Monsieur Le Chevalier has just attacked me for writing in English on this blog (while he does the same on his) and not in Afrikaans. The fact that I publish a daily website praag.co.za in Afrikaans with more than 6 000 entries and have personally written hundreds of columns and articles in Afrikaans does not count for much, I suppose. Neither does spending months on editing a second edition of Paul Kruger’s biography by D.W. Krüger and co-translating another book (Negrologie) from French into Afrikaans.
Soos Le Chevalier dit stel op Newsferret se kommentaargedeelte:
“PRAAG… Die Pro-Afrikaanse Aksie Groep se stuurman, wat in Engels skryf. Die groot hero vir alles wat Afrikaans is, en gevolglik net wit en nie Engels is nie, bepleit sy saak in Engels.
Dit alleen maak hom nie werd om eens ‘n nat brakkie aan af te vee nie, as animal cruelty natuurlik jou thing is…”
Die feit dat ek oor die afgelope tien jaar of meer ‘n konstante stryd vir die behoud van Afrikaans gestry het, letterlik honderde vergaderings en betogings bygewoon het, petisies opgestel en versprei, hofsake met my eie geld befonds het, ensovoort, dit alles tel ook niks nie.
Maar aan hierdie soort verdagmakery is ons al gewoond nie waar nie, want dis waaroor diktature – en die huidige Suid-Afrika is maar net nog ‘n Engelstalige Bantoediktatuur soos vele in Afrika – gaan, om mense verdag te maak, te beswadder en deur propaganda, geweld en intimidasie te beheer.
I am probably going to post an Afrikaans version of what I am writing here on praag.co.za as part of our planned debate on minority rights in South Africa, but let me continue this in English as it is important for foreigners and those people who do not read the Afrikaans sites to understand that the position of the Afrikaner minority in South Africa is the most important political and international issue facing this country today.
Next week on 12 and 13 November the Second Session of the UN Forum on Minority Issues will be taking place in Geneva. I would have been there to put the case for the Afrikaner people, but my passport was stolen and after obtaining a temporary passport I was told by the Swiss embassy that they do not recognise it, effectively keeping me from attending the conference.
Both Newsferret a.k.a. Hermann Hanekom and the KykNET documentary filmmaker Tienie Theunissen in an interview published in today’s Beeld is putting forward the official ideological position of the ANC, that Afrikaners do not exist. At best we are a negligible subculture of the so-called “Afrikaanses” or Afrikaans-speakers that are a mere “linguistic community”, speaking a non-dominant language in this English land known as South Africa. As Hermann Hanekom puts it in his inimitably elegant way (sy gevleuelde woorde): this is “the fruit salad of a South Africa we can be proud of, but our pride (is) being destroyed by the Dan Roodts”.
I cannot, for the life of me, see why I am destroying the pride of South Africa – when you South Africans are doing such a good job of destroying it yourselves. You are all just a bunch of thieves, murderers and rapists and if it weren’t for the fact that you continue to force Afrikaners to play in your so-called South African teams, you would probably have lost at most forms of sports, just like your schools and universities are sinking slowly into the abyss of Third World decrepitude, just like those of Zimbabwe.
Nietszche wrote the ultimate insult to Christianity when he said: “Wherever there are walls I shall inscribe this eternal accusation against Christianity upon them — I can write in letters which make even the blind see. I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct for revenge for which no expedient is sufficiently poisonous, secret, subterranean, petty — I call it the one immortal blemish of mankind.”
Nietzsche was being a bit polemical, but is South Africa not “the immortal blemish of mankind”? This country that is not even in control of its own borders and has twice founded itself on a genocide, first in 1902 when it “united” on the graves of the Boer women and children who died in the camps and after 1994 by denying the existence of the Afrikaner people on its own soil, actively legislating against our language, culture, identy and our very existence. The so-called “South Africans”, availing themselves of a label that they themselves rejected for most of the twentieth century, from the nineteen-thirties when you randomly assaulted Afrikaners who did not wish to stand to attention when “God save the King” was played in cinemas, to the sixties, seventies and eighties when you spewed your hate, lies and half-truths about the then Afrikaner-run state called “South Africa”. Why the apartheid name “South Africa” was not changed first, I do not know, but I suspect that you, the hermit crabs (Jean Raspail’s insightful characterisation) who have usurped our state and made it your home, as if you had had any part in its construction, would be lost without our soiled goods which we had to surrender at the behest of the British and the Americans.
You South Africans have no culture, except maybe American hip-hop music and Nadine Gordimer who received the Nobel literature prize for hating her own country, but who – please note – is mainly read overseas. That is the paradox of the so-called “South African”, who is an overseas, cross-border phenomenon, like the Malawian who slips across the border, acquires an ID book from some corrupt official and is instantly “South Africanized”. Or the British tourist who buys some real estate in Cape Town and becomes a permanent resident in what he deems to be an English-speaking country of whom he is also in some sense a part, but in a superior way, being from “back home”.
And yet, despite our existence as a people and a “minority nation” being denied – having lost the war of the cradle, as a result of 1902 – all over this land there are still relics of our being: Afrikaans schools, universities, churches, place names, monuments, libraries containing tens of thousands of titles written by ghosts or ghost writers with Afrikaans surnames. Such a lot for this “South Africa”, this parasite state, to destroy! Rename, extirpate, reprogramme, Creolize, change, falsify.
Hermann Hanekom participates in this lie by stating, seriously, that Afrikaans literature, our national treasure painstakingly created by generations of Afrikaners, is a product of Coloured literary prowess! How many so-called Creole or Coloured authors have there been, to date in Afrikaans? He mentions Adam Small and P.J. Philander. Recently a Russian academic asked me the same question and the only names I could think of were:
P.J. Philander (poet)
Adam Small (poet and dramatist)
E.K.M. Dido (novelist)
Kirby van der Merwe (novelist)
Clinton du Plessis (poet)
Peter Snyders (poet)
S.V. Petersen (poet and novelist)
Elias P. Nel (short-story writer)
Over the last 150 years and more, there have been hundreds, nay, thousands of published Afrikaner authors, not to mention the unpublished authors of theses and dissertations, academic and newspaper articles, and so on, 99% of whom have been Afrikaners. There are over 300 dictionaries in Afrikaans, none of which was created by a Coloured, even as a collaborator. That is a fact. There are fewer than ten Malay words in Afrikaans, yet the Coloured director of the ATKV after a visit to Malaysia recently seriously claimed that the Afrikaans lexicon or vocabulary was “heavily influenced by Malay”.
South Africa, the parasite state, claims that the Afrikaner nation has no territory except Orania, that the Zulus of Natal or the Xhosas of the Transkei deserve to rule all previously Boer or Afrikaner territory which they now claim as their own, being the “dominant tribe(s)” of this country.
Even if this is true, that all territory belongs to you and that we have none, and even if all the Afrikaans names had to be changed and wiped out, there would still remain two million odd people, bearers of this unwanted culture and nationality, a “minority” by any definition. As Francesco Capotorti, Special Rapporteur of the United Nations Sub-Commission on the Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, defined a minority in 1977:
“A group numerically inferior to the rest of the population of a state, and in a non-dominant position whose members – being nationals of the state – possess ethnic, religious or linguistic characteristics differing from those of the rest of the population and show, if only implicitly, a sense of solidarity, directed towards preserving their culture, traditions, religions and language.”
Even if all South African history is the history of the ANC – as prescribed books at school these days pretend – and the Great Trek, the Boer Republics and the creation of Iscor, Eskom, Sasol, the Afrikaans media and publishing houses, the Afrikaner cultural organisations and institutions, were all “just a joke” as Hermann Hanekom seems to imply, South Africa is still stuck with two million misfits on “its” territory and another million or so in exile who continue to maintain some form of relationship with their country of origin.
Apart from executing us Rwandan-style – which seems to be happening already on a minor scale – or assimilating us through forced intermarriage, anglicisation and so on, you are stuck with us. We are your black – or rather white – sheep, the thorn in your side, the stranger in your midst.
And the United Nations and the rest of the world are looking at you, at your crimes, at your domination and ill-treatment of us.
You may have conquered us like the British conquered us before. On 27 January 1832 the Commercial Advertiser in Cape Town wrote: “The Cape is a British Colony – captured by British bayonets in 1806 and purchased with British gold in 1814.” And on 19 September 1857, the Cape Argus stated, similarly: “There are many things… which will advance the moral and social progress of the Colony; but nothing will conduce more to these great ends than the substitution of the English language for the present Cape Dutch. Let your language and your nationality go…”
Do these words from 150 years ago not sound familiar? Let your language and your nationality go. The problem is: what defines us Afrikaners more than anything else is precisely that we do not and will not, ever, “let go” of our language and our nationality.
As time goes by, these Bantu lords in their big black cars and their mansions – as well as you, their subjects, who kowtow to them – will find out, like the British lords before them, that their Afrikaner problem will never go away. Left to fester, it will simply get worse and worse until, finally, “South Africa” meets its nemesis, the Afrikaner…
