Category Archives: Africa

UPDATE II: ANC Centenary Celebrations Kick Off in … America (Theron The Twit)

Africa, Celebrity, Hollywood, Propaganda, Pseudo-history, Race, South-Africa, Terrorism

PBS is celebrating: “This week, the African National Congress, South Africa’s ruling political party, marked its 100th anniversary.” Drop the Newspeak. The ANC heads a dominant-party state. Not quite a one-party state, but almost.

To kick off the fun, I watched a rather well-produced, utterly one-sided, propagandist “documentary” yesterday. “Have You Heard From Johannesburg” is about the so-called Struggle. The behind-the-scenes reality popped into my head when watching the famously “exiled South Africans,” (like Oliver Tambo) suited up, and giving ponderous interviews:

“… There was certainly precious little that would have dampened Joseph Lelyveld’s enthusiasm for ‘The Struggle.’ But when the former (aforementioned) New York Times editor went looking for his exiled ANC heroes all over Africa, he found nothing but monosyllabic, apathetic, oft-inebriated men whom he desperately tried to rouse with revolutionary rhetoric.” (Page 143, Into the Cannibal’s Pot.)

Myth-making aside, the ANC’s manufactured heroes have nothing on the ascetic, self-sacrificing Salafis who man al-Qaeda (and who do not rely on European groupies for sustenance).

UPDATED I: “AFRICAN NATIONAL CORRUPTION.” A LOT TO CELEBRATE. DURBAN. I WOULD NOT recognize it today. Durban Bay is dying, environmentally.

UPDATE II: “Be a man who is not afraid to know his HIV status” broadcasts a billboard in the CBD of the once-magnificent city of Johannesburg. The image attached to the ad? A white man. HIV is almost non-existent, statistically, among whites. Such equal opportunity idiocy reminds me of that useless idiot, actress Charlize Theron, who, during a recent interview with another member of the idiocracy, Piers Morgan, hinted that South Africans should be disarmed. Her campaign against rape in SA was as vague, if not as dangerous. In addition to being a pretentious, rather poor actress, Theron is a major hypocrite: I believe her mother shot her father, all in a “good” cause, of course.

The image of your prototypical HIV carriers is at the 3:27 minute mark:

In my book I flesh out the facts about the Central Business District; what it looks like today—the JHB Stock Exchange has been forced to migrate to the suburbs, and businesses are shuttered—as compared to the time when I used to walk to work (it was in the Southern Life Building) from the bus station. I lived up the road in the once vibrant, humming, safe Hillbrow, where I used to stroll at night. A clip of Hillbrow today is below.

Have you ever heard of the hijacking of a … building? It’s a new concept. Of course, the woman in the clip is mouthing the allowable left-liberal platitudes, with her reference to the divinity “Madiba” (Mandela’s African honorific, and an adopted affectation among liberals). “Madiba” would not wish fear to replace his magnificent legacy. The old idiot interviewed seems to think that fear anchored in a fearful reality is a really bad thing. I’ve heard this pearl of wisdom repeated among many American liberals. Living life stupidly and fearlessly seems to be a great virtue.

UPDATED: Decoding The Plan to Make Detroit Work (Blame Honky)

Africa, Debt, Economy, Federalism, Government, Intelligence, Race, Racism, Socialism, Taxation

If these minority penalizing budgetary cuts were inflicted in New Hampshire, Desiree Cooper of Detroit Public TV would have probably cried foul. But they aren’t, so Cooper keeps her cool in an excellent factual account about Detroit’s black-dominated city council, and its efforts to save the city’s finances by consolidating services. (Read: directing these to those who PAY.)

This invariably means directing services to the dwindling tax base (You Know Who), so that this productive, paying minority gets the best bang for its huge outlays and goodwill and… STAYS IN TOWN. These good people want to remain in the city they helped build.

Have their overlords realized, perhaps a little late in the day, that keeping the taxpayers who pay their salaries happy might just be the key to their own statist status? As Cooper puts it in this remarkably impartial report: It is these “dedicated Detroiters, the more affluent Detroiters who are part of the tax base [that] the city desperately wants to hold on to.”

Barbara and Spencer Barefield are an example. The couple has “what they consider a small house amongst Palmer Woods’ mansions.” They (and their ilk; nudge-nudge) will be accorded “preferential treatment in this community’s upkeep, maintaining roads, sidewalks and streetlights. That could mean the difference between residents staying or leaving.”

Of course, it is a travesty to frame as “preferential” the provision of basic services in return for enormous outlays. It shows you how far we have gone in assimilating Karl Marx’s maxim, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”

The Barefield are Detroiters of quite a deep dye, as they are prepared to put up with a $900-a-month utility bill!

READ MORE about the “Detroit Works” project, undertaken by Mayor Dave Bing and his crew—architect Rainy Hamilton, Karla Henderson who heads Detroit Works, City Council President Charles Pugh, and others—in an attempt to save the city (and their sinecures?):

With a sprawling city, 139 square miles, and few resources for city services, Mayor Bing took the Detroit Works project as an opportunity to redefine the city’s physical, economic and social landscape. He began by taking inventory, taking a close look at what Detroit really has.
Demographers have identified at least 100 distinct neighborhoods within the city limits. With that in mind, Detroit Works unveiled its short-term plan, classifying the city’s neighborhoods by their quality of housing and stability of population.
The degree of city services and investment would depend on whether the neighborhood is deemed steady, transitional, or distressed.

UPDATE (Dec. 13): Erik in the comment below blames honky in what sounds like vintage Yankee propaganda. You’ll get better historical facts about the South from reading or watching the brilliant timeless “Gone with the Wind.” So too did Mencken write about the civilization destroyed by the “dirty Yankees.” The South was the seat of the country’s aristocracy—and some of the finest families in America.

Although my book, Into the Cannibal’s Pot, advances the cultural argument in explaining underdevelopment, it is also highly critical of it. As follows:

In “Into the Cannibal’s Pot,” I concur to an extent with thinkers such as Etounga-Manguelle. Indubitably, in Africa “magic wins out over reason; community over individual; communal ownership over private property; force and coercion over rights and responsibilities; wealth distribution over its accumulation.”Indeed, human behavior is mediated by values. However, I criticize the cultural argument for “affording a circular, rather than a causal, elegance: people do the things they do because they are who they are and have a history of being that way.”
But “why have some people produced Confucian and Anglo-Protestant ethics—with their mutual emphasis on graft and delayed gratification—while others have midwived Islamic and animistic values, emphasizing conformity, consensus, and control? Why have certain patterns of thought and action come to typify certain people in the first place?” Such an investigation, I conclude, political correctness prohibits.
In any event, bad leaders or bad weather patterns are not what shackle backward peoples. Not exclusively. As cities across England burn because of the “unequal civilizing potential” of certain peoples—James Burnham’s coinage—it has become clear that the values and cultural influences which people (and peoples) bring to the polity cannot be tweaked out of existence like some unsightly nose-hair.

Read it, Erik. Mimicking whitey, if that is indeed your and Sowell’s explanation for black dysfunction, falls flat when it comes to Africa.

UPDATED: Onward to Uganda!

Africa, Barack Obama, Foreign Policy, Military, War

I’ve never thought much of the president, as you know. But even I was overly optimistic about Barack Obama’s powers of discernment, having once ventured that in the so-called good war (Afghanistan), Obama had found a war he could call his own. BHO has fewer qualms than Genghis Bush himself about pursuing “wars of the womb” (Libya) and skirmishes for certain select causes (no congressional authority required): that’s the guy’s style.

Now, at the behest of B. Hussein Obama, US troops have joined forces with one Ugandan tribal entity against another, and are hunting for a war lord: Joseph Kony of the Lord’s Resistance Army. (I dilate briefly on this conflict in my book, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa”; it’s emblematic of most of the faction fighting that grips Africa.)

BHO, however, believes “that deploying these U.S. armed forces furthers U.S. national security interests and foreign policy and will be a significant contribution toward counter-LRA efforts in central Africa.”

I had failed to sufficiently appreciate both the depths of Obama’s stupidity and the breadth of his abuse of office.

UPDATE (Feb. 7, 2012): “Obama decision to send troops to Uganda comes under new scrutiny.”

UPDATE II: Public Enema # 1 (Bum Doctors Spread AIDS)

Africa, Etiquette, Healthcare, Pseudoscience, Reason, South-Africa

It is one thing to have voodoo for values, but what about a sense of propriety?

The N2 is a major highway in South Africa that starts in my hometown of Cape Town. A repulsed reporter at The Daily Voice snapped images of a traditional “healer” administering a treatment for bewitchment alongside the road, in full view of motorists careening down the highways. The shameless sangoma (witch doctor), whose fees are probably reimbursed by the medical scheme (in the New South Africa), elaborated on his methods. Prepare to be repulsed (if you click on the image).

“Liberals labor under the romantic delusion that the effects of millennia of development-resistant, self-defeating, fatalistic, atavistic, superstition-infused, unfathomably cruel cultures can be cured by an infusion of foreign aid, and by the removal of tyrants. … the values and cultural influences which people (and peoples) bring to the polity cannot be tweaked out of existence like some unsightly nose-hair. … (From Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa.)

UPDATED I (Sept. 5): Gray Falcon, AKA historian Nebojsa Malic—one of the top authorities in the US on the Balkans (if you want the truth)—has reviewed Into the Cannibal’s Pot on Amazon. Do read Mr. Malic’s insights, titled “A cautionary tale beyond black and white.”

UPDATE II: The common, communal and irrational practice described above should help explain to the perpetually perplexed West why the spread of AIDS/HIV is so hard to curtail in Africa. You know that the bum “doctor” does not use disposable equipment. Nor does he have an autoclave with which to sterilize his home-made enema.

Perforations are bound to happen. Infection likely to follow.