was due to fly to London on a working holiday visa in less than a week’s time when I got an unexpected phone call. It was from the TRC. They wanted me to come for a job interview! I was gob-smacked.

My lecturer at University – Prof Christoff Heyns – with whom I had done my final year thesis on the TRC Act had sent it to them. They liked it.

The position was for a statement taker. That is to say noting down people’s stories. It was the kind of opportunity one could not say no to.

I supported the idea and the embodiment of the TRC in its legislation whole heartedly. As a student I had vigorously campaigned for the end of white rule. I was a member of Students for Human Rights and had helped organize the first Pan African Human Rights Competition.  This was a dream job.

In a way I was an affirmative action choice. The only white statement taker in our region (that covered the whole of the old Transvaal and parts of the Northern Cape and Free Sate). Some regions didn’t even have a whitey.

Working at the TRC first felt unreal. Surrounded by powerful and well known people like Bishop Tutu, Dumisa Ntsebenza, Alex Boraine, Wynand Malan one felt very important.

We had policemen at our bid and call, and we were backed up with some of the most powerful legislation ever given to a South African investigating body. Before the TRC we could even revoke a person’s right to remain silent. Before us truth will out, or so we thought.

Part of the TRC mission was to record gross human rights violations – defined as murder, torture, or serious assault – that were committed with political animus. As a statement takers my colleagues and I were required to take three to five statements, by hand, per day.

It was fascinating, exhausting and harrowing. We were listening to violent tale and then a tragic one, and then both in one story. It was infuriating, and quite often it made me feel deeply ashamed of being an Afrikaner.

I met prime evil Eugene de Kock. A man that looked unremarkable, like an accountant, albeit a big one. Soft spoken, bespectacled, unassuming except for his size. He was bright you realised when he spoke, he chose every word very carefully. I met a dozen or so other killers.

I took some auspicious statements. Like that of the mother of Ahmed Timol. Ahmed was the first political detainee to die at the infamous John Vorster Square police station (There was 9 that died there), when he “jumped” from the 10th floor. Despite signs of torture an inquest by magistrate de Villiers agreed that Timol had committed suicide, rather then divulge information. He was after-all a communist, trained at the Lenin School in Moscow. Police referred to the 10th floor at John Voster Square as Timol heights.

I also saw a report by physiotherapist of another victim of John Vorster square – Stanza Bopape. The security police had taken Bopape to one while he was held in detention. When I saw the physiotherapists name I saw he was a good friend of my father. Why did the police take him to the friendly oom? Bopape was torture to death, and then dumped into a river. Me and my kin were on trail, and we were getting away with murder.

Sometimes of our own. Jurgen Grobbelaar was a brilliant student in Krugersdorp. The best in his class. My father’s wife – a teacher – knew him well. But in his first year at Tukkies, where I met him, he got involved with the far right. They stole automattic rifles from a military base and in an attempt to get more weapons killed a woman. He died in the desert in a police chase close to the Namibian border.

His mother came to see me a few years later at the TRC. I saw the police docket. I saw what they did with him. They claimed he had shot himself. Impossible. Both his arms were utterly broken. The police did not bother to get out of their armoured vehicle me thinks. Using a technique from the Borderwar they simply drove over him. And then they shot him at point blank range in the face to make it look like suicide. At least that’s my theory.

And then the obfuscation and obstruction that was often the case when the police were suspected of fowl play, followed. His body had been sent from pillar to post and the post mortems delayed.

I often left the TRC office in a daze.

As I drove home I saw South Africans go about their everyday tasks, and I thought to myself, how is this ‘normal’ South Africa possible? Why are black South Africans so forgiving? Why is there no civil war? (Since then I feel I have answers to some of these questions, but that is not the subject matter of this post.)

I also got really frustrated.

Luckily I had befriended Thulani Granville-Grey, our friendly dreadlocked in-house psychologist. With him I shared lunches and got issues of my chest at the Sanlam Center at the same time.

Rather that – informal therapy – than attend statement taker group therapy. On the one hand I had grown up in a Apostolic Faith Mission and Charismatic Christian tradition, I was no stranger of public displays of emotion and admitting weakness. On the other I was a South African male, a boertjie. I disliked spilling my guts in front of others intensely.

Thulani reckoned that my distress was because all I’m doing is documenting losses. I’m not in the research or investigation, reparation or amnesty teams, who at least in some ways try to ameliorate cases. I’m not feeling I’m making a positive difference.

There was a solution. Make a difference!

Incredibly a number of posts were still open after 3 months in the Johannesburg Investigative Unit. I was the only statement taker with an LLB so I thought I’d chance it to become a TRC investigator. I had been editor of the student newspaper of Tukkies. I knew I had a nose for leads. It took me about a month to convince them, and then I was appointed investigator.

My frustration did not lift. It turned into desperation.

The Johannesburg Investigative Unit was run by an oddball called adv Andre Steenkamp. Andre jumped – like his prickly mustache – from issue to issue and argument to argument. Energetic, fidgety, aggressive.

He – along with some really talented policemen – had left the Transvaal Attorney General Jan D’Oliviera’s very successful Unit (They had investigated and prosecuted Eugene de Kock amongst others) to join the TRC. It was clear that he was ambitious and out to prove he was better than Jan.

Either that or he was an National Intelligence spy and an extremely good actor out to sabotage the process . I however doubt it.

But he was also very disorganised.

In the context of the TRC he was not out of the ordinary. The whole organisation was disorganised and racked with spams of infighting, particularly in middle management upwards.

One month after joining the investigating unit, I had still not been given anything to investigate.

Our unit had some pillars I could depend on. One of them was Piers Pigou. An Englishman who had worked with NGO’s like the Human Rights Commission during the 90′s township war. I decided to ask Piers where I should start investigating.

Piers had little hesitation and pointed me at the troubles in the Vaal triangle area. He sent me documents and put me in touch with people. And off I went into our heart of darkness.

Almost half the casualties of political violence from 1948 to 1994 happened in the last three years of white rule. A big chunk of these in the Vaal.

The Vaal is home to some of the most vicious battles, massacres and murders during apartheid SA’s death throws. I’m talking the Sebokeng massacre, the night vigil massacre, the Vaal monster, and the Boipatong massacre.

The latter changed the course of South African history.

At the time – June 1992 – the Nationalists were still riding their new found wave of goodwill. A wave generated by ubanning the ANC, releasing Mandela and negotiating. Their wave had just got new oomf with the succesful white referendum of 1992.

Importantly they were holding out at Codessa for a number of constitutional guarantees for the white minority.

Rian Malan argues that the ANC cynically used the Boipatong massacre and the condemnation that followed to scupper the talks, not return to them and pile pressure on the Nats.

Eventually, in September 1992 they did give in. South Africa’s constitution was to be modeled on that of a run of the mill western liberal democracy.

Here I was, a 24 year old with virtually no experience, the self appointed and only investigator on a crucial part of South African history, with only Piers to ask for political advice, and the practical helping hand of police investigators Fanie and Johannes.

So why was I unhappy?

The TRC eventually included findings on these crucial incidents in their report, but none of which is based on the reports I gave them. I am not sure where they got there information from, but it would seem that the Commission leaned heavily on material published by NGO’s like the Human Rights Commision (HRC) before the TRC came to existence. It’s important to note that the HRC never investigated these incidents either, but merely repeated allegations made at the time.

The findings over Boipatong in particular caused quite a stir, with Rian Malan accusing the TRC of bias. There was no proof that the police directly assisted in the attack on Boipatong like the TRC report stated insisted Malan.

He was right. There was no proof that the police or whites were at the scene at the time as the TRC report claimed, and as the ANC and some members of the local community had claimed after the massacre.

But Malan was also wrong.

It’s highly unlikely that they were present, but there was ample proof that the police, or at least elements in the police, had close links with the attackers, had supplied the weapons and had interfered with investigations. If one looked at the bigger Vaal picture it was clear that it was a vipers nest of very nasty characters, some of them in or protected by the police.

In fact I had handed a box full of evidence to the TRC when I Ieft. In it is enough concrete leads to start further investigation and prosecution of a number of senior (and not so senior ex policemen), for Boipatong, Sebokeng, and other incidents.

Nothing has ever happened. I’m not sure if that box still exists.

There were other incidents that made me disalusioned with the TRC. Like when some staff turned up late for work. Or did no work. Or the racism displayed by some of its members. There was the day during the 1998 World Cup of which I shall blog sometime.

There was the breaking of law in the name of a cause like the case of police killer Brian Mitchel. He should not have been given amnesty in terms of the Act. He had attacked civilians. But he was given amnesty in the hope that others would be encouraged to apply. And their was the ignoring of the law in the case of Clive Derby Lewis and Janus Walluz, they were the text book case for amnesty because their target was not only not indiscriminate but highly political. But they never got it, because they had killed the crown prince of the ANC.

There was the death threats to investigators, including to Liela Groenewald, who investigated Winnie Mandela. There was the day when Albertina Sisulu and the might of the ANC refused to confront Winnie Mandela over the murder of two boys.

But the biggest incident that pricked the little bubble that was my middleclass and cosseted upbringing was this.

Once a week I took a pile of files to Joyce Seroke, a TRC Human Rights Committee member. One of the senior TRC members I found most friendly and approachable. Warm even.

I would go through the cases with her, and she would make findings on whether those persons in the files qualify as victims of gross human rights abuse in terms of the Act.

What happened that day shocked me to the core. But today most South Africans would probably commend her.

As was my habit I came back from lunch with a copy of The Star underneath my arm. The story on the front page caught Joyce’s eye, it was about the horrific car hijacking in which a father lost his daughter. But it said, the police had caught the culprits.

Good said Joyce, now they should torture these bastards to find out whose behind these hijackings.

I saw lights, blood hummed in my ears, my mouth was dry. My mind was spinning.

It was a profoundly confusing experience.

No related posts.