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An open letter

Dear Mr. Imm,

You probably know as little about me as I do about you, living on different sides of the planet. However, I was one of the invited speakers to the American Renaissance conference that had to be cancelled after you and other left-wing groups had harassed the hotels concerned.

I was practically on my way to the airport for the 19-hour flight from Johannesburg when I had received Jared Taylor’s e-mail informing me that the conference had finally been cancelled, with the Capitol Skyline Hotel also succumbing to pressure from yourselves.

As an Afrikaner from South Africa, I am totally astonished at your behaviour and that you even seem to boast about having prevented the biannual AR “conversation about race” from taking place. Did your own president, Barack Obama, not call for a “conversation about race” shortly after taking office?

Americans are privileged to live in a country with a Constitution guaranteeing freedom of speech by means of the first amendement. Why would you want to undermine that principle by threatening hotels in Washington with boycotts, “shaming” and even death threats?

On your website you state your opposition to “fundamentalism” as presumably practised by some Muslims. However, what about race fundamentalism?

Your opposition to any rational debate on race reminds me of the Spanish Inquisition or Stalin’s Russia, where only one set of ideas could be publicly or even privately expressed. Your intolerant, left-fascist attitude affects not only the free discussion of political ideas, but also science, morality, history and international relations. If it were to bebome universal, humanity would go back to the Dark Ages where anyone voicing dissent from opinions held by the masses or the mass media would be persecuted.

Given the global clout and influence of the United States as the sole remaining superpower, you have a special responsibility toward the rest of us living in other parts of the world where we, too, grapple with severe racial problems. Again, if your scare tactics and intellectual terrorism had to become the norm, the USA would quickly assume the status of a new Soviet Union, not only oppressing its own citizens, but exporting its myopia and intolerance world-wide.

Already my country, South Africa, is suffering under a disastrous experiment in social engineering, based precisely on American so-called liberal ideas, but which are the antithesis of liberality and classical liberalism. Radical affirmative action, the exclusion of whites on racial grounds, as well as racially motivated attacks on whites are the stuff of everyday life in South Africa. Stop any white South African in the street. He or she will tell you.

On 20 December 2006 a pretty, blonde-haired little girl was shot just for the hell of it by two blacks in Randfontein, west of Johannesburg. Danielle Esterhuizen was only five years old, sitting on her mother’s lap. On 23 February 2009 a 16-year Bernadette Kruger was deliberatly run down and killed by a black taxi driver on her scooter, while on her way to school, again simply because she happened to be white and to be defenseless. Blacks study for free at university while whites have to pay. In November last year, the Supreme Court of Appeal, the highest judicial tribunal in South Africa, delivered a stinging judgement against the Pretoria municipality that had refused to appoint qualified white electrical engineers and high-voltage electricians, even when no qualified blacks could be found. In their racial zeal, not only did they endanger the economy of the capital, but they also placed the lives of the public at risk as at least one sub-station had exploded due to lack of maintenance.

Your website domain where you exhort readers to curtail Jared Taylor and American Renaissance’s freedom of speech, is is situated at realcourage.org. How amusing, how Orwellian!

For you precisely lack courage to confront lies and expose myths. Especially the infantile lies and myths about race, your race fundamentalism. If you had had any intention of, as you state on your website, support(ing)… our universal human rights in all parts of the world”, you would not have engaged in vindictive posturing about a gathering of decent, well-behaved race realists in Washington, but you would have taken up the cause of the white South Africans or the white Zimbabweans, ethnically cleansed from their country by Robert Mugabe!

You claim to be “defying racial supremacism”. But what about black racial supremacism as institutionalised in Southern Africa? Would you also have “real courage” to defy that brand of racial supremacism?

I may be mistaken, but I doubt it very much. Your bag of well-worn clichés about white racism might still work when you shout “Boo!” at a few timorous hotel managers, but in the real world, especially outside your own suburb, it is as redundant as Karl Marx’s writings on economic equality.

If I think about the fact that you literally prevented me and the others to speak at the American Renaissance conference, it is obvious that you are already far advanced in imposing a type of Soviet closure of the mind on the capital of the USA. Paradoxically, our anti-white racist, black, quasi-Marxist government in South Africa offers me far more freedom of speech in South Africa than you could provide me with as a guest in your country, notwithstanding the First Amendment. Over here I regularly speak my mind in the press, on the internet and even on the state-owned radio and television stations.

Does that not trigger an alarm bell somewhere, that South Africa’s black government who used to be terrorists, bombing supermarkets and restaurants – they also call each other “comrade” by the way – could offer one greater freedom of speech than the, oh so white, “equality activists” of Washington?

Read Dan Roodt’s Appeal to American readers
Lees Dan Roodt se Ope brief aan Afrikaners

Boekmerk by:

At the start of this fateful year of 2010, with a lot of foreign soccer fans about to get their first taste of South African crime, violence and mayhem, politics is moving at a breath-taking pace. Only two weeks ago 73% of Beeld’s online readers exppressed themselves in favour of a volkstaat, a hitherto politically incorrect idea.

Since then, the debate has been raging about where, with some (like me) saying we should have a third of the country, incorporating Pretoria, the Eastern Transvaal, Eastern Free State and the Southern Cape area which is, of course, almost 100% white and Afrikaans. Others say that we should claim a kind of Palestine in and around Pretoria where we are in the majority. Then there is the Orania faction, maintaining that we should build a New Jerusalem on the banks of the Orange in the Northern Cape.

All of this is exciting and for the first time since 1994 I am getting the impression that we are heading somewhere. At least we are becoming realistic about our future prospects which, within an increasingly anti-white, failing or failed state anachronistically self-identifying as “South Africa”, have become an either/or choice: either emigrate or seek your own state/territory within the boundaries of a disintegrating South Africa overrun with illegal immigrants from the rest of Africa.

Anton Barnard has just raised a very relevant issue on his blog, SAmizdat: What about English-speaking whites? Would they be welcome in a future Afrikaner volkstaat, wherever it might be? His conclusion:

“I would personally also say there is a case to be made for extending a once-off offer of asylum or refugee status to ESWs who suffer from racist persecution and crime at the hands of the ANC regime. Afrikaners could certainly not stand idly by if, God forbid, South Africa threatens to become another Rwanda and our ESW brothers are about to suffer a genocide. This should, however, be subject to the understanding that any Afrikaner self-determination or independent state would be of an Afrikaner nature in terms of language and culture, and that refugees would be expected to assimilate and adopt the Afrikaner culture.

The above will admittedly not appeal to all ESWs, but then they are free to savour the many delights Africa and the so-called Rainbow Nation have in store for those of an unfashionable shade of pigmentation.”

I probably have more English blood than Afrikaans in my veins, both on the maternal and paternal side. My mother, although Afrikaans-speaking, grew up in the East of Johannesburg, went to Jeppe High School and she always had a slight hesitation about some of the intricacies of Afrikaans grammar.

Barnard raises the issue of Steve Hofmeyr’s children with his English wife, Natasha Sutherland. Hofmeyr in his own way is something of a language nationalist. It would be rather absurd to deny his children citizenship of a future Afrikaner state.

Another example that springs to mind, is that of an elderly British-born woman I met at the Oudtshoorn Afrikaans festival a few years ago. She had emigrated to South Africa in the fifties and duly learnt her first Afrikaans as part of an induction programme on the ship on the way here. She spoke fluent Afrikaans and was proud of her new language and identity, although some part of her would always remain English.

I strongly feel that bilingualism had severely weakened white South Africa in the past. Even though English-speaking whites by and large shared a common “South African” patriotism, the intellectual and business elite was more loyal towards Britain and the outside forces that were intent on destroying White South Africa and putting the exiled ANC in power. Although a small minority in the old South Africa, some radical or even communist journalists, as well as academics at Rhodes, Natal, Wits and UCT, sided with foreigners in wishing to see their own kind subjugated and ultimately assimilated or hounded out of South Africa in a remake of the recent Zimabwe. Many of these radical or ultra-liberal whites still exist and their one distinguishing characteristic is their English culture and admiration for Anglo-American political correctness and the anti-white ideology associated with “diversity”. Interestingly, those Afrikaners converting to political correctness, such as Max du Preez, Christi van der Westhuizen or Carel Niehaus, to name but a few, almost immediately ditch Afrikaans in favour of English as being the more appropriate vehicle for their new-found faith, a bit like all Muslims have to learn Arabic.

If a future white African state or territory is to survive against the many odds it will face, I cannot see how bilingualism or a divided loyalty between the local republic and the wider Anglo-American empire with its increasing obsession with multiculturalism, diversity, affirmative action and anti-white racial ideologies would favour our long-term survival.

As a result of our intermarriage with English-speaking whites, there has been a certain white “melting pot” which has continued unto the present day. Many English-speakers, especially those living among Afrikaners, have become bilingual and more or less integrated into the Afrikaner way of life, including boerewors, rugby and Afrikaans popular music.

Any nation state – and volkstaat is really just an Afrikaans word for a nation state – needs a high culture, a symbology, a literature, a history, a national consciousness and preferably, a national language, to define itself.

To participate in the Afrikaans tradition, which includes the potential to liberate ourselves from the current anti-white oppression, is a privilege, as our many great authors from the past have discovered time and again. People like Leipoldt who was equally fluent in English or our greatest poet, NP van Wyk Louw, who had attended a posh English private school in the Cape.

I say, let all white Africans who have truly made their home in this part of the world, embrace Afrikaans and Afrikaans institutions! Waging the current struggle against our imminent demise at the hands of the Afrocentric, racist maniacs who rule us, it wil sustain, strengthen and unify us.

Going forward, the autonomous Afrikaans language and culture will be our mainstay. After liberation, when the exiled whites return from Australia, Canada and elsewhere, their anglicised children will have to relearn their own language, just like the Jews reacquired a dead language, Hebrew, in Israel.

Like JBM Hertzog also maintained, at heart we are all Afrikaners. We just have to teach proper Afrikaans to our children in future when our Afrikaans-only schools will rival those of Finland, the best in the world.

Boekmerk by:

Everyone has been commenting the South African matric results lately, including the fact that whites outscore blacks in marks and distinctions.

One black columnist doing some soul-searching is The Sowetan’s Sandile Memela. He writes:

A FEW days ago I had a conversation with my niece Nomfundo about matric results.

She is a second-year science student at Wits University. She obtained one distinction at a private school in matric.

Nomfundo does not believe that whites have greater intelligence than blacks.

“It is not that whites are smarter. The fact of the matter is that black students are just lazy and uninspired. They lack focus, discipline and determination ,” she says.

It is a fact that in the post-liberation period, African students in matric hold the record for being the worst performers.

If you look at the faces of smiling and happy pupils who have obtained more than six distinctions in matric this year, they are mostly white.

Of course, that tells us something, not about who has superior intelligence but who is willing to work, work and work hard even if they go to parties.

Nomfundo says during her high school days, what struck her was what African students were obsessed with.

“Black pupils seem to be interested in hairstyles, designer labels, parties and, of course, booze.”

Read the whole article here.

What Memela argues, is that black failure and white success may be ascribed to a difference in attitude. But just like two individuals may differ in both attitude and ability, it is certainly admissable that races, too, may differ not only in attitude but also in ability. How much of the one can be explained by the other? After all, if I am a bad golfer and I find the game frustrating, I am more likely to give it up than pursue and practise it until I become a low handicapper.

What goes for golf, goes for maths and science, as well as school or university in general. Since The Bell Curve, not to mention may scientific studies published in peer-review journals, we all know that blacks have a lower average IQ than whites. In South Africa, the white IQ is somewhere around 100 whereas the average black IQ is about 70.

Blacks generally prefer parties and festivals because a lot of them lack the mental ability to excel at such demanding subjects as mathematics and natural science which require logical reasoning and cognitive ability. Of course, a small minority – less than one percent – of such abilities and even the mediocre ones are showered with praise, bursaries, corporate scholarships and so on.

What government should do, is to bring back IQ tests in school like they used to exist under the old government. Research in this area should also be funded by companies and the National Research Foundation. Only when we have a better idea of South Africa’s cognitive and intellectual capital, will the debate about the matric results become meaningful and scientific, instead of vague exhortations to blacks to drink less beer and study more.

However, while ignoring race differences in IQ, Memela is quite right when he says:

“It is time black society accepted it is raising lazy and uninspired pupils who are encouraged to rely on false affirmative action.

In fact, black pupils have internalised a culture of entitlement that over-emphasises skin colour, worshipping at the altar of materialism and political connectivity over merit.

This marks the beginning of the end of black rule and self-determination as ultimate power, knowledge and intelligence will always rest with whites.”

The only problem is, South African whites have been so bamboozled by 0ur liberal media and the ANC government’s propaganda that they are starting to doubt their own talents.

Except for those white matriculants, mostly girls who, year after year when school-leaving results are published, continue to surprise us by shooting the lights out. One Afrikaans girl from Hoërskool Florida, Wilmé Olivier, obtained a 100% pass rate in the more difficult and demanding Alpha Mathematics.

But what kind of future is there for her and so many other white kids who obtain brilliant marks but who will soon be demotivated by anti-white discrimination in South Africa?

Read the latest news on similar issues on Race and ethnicity.

Boekmerk by:

Fortunately I am an Afrikaner and not a South African. So I do not have to feel bad about my countrymen being fanatical rapists, robbers, murderers, as well as having the worst soccer team in the world.

Apart from their predilection for acting like those kids on an island without adult supervision in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, South Africans also show a great propensity to kowtow. English is a marvellous, Creole language that has absorbed all sorts of terms from other languages, from Afrikaans to Chinese.

Kowtow, like “no can do” is an example of Chinglish, or Chinese English and, according to the little dictionary widget that a friend was kind enough to install on my laptop means:

1. kneel and touch the ground with the forehead in submission as part of Chinese custom.
2. be excessively subservient towards someone.

Believe it or not, I have something in common with Jacob Maroga, the outgoing head honcho of Eksdom, as blogger Anton Barnard calls our national electricity utility. We both studied at a place called Wits University. I happen to have a Wits Ph.D. from a now defunct department, which more or less makes me unemployable. However, if my genetics had been different I might now have been resigning from one parastatal job, walking into another, and paying myself a golden handshake of five or ten million rand just for the hell of it.

But let met not lapse into braaivleis gripes about affirmative action here. The point is that, not so long ago, Wits sent me their alumni magazine in which Jacob Maroga of Eksdom was more or less held up to be a genius. How Wits ever got hold of my address to remind me of an earlier, forgettable part of my life, I don’t know. Being subjected to Jacob Maroga’s hagiography – “A Wits man solving the country’s electricity problems” or something in that vein – was actually worse than one of those phone calls offering you a free carpet shampoo when your house actually has tiles.

It somehow set me thinking about the Seffrican capacity for kowtow, touching the ground with your forehead in the presence of some illustrious personage who, inevitably, will be black.
You see, Wits or the alumni magazine or both, was kowtowing in front of this great man Jacob Maroga who had actually made our lights go out. As they will no doubt continue to do.

Somewhere in the late eighties a lot of Afrikaners stopped being Afrikaners. They became Seffricans and like Marthinus van Schalkwyk tried to “fit into” the new scheme of things. Afrikaners, or at least those who had connections to the National Party or the Broederbond, used to have a kowtow culture of their own, defined by the somewhat off-colour word “gatkruip”. Which explains, I suppose, why they took so readily to the current habit of sucking up to the sundry demigods you can see lounging about in five-star hotels or pushing you off the road in their two-million rand four-by-four, with or without a set of blue lights.

Maybe that funny set of characters on your ugly national emblem, purporting to be from a dead language, really means: “We kowtow, no matter what.”

No matter how bad things get, South Africans will always be grateful for just being allowed to breathe.

When next time the robber loots your house, just be “thankful you are still alive”.

And send a donation to Wits. They need it to promote East African feminist literature over there, with a queue of Tanzanian professors waiting for their tenured posts.

Boekmerk by:

When I read the first Associated Press report on the arrest of Louis Henry Gates Jr., it was obvious to me that that particular storm in a teacup would be blown up into something of a racial hurricane. Not surprisingly, America’s half-blood prince, as Steve Sailer had christened Obama, was not far behind in meddling in what was supposedly a purely local, Cambridge affair.

The fact that Obama has since effected something of a volte face, even offering to have a beer with the much-maligned Sergeant Jim Crowley and his histrionical victim, does not detract from the incident as having demonstrated the fraught nature of US race relations.

Most American pundits have by now flogged this particular black horse to death, including Ann Coulter and Pat Buchanan who at least cannot be accused of being liberals. However, even in their “conservative” reactions, we discern a certain embarrassment in dealing with the case of the “arrested professor” who had suffered the indignity of having been, at least fleetingly, a burglary suspect.

Apart from the obvious way in which the incident had demonstrated the fragility of what amounts to America’s manufactured consensus on race, the entire melodrama took place within the vicinity of America’s greatest university, Harvard.

Or should I say, once greatest university? Because Harvard and its W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Researches represent the pinnacle of the American academic system with its “tenured radicals”, those social-science and literature professors who actually hate everything that America stands for or used to stand for. Not for nothing did Louis Henry Gates Jr. call the president of Harvard after his gruelling ordeal of being peacably escorted to the local police station.

Gates, the self-defined “black man in America”, should consider the plight of a white man in South Africa, a game farmer by the name of Ettienne van Wyk. He was arrested by some black policemen for transporting his animals without a permit. He and his farm manager, Mr. Zacharia Duvenhage, were tossed into a cell with 14 hardened black criminals: murderers, robbers, rapists. At around 3.00 a.m. Van Wyk was sodomized by some of the inmates, while the others sang songs to drown out his screams. During this impromptu a capello performance, the station commander was sound asleep.

Van Wyk later sued the South African minister of police for R1.2 million or $150 000 in damages. Duvenhage, who was not sodomized, sued for only R350 000 or $44 000 for suffering several minor injuries.

Why is this, another incident, so many thousands of miles away, relevant? Because the case of Van Wyk represents something like the mirror image of Louis Henry Gates’s minor spat with the law. He, “a black man in America”, was arrested and taken to the police station by a white policeman painfully conscious of his duty as an enforcer of the law. He suffered no injury, except to his zeppelin of an ego. Yet the global media lavished more attention on Gates, a self-confessed creation of affirmative action, than on the war in Afghanistan and a few other wars combined. In contradistinction, the liberal champions of racial justice and equality will never spare a thought, let alone a minute of prime time, for Ettienne van Wyk, a white man arrested for a minor offence concerning the transport of his own animals and sexually assaulted by black criminals while under the authority of a black policeman.

Gates knew that he could rely on the universal belief that all blacks are victims. Probably that is what prompted his fit of rage at the white policeman in the first place. He was playing the agent provocateur, hoping to increase his standing in the victim stakes, which is necessary, when one has a cushy job at Harvard and a house in a neighborhood that is anything but shabby.

Even when the shoe is on the other foot and the black is the pepetrator, to liberals he remains a victim. Something, or someone, “made him do it”. In the aftermath of Gates’s rise in the victim stakes, someone will – no doubt – ascribe the more objectionable facets of his behavior to whites or white racism. Ultimately, the burden of racial pain is sinmply too much to bear and no amount of material comfort will ever suffice to attenuate its effects which may flare up at any moment.

In a normal world, of course, such incidents would not take place. An alleged slight to the dignity of some affirmative-action academic would not be news. There would be no global theatre for blacks to play out their sense of inferiority and inadequacy in front of a sympathetic audience of guilty whites.

However, the so-called fight against racism is both byzantine and insiduous. Like the class struggle of Marxist lore, it affects or infects individuals and society. Whole institutions, as well as states like the USA, Great Britain or South Africa, kow-tow to the social god of racial correctness. Affirmative action and diversity are to Harvard what dialectical materialism and the class struggle were to the Patrice Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University in the old Soviet Union. Recent jokes about the USSA, the United Socialist States of America, that have taken over where the USSR left off, may contain more than a grain of truth.

In this sense, Louis Henry Gates Jr. is not so much a product of black nationalism, although he is an academic specialist of everything black. Some forms of black nationalism may actually be good, being a natural expression of the keen sense of racial identity felt by all Africans, even the Westernized ones residing in America. Rather, Gates is essentially a product of the American university where whites and blacks alike are indoctrinated in the official ideology of diversity and affirmative action. When California’s Proposition 209 was voted into law in 1996, essentially prohibiting the state from applying anti-white measures during hiring or admissions to schools and universities, the University of California continued to apply racial preference policies in defiance of the law.

In a video made in the same year, 1996, and available on YouTube, Gates boasts about having been a beneficiary of affirmative action and having been able to study at Yale “with white boys and girls”.In his Ivy League world, black is king, period. Academics live in the same mortal fear of being accused of “racism” (or “sexism”) as Catholics did in the days of the Spanish Inquisition when an accusation of heresy could result in being burnt at the stake. Gates is probably highly surprised that anyone, including Obama, should have listened to the white policeman’s version at all. For in his rarefied university world, no white would ever speak up to a black, let alone arrest one.

On the whole, Sergeant James Crowley did the US and the world a favor. He pricked the bubble of Gates’s privileged existence. For once, diversity parasites all over America got the terrifying message that they might be treated equally with whites. If only for that, the man deserves some sort of police medal.

But such incidents have an even greater value in that they demonstrate the correctness of Jared Taylor’s claim that diversity is a burden and not a benefit to institutions and society. They are also polarizing, rupturing the usually polite silence on race that prevents any rational discussion of the dilemma facing not only America, but the entire world.

Slouching toward multicultural utopia and the probable collapse of our civilization, we are in dire need of such confrontations and the debates they must provoke.

Boekmerk by:

Have another look at this, my classic article from late 2004; it is still as valid as ever.

During the time of National Party reforms in the seventies and eighties, the cliché “adapt or die” used to do the rounds. Nowadays, given the highest murder rate in the world, this should be modified slightly to read, “adapt and die”. For the endemic social violence in South Africa is probably incurable.

Optimists think that violent crime can be solved through better policing, more efficient courts and more secure prisons. Even assuming that such improvements were possible under conditions of hard-core affirmative action, it must be admitted that criminal justice treats the symptom and not the cause of social violence. The Department of Correctional Services, for one, has lost 496 out of 500 former Deputy Directors since 1994, representing most of the intellectual capital in the department. Newcomers may learn their job properly, or they may not, but they have to be flown to overseas countries to find out how prisons work as most of those previously involved in managing our prisons are no longer there.

South Africa used to have a problem of political violence. It was not as bad as elsewhere in Africa, but for some reason elicited hysterical international condemnation. However, actors in political violence are mostly driven by some sort of creed or belief system. Whether such a person is a communist, an anarchist, a neo-Nazi or an ethnic or religious guerilla fighter, he is usually amenable to persuasion or compromise. Even a group of Muslim suicide bombers might declare peace if they were given a territory in which to set up an Islamic theocracy, governed only by themselves and not subject to any outside influence.

In the same way, South Africa’s so-called liberation movements who were at one time fanatically convinced of the need for violent and bloody revolution, laid down arms and bombs upon being told that F.W. de Klerk would surrender power unconditionally. Solving political violence is often intractable, but not impossible.

Not so social violence. Endemic crime, the breakdown of the social fabric, a sense of drift regarding norms of good conduct, point to a far deeper problem. The freedom fighter or urban terrorist is ultimately rational, despite a value system that normal society might find idiosyncratic.

But what is “normal society”? It is only the sum-total of behaviours prevalent in any given society at any given time. The Aztecs, infamously, practised daily human sacrifice to appease their sun god. It might revolt many of us today, but to them it was entirely normal. South Africa currently sacrifices about 87 humans per day to violent crime, or 32 000 per year. Those are only the ones who actually die. Scores of others are injured, maimed, traumatised, robbed, raped, burgled and so on.

In any suburb today an entire history of murders, hijackings, and other violent events can be written, if only the locals were narcissistic enough to consider their own history worth recording for posterity. On the other hand, social violence lacks the charm and grandeur of political violence as it is usually not committed in the interest of some glamorous cause like national liberation or world revolution but simply to acquire some hapless person’s BMW or rape his wife because she happened to be inside.

However, some time ago a Johannesburg newspaper engaged in chronicling some local history in the suburbs of Westdene and Lakefield in Benoni. Nearly every resident had a story to tell, an entire litany of mayhem. Mr. John Gee miraculously survived a shot through the eye, but now feels traumatised. His wife says, “One lives in fear in one’s own home. One does not sleep. One prays for protection, yet only more fears come.”

But who are the authors of South Africa’s social violence? Even asking this question presents one with a sense of discomfort, because most violent criminals in South Africa are young black men between the ages of 16 and 36. As one surgeon who had stitched together at least three child rape victims, two of whom were infants, said recently, “Probably white men commit such acts too; it is just that no-one in South Africa has come across such a case.”

Of course, it would be preposterous to say that all young black men are prone to violence. Judging from our daily experiences in crime-torn South Africa, however, a sub-section of that population, large enough to cause more havoc than even a well-equipped guerilla army of a few thousand men, has taken up practices such as heists, hold-ups, murders, sexual violence exacted upon women and children, and so on.

Explanations for such deviancy are manifold. The ubiquitous answer of it being due to apartheid might have been satisfying if other African societies never subject to group areas and a homeland system did not display similar traits. The Congo, Liberia, Sierra Leone come to mind. There is a whole nature/nurture debate around black violence, except that no adherent of the “nature” side would publicly admit to being one, for fear of being branded a racist. Even though mainstream American cancer research has conclusively shown that black men have higher levels of testosterone than their white counterparts, few would hazard the notion that this might be linked to their greater propensity for violent crime.

America has a gargantuan prison population of two million, over half of which consists of African-Americans. This is despite their minority status in the USA, comprising only 12% of an overall population amounting to 290 million. South Africa could neither afford nor succeed, given the dire state of our criminal justice system, in jailing a similar number of black male offenders. Currently, only 10% of murderers in South Africa get arrested and only 6% are convicted. Any murderer therefore has a 94% chance of getting away with it.

If by some miracle all serious criminals in the country had to be caught and imprisoned, the prison population would surely treble or quadruple from the present 200 000, which is already high by world standards. Not only is such an improvement inconceivable under current conditions, but it would also be politically unpopular with the ruling ANC who would be incarcerating large numbers of young black males who are mostly its own supporters at the polls. Few whites, if any, commit violent crime and there are only 3 900 of them in prison, mostly for white-collar offences such as fraud or insider trading on the stock exchange.

All that remains in the world’s most violent society, is precisely to adapt and die. Twice as many South Africans of all races now die of murder than of road accidents – even though the road accident rate is also the highest in the world, surpassing that of Turkey. Crime extends to trade in driver’s licences, so that a large number of drivers use so-called “bought licences”, hardly a contribution to road safety.

There are some people naive enough to think that “something can be done about crime” in South Africa, mostly opposition politicians who dream about diverting funds from arms procurement to policing, but this would be futile. There are already three times as many private security personnel as state-employed policemen, and even they do not succeed in containing what has become Africa’s only peacetime killing field.

“I killed them because they were white.” These famous words were spoken last year by William Kekana, who participated in one of the most horrendous incidents in which the entire family of Mr. Clifford Rawstorne was wiped out, consisting of his fiancée, baby, as well as his own mother. Even this massacre of an entire family would not have made headlines, were it not for the fact that one year-old Kayla was executed on her very first birthday with a shot in the head. Needless to say, the two adult women were first raped before being killed. Both William Kekana and his accomplice, Charles Fido Baloyi, fell into the high-risk group of young black (and Coloured) males who commit almost all violent crime in the country.

South Africa actually has a Minister of Safety and Security, which to some might seem like an example of absurd humour. His Excellency Mr. Charles Nqakula, whose official résumé proudly states that he was once “a waiter and wine steward”, has immortalised himself by euphemistically stating that there was no real crime problem in South Africa, except that it was “a little on the high side”.

All in all, South Africa has got remarkably used to its new-found status as the crime capital of the world. The high-rise districts of Hillbrow and Berea in Johannesburg have been officially designated by Interpol as having the highest murder rate in the world, that is, 600 people per 100 000 population members per annum. Consider for a moment that such a figure represents 12 times the rate found in inner-city ghettoes in the United States, often seen as no-go zones by many Americans.

One British immigrant to South Africa who has survived three car hijackings, refuses to emigrate, stating that he is now accustomed to having Kalachnikovs pointed at him from point-blank range. Everyone knows a relative or friend who has been killed or at least subjected to some form of violent crime, and no South African can remotely imagine a society where people do not live behind razor wire, electrified fences, high walls, burglar bars and similar decorative props.

Outsiders might find our lifestyle bizarre, but many pundits in South Africa consider our society to be much more “normal” now than at any time in the past, which was tarnished by ethnic separation albeit without the present large-scale violence. At the height of segregation and apartheid under Hendrik Verwoerd, South Africa was almost as peaceful as Switzerland but she was immoral. Today we are the apotheosis of racial morality and political correctness, yet as violent as the Congo or Liberia. Surprisingly, however, our economy continues to function amid the carnage. No economist has ever studied this as far as I know, but not only is crime our biggest industry – bigger than gold-mining or manufacturing – it also stimulates consumption as stolen goods are replaced; it is a boon to the insurance and security industries and ultimately makes surgeons and undertakers rich. The government earns billions of rands in Value-Added Tax on stolent goods being replaced with new ones. So crime pays.

News about killings or shoot-outs no longer elicits the slightest surprise. It is part of our daily existence, and one assumes the lethal risks attending to something as simple as going shopping or driving to work. My wife, for example, has twice been to the local shopping centre where in the one instance a shoot-out was taking place in the parking area so that she had to hide between the cars with our 18 month-old son in her arms; in the second case an armed robbery had just taken place with the robbers casually strolling by with their guns and their loot.

Everyone knows someone who has been killed, raped or maimed. Just this week, the wife of a friend and former literary editor of Die Burger, François Smith, was stabbed to death with a screwdriver in their home in Wellington, near Cape Town. Her murderer was a 16-year-old squatter camp resident whose race was omitted by the press but presumably few, if any whites, reside in his particular squatter camp which is dedicated to black Africans. Lisbé Smuts-Smith was a well-known academic and head of the Afrikaans literature department at the University of Cape Town. Just two weeks ago, another UCT academic, mathematician Brian Hahn, was attacked by a former student, dr. Maleafisha Steve Tladi (35). Hahn died in hospital a week later, while Tladi was released on bail of R500 (about $80).

Two years ago Louw Rabie, a brilliant albeit reclusive geologist and brother of author Jan Rabie, was beaten to death with a fence pole by two Coloured men to whom he had lent some money a week earlier. Police in the small Cape town of Montagu readily caught his murderers because they happened to have drinking money during the week, taken from his home. He was 80 years old, but in good health. He is reputed to have been one of the most brilliant geologists and intellectuals this country has ever produced, writing copiously throughout his life but disdaining publication and public esteem. Africans with their oral tradition are fond of saying that “when an old person dies, a library burns down”. What strikes me about the relentless killings of educated whites, is that the criminals are indeed “burning down the libraries” of this country and physically exterminating the intellectual class, much like Pol Pot did in Cambodia. The media are celebrating youth, dance, colour, being black and exuberant – as opposed to the quiet studiousness of middle-aged and elderly whites, the bearers of knowledge and understanding. Are these learned whites who are being killed in exuberant, paradisiacal outbreaks of violence simply the remnants of a civilisation that is being eradicated in the name of decolonisation? No government spokesman has ever condemned such killings; so we may assume that the present regime is completely indifferent to them, where such killings do not enjoy their tacit support.

Around our local school in the past week there have been two car hijackings, as well as one murder. It is not really considered to be an exceptionally violent area. Most of this is not even reported in the press, because there really is not enough space and ordinary crime is no longer newsworthy. It needs some further sadistic element to make the front page, such as babies getting killed or raped, or elderly farmers being tortured to death. Farming in South Africa is now arguably the most dangerous profession in the world with more than 1600 farmers murdered since 1994, often in macabre and dehumanising ways.

To the outside world, white South Africans are congenitally evil. If our murderers and rapists had been white and their victims black, Europe or the United States would long ago have sent an expeditionary force to put a stop to it. At present, news of white suffering in South Africa inspires the occasional yawn in Western capitals. This is why a recent article in The Despatch, detailing the rape of a dog by three black men, gave me some hope that a chord will be struck somewhere in the coolly indifferent breasts of our fellow-Westerners. Even if the lives of Louw Rabie, Brian Hahn, Lisbé Smuts-Smith, Kayla Rawstorne and tens of thousands of others are of no value to them, perhaps they will take pity on the mongrel bitch in Grahamstown that was recently raped by three black men. Or perhaps two black men, as the third one protested his innocence upon being dragged out of the shack by screaming, “I came here to relieve myself. These two were raping the dog when I arrived!” Cruelty to humans, especially white humans, is today a normal feature of our society, just like human sacrifice used to be in the culture of the Aztecs. Cruelty to animals, or non-consensual sex with dogs, may still evoke some sympathy, not only locally, but also internationally. I therefore feel sorry for Masganda – the name of the dog concerned – who was rescued with a bleeding vagina and in need of veterinary attention, but perhaps this lowly creature of uncertain lineage could become a martyr for our cause in alerting opinion-makers and political leaders of our plight.

Cycling has become a popular sport in South Africa. However, its practitioners regularly get shot at by gangs of black youths in the street, so that many of them carry guns and knives for self-defence on their bicycles. Members of the Johannesburg mountain-bike club were outraged a while ago when two cyclists, Scott and Lloyd Griffith, were charged with murder after an armed battle with their four black assailants, one of whom succumbed to his wounds.

Most of the time, however, whites are helpless victims of crime. The government has recently passed a new gun law which makes it difficult, if not impossible, to own a fire-arm. They have also abolished rural commandos of military reservists entrusted with crime-prevention in the country, without any police units replacing them. Occasionally the newspapers carry stories of crime victims successfully defending themselves against attacks, offering armed resistance. As a result of the new gun law, this will soon end and we shall simply be able to hide or flee from our assailants. Defending oneself against a marauding robber or rapist might be a manifestation of racism, and is therefore frowned upon as being a kind of “right-wing” response.

Being robbed of one’s vehicle or household belongings is now considered quite normal, and often people ascribe escaping with their lives to their own astuteness, such as being friendly to the robber, helping him load the effects into a vehicle, not looking him in the face so as not to recognise him afterwards, et cetera. A friend of mine in Kempton Park kept up a reasonable conversation with the thieves emptying his house, tied up as he was with a gun pointed at him. He survived, although his elderly mother was badly roughed up and had to be hospitalised. In other instances, of course, people are not so lucky and they become just another murder statistic. Then they simply adapt and die.

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