printThe once proud University of Cape Town (UCT), my husband’s alma mater, is now home to the sort of students who collect their own bodily waste so as to throw it at a statue of Cecil John Rhodes, the man who donated the land upon which UCT stands. (Rhodes also founded the global mining giant De Beers, an enormous source of racial quota shakedowns for black South Africans, Black Economic Empowerment, or BEE, as affirmative action is known in my old homeland.)
If you wish to understand the fraught history behind the propaganda, helped along by US media, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa” is a must read. The section titled “Tot Siens (Farewell) To The Taal (The Language),” in Chapter 2, explains what’s underway in poo-poo land.
“He who controls the past controls the future.” So wrote Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four. The ANC now commands past, present and future. … It may be a trifling issue to deracinated sophisticates, but landmarks in the country’s founding history are slowly being erased, as demonstrated by the ANC’s decision to give an African name to Potchefstroom, a town founded in 1838 by the Voortrekkers. Pretoria is now officially called Tshwane. Nelspruit, founded by the Nel Family (they were not Xhosa), and once the seat of the South African Republic’s government during the Boer War, has been renamed Mbombela. Polokwane was formerly Pietersburg. Durban’s Moore Road (after Sir John Moore, the hero of the Battle of Corunna, fought in 1809 during the Napoleonic Wars) is Che Guevara Road; Kensington Drive, Fidel Castro Drive. Perhaps the ultimate in tastelessly hip nomenclature is Yasser Arafat Highway, down which the motorist can careen on the way to the Durban airport. …