Category Archives: Africa

Updated: Hermann Giliomee: Reluctant Historian of the Afrikaner?

I’m reading Hermann Giliomee’s The Afrikaners: Biography of a People. Giliomee is the historian of record on the topic. At the same time, I’m also reading David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. (I reviewed one of his later volumes for The American Conservative.)
Perhaps my South African readers—at least those who are in the know—can respond to my initial observation:
Besides Fischer being a better writer, Giliomee seem to lack any fondness for his subject—the kind I detect in Fischer, who simply delights in the American settlers, human foibles and all.
I was so looking forward to reading Giliomee, but I find his door-stopper quite a downer. He’s a fine historian, make no mistake; Giliomee has an impressive command of the primary sources. But he’s too negative about early Afrikaners.
For example, unanswered in Giliomee’s account of the travails of the 4000 odd settler/farmers in the Cape is why these people were subjected to ongoing cattle theft and brutal attacks from the indigenous peoples. Giliomee says the natives felt encroached upon. This may count as a necessary, but insufficient, condition. We are talking about a vast country. The locals would have hardly noticed the few farms that dotted the landscape.
Similar questions are completely elucidated in Fischer’s accounts. He leaves his readers with no lingering, nagging questions. Again, I’d have liked to detect some passion in Giliomee—an Afrikaner himself—for his subject. But maybe his known liberalism prevents him from connecting to his roots.

Update: Dan Roodt, a BAB A-Lister, writes:
“You are perfectly right about Giliomee’s book. It is full of detail and sources, but it lacks a central argument or passion as you call it. I think he was too scared to write anything that could be considered nationalist or un-PC.
Giliomee’s greatest failure, I think, is in the last part where he simply repeats all the clichés of how the old government fell, leaving out the role of the Western powers and all the behind-the-scenes wrangling that was going on.
Yesterday the power went out three times, at 10, at 4 and again at 8 p.m. for two hours each time.”
**
I’m beginning to think I’ve been too charitable to Giliomee. Contrast his The Afrikaners with Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed. The last speaks in so many voices other than the historian’s. It’s replete with excerpts from personal diaries, accounts from tutors and travelers, and outsiders looking in on the settlers. Hackett also mentions his own roots and is manifestly proud of his ancestry.
In the magnificent Albion’s Seed you learn exactly from where in England the settlers came, how they built their homes, courted, married, made love, sired children, buried their dead, and punished outlaws; what they ate and how they prepared food; how educated they were. In one wonderfully vivid diary, a husband speaks of his wife’s high-spirited nature and temper; how they make-up after fighting (“I gave my wife a flourish”: don’t you love that? He sauces it up even more.)
Early Americans were as flawed as the Afrikaners and as brave and adventurous. However, none of this emerges from Giliomee’s account. Admittedly, I have not yet finished the thing. But so far, it’s dry, dour, and sour. No diaries are drawn from; you learn nothing about how farmers lived, loved, raised children.
Conversely, Giliomee is quick to highlight miscegenation, on the rare occasions it occurred, and cruelty to slaves (a wrong Americans were also guilty of, but Hackett Fischer doesn’t blacken them for the sins of their times; he simply narrates the facts). Giliomee is also diligent in bringing to light stories of rogue Afrikaners; about heroes and emerging leaders you learn less.

The Hue of Hatred I

Africa, Crime, Criminal Injustice, Race, Racism

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The popular press has been filled with the gory details of an assault by some WHITE trailer trash on a 20-year-old BLACK woman, as the newsmen and women diligently disclosed. She was confined “for about a week at their mobile home, where she was tortured, sexually assaulted and forced to eat rat droppings.” The evidence for the so-called hate crime charge is insufficient, say the authorities.

The words “black” and “white” were nowhere apparent in the malpracticing media’s reports when “on January 6th, 2007 a double murder was committed in Knoxville that would make Dirty Harry throw up”:

“On that night, 21-year-old Channon Christian, and her boyfriend, 23-year-old Hugh Christopher Newsom were carjacked in Knoxville by three thugs. Their attackers were sadly not satisfied with the Toyota 4-Runner that they commandeered at gunpoint. They kidnapped the young couple and took them to the house where one of the perps lived. They were joined by a fourth man and a woman. They proceeded to commit the stomach-churning crimes.

All four men are charged with the anal rape of Christopher Newsom. They did so in the presence of Channon Christian. They then shot him to death, wrapped him in bedding, soaked him in gasoline and set him on fire. He was the lucky one.

Channon Christian was a senior at the University of Tennessee. According to the charges and a source close to the investigation, she was repeatedly gang raped by the four men — vaginally, anally and orally. Before she died, her murderers poured a household cleaner down her throat, apparently in an effort to kill the DNA they had placed there. She was left to die, either from the bleeding caused ‘by the tearing,’ or from asphyxiation. Knoxville officials won’t say.

It was several days before the police found her body. She had been stuffed into a garbage can in the house. According to a story posted on the WATE T.V. News web site, she was, ‘in five separate dark trash bags.’

The four men and the woman were eventually arrested. They are all black. Christian and Newsom were white. Two of the murderers had prior felony convictions…”

Who hates who is amply evident from the numbers, expertly exposed by Pat Buchanan:

“[I]n ‘The Color of Crime: Race, Crime and Justice in America,’ produced by the ‘right-leaning’ New Century Foundation in 2005, using the same FBI and Justice surveys, startling facts emerge:

—‘Blacks commit more violent crime against whites than against other blacks.’ Forty-five percent of the victims of violent crime by blacks are white folks, 43 percent are black, 10 percent are Hispanic.

—Blacks are seven times as likely as people of other races to commit murder, eight times more likely to commit robbery and three times more likely to use a gun in a crime.

—‘Blacks are an estimated 39 times more likely to commit violent crime against a white person than vice versa, and 136 times more likely to commit robbery.’ (If decent black folks have trouble hailing a cab, and they do, these numbers may help explain it.)

—Black-on-white rape is 115 times more common than the reverse.

Even the two most famous sexual assaults by white men on black women in the last two decades—the Tawana Brawley and Duke rape cases—turned out to be hoaxes.

What do these statistics tell us? A message the Post will not report. The real repository of racism in America—manifest in violent interracial assault, rape and murder—is to be found not in the white community, but the African-American community. In almost all interracial attacks, whites are the victims, not the victimizers.”

Updated: Rugby Racism?

Africa, Law, Race, Racism, South-Africa

As the diversity doxology has it, justice will be achieved when racial and ethnic groups are reflected in academia and in the professions in proportion to their presence in the larger population. The absence of such perfect representation is blamed on endemic white racism.

The doctrine is based on one big post hoc fallacy—reasoning backward is a logical error. If B (lack of representation) then A (racism) is an error, as in WRONG! Consider: in professions and academic pursuits where mathematical precocity is a factor, white Americans trail Asian-Americans. And white Gentiles lag behind Ashkenazi Jews. By logical extension, these realities must imply a systemic bias against whites, which is nonsense on stilts. But reason and race baiting are mutually exclusive, so long as those baited are white.

Naturally, no one ever demands that the NBA or the 100-meter dash be made to better reflect the general population.

Rugby is, traditionally, an Afrikaner sport. Afrikaners have always loved and excelled at it. Now TIME magazine is inferring racism from the fact that there are more whites than blacks on the South African national team.

Look at the complexion of, say, the Kaizer Chiefs soccer team. To be fair, in its hissing fit, TIME does qualify its racism taunts with the following information:

“Then again, rugby has never been the first-choice game among the black majority, and in South Africa’s national soccer team, only one or two white players make the cut. ‘You can tell a mostly white high school when you drive by its rugby field,’ Cronjé says. ‘Black schools have soccer fields.’”

The aim, very plainly, is not to leave the Afrikaner anything of his traditions and history. Witness the haste with which the ANC government is expunging South Africa’s past by renaming places across the country. This jocular account of bestowing on old South African boulevards names like Arafat and Che Guevara is courtesy of the Wall Street Journal, a chief cheerleader for the new dispensation in my old homeland.

(More on the New South Africa in our Archive.]
Update: Against the contention made in the Comments Section that “Affirmative Action is an ideology that has been hijacked”: The equal-rights-for-all principles instantiated in the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were subverted over the decades by judges and federal administrators, and replaced with “affirmative action in favor of blacks.”
As Harvard scholar Richard Pipes averred, in the book Property and Freedom, the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 “gave the government no license to set quotas for hiring personnel by private enterprise or admitting students to institutions of higher learning, yet the federal bureaucracy acts as if it had.”

Update II: Pope’s Noble-Savage Catechism

Africa, Christianity, Religion

Before I get to why Pope Benedict XVI is a disappointment, a note about standards of reporting nowadays.

The scribe reporting the story about Pope Benedict’s latest contribution to Rousseauist rubbish claims to be excerpting from the Pontiff’s “first book.” Knowing that Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger is the prolific author of many books, I was hopeful. My thinking being that the Pontiff must have been younger and less thoughtful when he indicted the West for Africa’s woes.

From this report, it appears that Philip Pullella thinks a new book the Pope has written is his first. Pullella writes:

“Rich countries bent on power and profit have mercilessly ‘plundered and sacked’ Africa and other poor regions and exported to them the ‘cynicism of a world without God,’ Pope Benedict writes in his first book.”

How likley is this, given the Pope is almost 80, exceptionally learned, and has lived an incredibly full life given over to contemplation and intellectual pursuits. A quick Google traces the origin of the error. Catholic News Agency’s headline goes so: “Pope Benedict XVI completes first book of Pontificate, ‘Jesus of Nazareth.'” In his cut and paste effort, Pullella must have caught only the first part of that sentence. Or, conversely, misunderstood the modifier.

“The Pope also condemns drug trafficking and sexual tourism,” pules Pullella. As a former AIDS counselor in South Africa, I suggest the Pope apply his brilliant mind to the problem of infection rates in Africa. In Africa AIDS is heterosexual. Rates of infection in Southern Africa would not have reached 20 to 33.7 percent of the adult population if not, very plainly, for unfathomable sexual promiscuity and brutality.

As to the Pope’s other indictment against the West, here’s what I wrote in “The Clinton and Bono Collective Unconscience:”

“The late Sir P. T. Bauer, the foremost authority on foreign aid, pointed out that a responsible demand for aid mustn’t avoid examining those ‘popular attitudes and behaviours in the poor societies’ which cause and perpetuate the misery. â€¦ rich nations were streaks ahead of sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia well before colonization. Countries like Australia and Switzerland were rich absent any meaningful ties to the undeveloped world. As Bauer proves, this was the result of the West’s human resources, not its exploitation of the backward world.”

Update: Some Catholic bashing is going on in the Comments Section. I disagree with —and dissociate from —it. Moreover, the idea that the West plundered Africa is nonsensical and is rooted in Leninist-Marxist theory. I suggest commentators on the blog acquaint themselves with capitalism, the impetus for this blog. A capitalist invests his capital in digging up useless good-for-nothing substances from the ground. He gives jobs digging up the useless stuff to locals who had no jobs before, and didn’t have the smarts and capital to do what he is doing. Then another capitalist creates goods from the previously inert stuff the first capitalist dug up. The goods are sold all over. Entire industries have arisen around useless stuff capitalists turned into useful goods. The wealth redounds to all involved, including the person being paid 50 cents an hour, for before the capitalist came along to “plunder,” he was paid NOTHING an hour. If not for this process–and Anglo American–a diamond would never have become a girl’s best friend. If you think this is exploitation, then you do pround to Leninism-Marxism.

From “Mutant Marxists in the Heart of Darkness“:

“[M]ost ‘resources’ in nature are useless lumps of nothing. If not for man, iron, aluminum, coal and oil would lie purposeless and pristine in the wildernesses. Man discovered that these elements could be used to assuage human needs. Once he identified and ingeniously matched the human need with the material thing, he devised ways to establish mastery over the resource, and came up with means to harness it. Most ‘resources’ provided by nature become goods of value only when man connects the dots. If not for man, the matter and energy abundant on earth would come to naught. The ability to discover and transform natural resources into usable goods, as well as to develop ‘resource-enhancing and sustaining technologies’ are the unique provenance of man.”
Our friend Robert Murphy has written the Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism. I suggest you purchase it, and while you’re at it, get a copy of Peter Bauer’s brilliant Dissent on Development.