Snippets from South Africa, June 2005
This country has always had a wealth of beautiful place names, in Afrikaans, English, Zulu, Xhosa, and many other languages. Why change any of them? Whether they like it or not, cities such as Durban, Johannesburg, and Pretoria were started and built by the ingenuity of whites. That is a fact of history. Other places in SA were started and built by blacks. But no – the ANC promotes only one agenda: its own.
The name of the country itself could oneday be changed to Azania. Certain terrorist organisations have always referred to it that way, such as the Azanian Peoples’ Organisation and the Azanian Peoples’ Liberation Army, the armed wing of the Pan Africanist Congress.
Imagine: visitors to Durban, South Africa may soon be flying to Ethekwini, Azania. That’s if they don’t rename the entire country after Nelson Mandela. I wouldn’t be surprised. Either way, it will be like flying into any other African banana republic.
Mbeki: Blacks Are Friendly and Forgiving, Whites Are Oppressors
At a so-called “Freedom Day” celebration on April 27, President Mbeki made the following statement: “where there could have been serious racial conflicts because of our unfortunate past, our people, particularly those who were oppressed, have offered the hand of friendship and forgiven those who were responsible for their untold suffering” (The Witness, April 28, 2005).
This statement was full of inaccuracies. Firstly, there were serious racial conflicts, and there still are. Secondly, he implies that the so-called “oppressors” (by whom he means the whites) have not offered the hand of friendship or forgiveness to the same extent as the “oppressed” (the blacks). Thirdly, the thousands upon thousands of whites who have seen their relatives murdered by blacks, their wives and daughters raped, etc., would surely dispute Mbeki’s claim that blacks have “offered the hand of friendship” to them. Fourthly, he implies by his words that whites did such terrible things to blacks that they need to forgive the whites; but this is just a lie. The blacks are far from being the lily-white (forgive the pun) innocents that Mbeki and others love to make them out to be. Sinful human nature is seen on both sides, as indeed it is around the world. But this is typical of Mbeki: he constantly portrays the history of South Africa in these simplistic, inaccurate terms.
The Deputy President Is Removed from Office: Tribalism and Tensions Within the ANC
In recent weeks, Deputy President Jacob Zuma was removed from office by President Mbeki, after a judge found that he had had a “generally corrupt” relationship with convicted businessman, Shabir Shaik. But there is much more to this story than meets the eye.
Certainly, Zuma deserved to be removed from his high position. But why, really, was he axed? We can be sure it was not because of his corrupt relationship with Shaik. The ANC government is overflowing with corrupt politicians. It appears that the real reason, as is becoming more and more evident and as is correctly understood by Zulus in SA, is that Zuma is a Zulu, in a party dominated and controlled by Xhosas. It is tribalism, which time and again in African politics rears its head. The ANC has always been a predominantly Xhosa party, and Zuma would have become president of SA when Mbeki left office; and this was unacceptable to the ANC. They used Zuma, a man immensely popular amongst the Zulus, the largest tribe in SA, to gain vast Zulu support in the elections, swinging huge numbers away from the main Zulu party, the IFP of Buthelezi. But at the same time they must have always been on the lookout for an opportunity to remove him from such a high position. That opportunity was presented, thanks to his corrupt relationship with Shaik, and Zuma fell from grace.
The ANC’s alliance partners, the SA Communist Party and the trade union movement Cosatu, wanted Zuma to stay on, but Mbeki ignored them and sacked him anyway. And Cosatu’s head has stated that this was a deliberate campaign to prevent Zuma from becoming president.
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