Re: Changing colour in SA
 

Countries and people who keep banging on about what happened in the past are generally getting nowhere - Mugabe has done a great job! Britain did commit appalling atrosities as did the Dutch but I think its fair to say that Britain is one of the least racist and most tolerant countries presently. Britain made terrible mistakes but seemed to learn from them and stopped this behaviour first (I'm not just talking about in SA).

Although positive discrimination may be wrong, what is the alternative? The more poor black people that have jobs, the less dangerous crime there will be. In an ideal world the government would pump billions into the townships and schools instead of using positive discrimination.

Re: Changing colour in SA
 

To Follow on from TigerOC's excellent post.
Racial segregation and discrimination was instituted by the British Empire
in all their Colonies , including SA.
I cannot defend or justify the excesses post Verwoerd but on a personal basis, my Great grandparents were in one of the concentration camps, they lost everything including their farm which was razed and dispossed,
My Grandfather,who had grown up in the Groot trek to get away from the english taxes, fought and was crippled in the Boer War, a man 7 foot 3 inches weighing 220 lbs was reduced to pushing a luggage trolley on a Railway Station while his highly educated wife worked in a Dairy, They were poor whites, living in a corrugated Tin Shack as squatters on a farm, Mielie Bags for Blankets,in a place that even today is one of the coldest in SA.

I went to English primary School in the 60's and had a fight every afternoon passing the Afrikaans school as I was seen as a traitor, an Afrikaans boy in a English School.
The bitterness was immense,

Regarding FA's comment about Population, there was parity between the black and white populations in SA till the 50's.
Only then did living standards start improving for both Black and white with the resultant increase in births and lifespan.

yes, the nats practiced AA, especially in Govt service, but did SA grow?
is AA now creating real growth?
I dont think so.

To Foreign Gals post, I agree,the present Govt has/is wasting Billions on stuff that does not matter.
I've asked previously, the money spent on 2010 and the Gautrain would pay how many people a living wage while they are taught new skills, including literacy.
and to the one who says Tourism creates jobs, I ask how many more get created through education and training?

Re: Changing colour in SA
 

Im sorry ......... were you being sarcastic there? :confused::blink:
I just needed to be sure ;):)

Re: Changing colour in SA
 

Sir, you have isolated her remark - go back to just after the war in an independent and failing state, there was a wind of Change in Zimbabwe Rhodesia and things were going to change. In the furst part of his rule (excluding the massacre of the matabele - and this was part of the wind of change) he did a good job in education, social security, social housing.

At the point when he hosted the African Games (98?) / remarriage he started to make a complete twt of himself and buggered it all up - and its decline - forced by him - continues to this day.

So her point in context is right in my view - I'm sure she's not supporting him now.

Re: Changing colour in SA
 

The war finished in 1902, the Union was formed in 1910, 8 years later. The Nats came to power in 1946, 36 years after that, during which time there had been 2 World Wars, the Great Depression and the Spanish flu pandemic etc, etc, etc. The Nats then ruled for a further 48 years, so 84 years after the British left, it is still their fault? (perhaps the apartheid scapegoat of the ANC has a further 70 years to run ;))

Perhaps segregation and job reservation etc was caused by the opinion of some that they were racially superior to others. :cool:

Re: Changing colour in SA
 

Depends on what your definition of bad treatment is. They certainly were not treated as equals.

Re: Changing colour in SA
 

Second thoughts you are right. I suppose (but don't know) that they were subject to the Area Acts same as everyone else - well except the whites that is. Then there could be a theory that no-one was treated badly - one which is raided but does not address the invasion / occupation / colonisation issue.

Re: Changing colour in SA
 

I'm not sure about the group areas act, I knew several who lived in "white suburbs" in the early 80's, one of them told me that before he bought his house in a white area he needed to get the written permission of his neighhours. I also new on who had grown up in a township. There weren't enough of them to have their "own area" I suppose.:cool:

Re: Changing colour in SA
 

Here we go again! The problem with the "race" situation in many parts of the World is that it is very easy to sit and make judgements here and now and ignore "cause and effect".

Almost everything that happens in politics and legislation is a result of something that has happened in the past and has effect now and has to be dealt with. Those are judgements made by people living within the frame work of the current social norms and customs. I have tried to explain "cause and effect" here.

Stanley kindly look at the time frames you have stated;

45 years after the end of the Anglo-Boer War the NATS came to power. These are the children of the affected. They have been living in poverty and deprivation and now have the democratic ability to effect change positively for themselves. And they do. They have made decisions within the Social norms of the day. Racial discrimination is practised in every part of the World. As Chango remarked from an American perspective you probably see exactly the same process in the Southern States of the USA. The populations there were probably very badly affected by the Wall Street crash of the 1930's and you had huge poor white populations. They enacted similar legislation based on a simple majority.

Again I am sick and tired of people making judgements on the actions that people took many years ago based on current social norms without "walking a mile" in the shoes of the people that made the decisions then. We are currently in the over-compensation cycle where we are falling over ourselves (not me by the way) to make up for the injustices of the past. The pendulum is swinging the other way right now, with the help of people like Mugabe.

As a foot note; I am not of Afrikaans extraction. I am of Cornish extraction. My Aunt married a trekker descendant from Kroonstadt. I was horrified by what I saw in and around Kimberley where my ancestors settled and what my Uncle by marriage told me. I am ashamed to be even associated with people that perpetrated atrocities like this. The British Nation should have been made aware of these atrocities and should have compensated the Afrikaans people for this. Instead they have been remorselessly hounded maligned.

Re: Changing colour in SA
 

By the way, Stanley10,as you love being pedantic, when did you say the nats came to power?
My History tells me it was 1948.

Re: Changing colour in SA
 

Many interesting and very valid points.

I'm fascinated by the different attempts at social engineering in various countries - whether in the UK (to try and eliminate the elitism of centuries of feudal and capitalist stratification of society), or in post-colonial African countries to try to secure either redress for past wrongs or what the contemporary ruling clique considers to be a fairer (i.e. larger) slice of the available cake which in SA amounts to BEE and this on-the-face-of-it bizarre ruling on the ethnic Chinese.

I suspect that all such attempts are, ultimately, doomed to failure. Reclassification of human beings to favour one, presumably disadvantaged group, over another seems to be a recipe for breeding resentment and creating yet more divisions. One imagines the urban underclass festering in those SA slums having in the Chinese yet another convenient target on whom to vent their frustrations.

Having just re-read Paul Theroux's 'Dark Star Safari', I am struck by his theory of how Africa successfully resists all attempts at imposition of externalisms... no matter how many years of foreign domination. As Theroux says "After years of experimentation with various ideologies and industries, they were back to farming by hand and pounding maize into flour... Nothing was new except that there were many more people, grubbier buildings, more litter, fewer trees, more poachers, less game".

Similar themes crop up in so many other books on African themes (e.g. Robert Guest's 'The Shackled Continent' and Robert Klitgaard's 'Tropical Gangsters' which are perhaps the most readable among many works by journalists, UN officials and academics. And yes - I've read those and many others too in the past six months since leaving the BBC.)

I find it depressing that the evidence so far is that all those supposedly wonderful advances introduced from outside (Europe, China etc.) eventually crumble. Every pound or dollar in development aid, famine relief, the creation of political structures, the development of industry is apparently only productive for as long as the outsiders run it or supervise it. Left to themselves, the Africans subvert the European/Chinese projects to their own ends. We can interpret this as incompetence, corruption or whatever... but maybe the truth is that none of it works or can ever work because it's essentially foreign and imposed from outside.

Re: Changing colour in SA
 

A fine post, Newshoney, and Theroux's Dark Star Safari is indeed a fine book too.

The common thread to all these modern interventions is the modernist theory that mankind can be engineered and remade to suit an ideology. Do-gooding Westerners helicopter and drive around in their shiny 4x4s thinking that the half-thoughtout theory they picked up during their short and increasingly trivial university education has provided them with the tools to recreate the whole of humankind.

Re: Changing colour in SA
 

Sorry, but I cannot "exclude" the brutal extermination of twenty thousand people from my assessment of Mugabe. There has been far too much excluding of that period. If, at the time, it had been squarely faced for what it was, much evil would have been averted.

Re: Changing colour in SA
 

And let us then "transform" the disgusting elitist private schools in South Africa. Let us bus in poor blacks from the townships and legislate so that the school population at, say, Hilton, is "representative" - so 80% black, perhaps 8% white, and so on. Those who cannot afford the fees shouldn't have to pay, and if that means that there is a general falling in standards, well who cares, so long as we have "social justice"?

Same with the teaching staff, who are disgustingly white. We should lower standard so that part-qualified black teachers can get a nice job in these private schools, and if education suffers it will all be for the greater good.

In fact, come to think of it, all private schooling in SA should be abolished. It is inherently elitist and racist. Same for private healthcare.

Re: Changing colour in SA
 

You realise I'm warming to you, P... :cool:
If only humankind were always humane and kind, eh?

Now that Angola has apparently joined Tanzania and Swaziland in finding out that murdering the political opposition is not conducive to running a free and fair election, I wonder if they regret allowing that trans-shipment of Chinese weapons to Comrade Bob. Though I do wonder just how "in charge" he is... is he just the figurehead for the military authorities in the JOC who are really running things now? Sadly bringing Robert Gabriel Mugabe (and/or others) to justice over the Gukhurahundi might not have prevented the current situation... the whole politico-military apparatus of Zanu-PF is equally guilty.

They will not allow the 'European' solution (democratic elections, respect for the rule of law, etc.) so perhaps an age-old 'African' response will follow...