The Mail & Guardian Race Issue

The Mail & Guardian newspaper published what they called “the Race Issue” over the Heritage Day long weekend. Reading it one had a rather surreal feeling that the key issue was the “White Issue” or even “the Wit Gevaar” [danger from persons known as “White”, for offshore readers{O.R.}]. It was rather a shock fifteen years after the revolution to discover that white people still apparently controlled all important aspects of life…and blacks were really no more than servants. I hadn’t realised that. I, we, thought we were just getting on with the pursuit of happiness in a post democratic dispensation.

Watching the news channels one so rarely sees a white person in any position of apparent influence these days it was all to easy to forget that the entire edifice of post liberation South Africa is apparently really a giant smokescreen behind which evil white elites still determine all the real truths of our existence.

I found that the big elephants: Xenophobic race attacks and their aftermath mostly unresolved, Lindela detention camp race profiling, unresolved Somali trader murders, 3500 unresolved [mainly] Afrikaner farm murders for instance contemporary race issues were ignored, in favour of beating an old, old, old drum. I worry that some ‘Truman’s World/ Matrix” miasma has swept us all along into a state of suspended belief: that we are frozen like yoghurt, in a time warp. I suppose it was Heritage Day after all… not Outcome day.

So I wrote a short letter to the M&G, well after I had written a long letter and then one somewhere in between. You my dear reader can browse through whichever you wish and ignore what you don’t like.

To the Editor [Letter #3]
Thank you for this interesting Heritage Day: “Race Issue”, edition of your newspaper, which has had me stomping around all weekend pondering how to react without gaaning on and on. My final conclusion is that the entire edifice is little more than a well-wrought navel gazing retrospective, in which you focus mainly on beating a cripple called Hubris cowering prostrate on the floor, while carefully ignoring the big mean elephants who are making sure s/he never gets up again.

Eventually I felt immensely sad thinking about how a ballsy sharp fanged pit bull newspaper called the Weekly Mail, has in our older years morphed into a rather long winded elderly, timid bulldog, with worn down chompers and a bad case of grumpy old man syndrome.

Sincerely

theblogospherian
PS: I did arrive at this conclusion after writing a long ‘gaan aan’ denotative discursive piece in the belief that most modern readers lack the imagination to understand anything unless it is spelt out in laborious detail… this after all being your trademark style, and me being a probably pedantic schoolteacher [whoops sorry forgot the Newspeak: ie; learning skills outcomes mediator] .
Afterwards, since the weekend was dragging on interminably and I was procrastinating on the real tasks in front of me, I wrote a more connotative exploration of your contribution … well admittedly I had consumed a great deal of congenial liquids.

I am not going to bore you with those possibly predictably tedious insights, or more probably tendentious perorations. I understand you are a busy person and I am probably the real grumpy old man.

So I’ll put them instead on the new unknown blog I’ve had to compile since you did away with Amagama and it’s unremembered [better] predecessor Blogspot; and I’ll thank you at the same time for your courtesy in sending me my entire file from those sites in a form that even an aging technomoron like myself was able to reproduce, even if I am still stumbling around trying to figure out how it all works. If you are interested you’ll find it all on: Http://theblogospherian.blogspot.com … If I had the faintest idea of how to get it onto your Thoughtleader, I may well have gone that route instead: assuming I would have been ‘invited’.

Best regards

Nicholas

Letter #1
This is the long tendentious discursive letter: warning: this may become boring.

The Editor
The Mail & Guardian 26/9/09 Re: The “race Issue”.


To whom it concerns
I have just ploughed through your Race Issue supplement and am left with a deep sense of depression and not a little puzzlement at what seems to be a profound depth of denial on the part of most of your contributors. I hope that what follows does not seem to be a rant… it is not intended to be.

First: the depression. Some fourteen years ago I [self] published a crime novel called The Buffalo Hunters, in which, under the misguided influence of [pre-Disgrace] J M Coetzee, I set out to completely obliterate the words White and Black from my 98,000 word text… The reasons for this are not germane to this contribution, although I have no issue with discussing it at some other occasion and they were in any event published in the Penguin collection “Soweto inside out” some years ago. The Buffalo Hunters sold a thousand copies, mostly by me, door-to-door, and attracted bemused responses from local critics most of whom pretended it hadn’t been written. So, for instance I eliminated white lies, black eyes, black marks and white knights and any other reference, however oblique, that associated those colours with people and values. I thought, mistakenly, I also admit now, especially in the light of this disturbing “Race Issue”, that we were entering a non-racial era, and that i was writing for an emerging non-racial audience that never actually materialised: as your correspondent Mr Ngcobo so poignantly observed in his recent Sunday Times peeve.

Later I wrote and published [on the Internet under the pen name Jakari] a follow up novel on the same lines… In the Ashanti Raider no key character was racially profiled, I carefully mixed up all the metaphors so that no one amongst the cast could be readily identified as one race or the other; and in our new non-racial society no publisher would even glance at the text, since, apparently, it had no generic stereotypes upon which “the reader” could hang its prejudices, and pre-determined interpretations… In this I ran deeply into ingrained behaviour and became effectively a social pariah.

Foolishly, then, I believed, along with many others, who supported the 1992, Yes vote, and the subsequent constitutional dispensation, that we were on our way to a non-racial society and a rosy future in which all persons would be equal and we could go forth and conquer the world. We know now of course that this idea was an illusion, that we [naively perhaps and equally perhaps, for many, in rat trapped desperation] negotiated with those who carefully masked their [understandable] hatred and, like Mr Mugabe, simply bided their time until that rage, pent up over 300 years, could not be suppressed any longer; and burst out in the form of a racially enraged President, and the emerging vindictive, retributive onslaught of a newly empowered elite, as a result of which that part of the White community that could do so, fled.

This means, to move from my sense of depression to my sense that many of your contributors are in a state of denial that the population demographic figure you quote on page 23 is of dubious veracity. In other words the idea that the white population [of post-democratic South Africa] is [now] as much as 9.1% of the total is an old and somewhat Potemkinist statistic… the more likely probability is hinted at by the figure for the decline in white tertiary enrolments to 23%. It is more likely that the [so-called] White population is now closer to 7% and falling [ironically in 1952 it was 23% by the way, although that too may have been more Potemkinist than we are wont to imagine]. As evidence in support of this contention the Economist newspaper published a reasonably verifiable report five years ago, to the effect that an evaluation of immigration statistics into five English speaking countries revealed that some 1,3 million persons had migrated from SA between 1994-2000. Of course not all of this entire exodus was White, and the Economist report was never mentioned in our media. At the time of the 1992 Referendum the White population was put at 5, 2 million. Adding, conservatively, another 500,000 émigré’s to the Economist evaluation over the intervening nine years, would give us a current figure of under four million honkeys even allowing for natural increase.

There is also a curiously prevalent assumption that the rest of the greater population’s growth has remained stagnant for at least a decade which, notwithstanding the HIV/AIDS toll, is absurd given the relatively greater birth-rate of the greater Black community, [which actually doubled in size between ’74 and ’94, so great was the level of oppression that no one had anything else to do], plus the [unacknowledged] high level of black refugee migration into South Africa over the past fifteen years.

To elaborate; for instance, fifteen years ago I had four black kids in my matric class [final school leaving year class for O.R.] plus one Chinese, and the rest were white. In 2010 I won’t have a single white kid in my final year matric Business class and only a handful in my lower grades: although the school would nominally be classed as a former ‘white’, so-called ‘private’ school.

By the way these kids along with hundreds of other black kids I have the pleasure of working with over the past fifteen years in a variety of social environments as a temporary part time teacher, all seemed pretty well fed, and frequently sport elaborate and expensive hairstyles; and while some don’t have cell’phones they can all find their way around Facebook more efficiently than I can, and are for the most part better informed than most of their white peers, who increasingly reveal the deleterious effects of large scale loss of complementary peers. I don’t want to add to that because I have no wish nor need to offend anyone.

To continue: Twenty years ago there were no black families living on my street. Three years ago when I helped draft a street petition to obliterate an unruly, abusive, disruptive, informal drinking establishment, operating from hijacked premises in the street, mine was one of only four white families out of the 140 households in the street. Never mind Mr Brandon Huntley, I can tell you when I walk down my street I stand out like a “sore thumb”.

Presumably the 136 new households have traded Mr Mngxitama’s [a correspondent] rather obscure “grammar of black suffering”, which I presume to reside somewhere in the experience of pre-colonial feudal Africa, for the “white grammar of suffering” in the form of mortgage bonds, hire purchase debt, pension schemes, medical aids and rapid upward mobility aspirations [In every respect of which, I might add they have one up on me, who still poddles about in a rusted decrepit 1978 Volksie Beetle on long term loan from an old friend, who now functions as a migrant surgical worker in a euro zone country hospital, having become unemployable in his homeland as a result of the new anti-white person discrimination.]

Now it may be that I’m wrong, and that all the former white residents just moved across town; but frankly I think you are all in deep denial about this “white” thing. My point here is that the game is over… You don’t need this “beat on whitey’ “Race Issue” series, because the game has been played, and we are simply in extra time, before the penalty shoot out with a crook goalie on the white side. Black won this event…BEE…[Black economic empowerment] rulz. The current ‘struggle’ is a sleight of hand illusion… an exercise in misdirection… the sands of time are moving inexorably towards the overwhelming black hegemony no matter how tightly whitey seems to be keeping his fist on the tiller.

Confusingly the strange problem today is less, white residual knee jerk, and often born-again, racism, but emerging, hotly denied, black racism, black exceptionalism, exclusivism and general xenophobia, in the face of huge competition for elusive opportunity.

The main reason why you still seem intent on fighting the issue is because the final ramparts have not yet been breached, or as Mr Ngcobo [a correspondent] asserts with a bravely un African allusion: “…before we storm the Bastille”. Nonetheless this will happen… 15 years is but a blink in the eye of history. Another 15 and the white component will reach around five percent before drifting lower. Then, whiteys you will see will either be those standing at robots [OR: SA speak for traffic lights] holding placards saying: “I am Hungry”, or more probably, Mr Mashele’s * residual white working class grimly smiling our shit eating smiles and trading with each other; or they will be his super rich ‘Weberian’ economically empowered minority who don’t need to leave their compounds, except to hang out in places that only other rich [but black] people can afford to go to. Either way both white groups will be relatively invisible, as are the whites in Kenya, Uganda and other more francophone regions of the continent. [* another correspondent][This idea incidentally that “secret cabals of elites” control the country’s destiny is so old it dates back to before Rhodes and provides… like religion, a comfortable scapegoat for idle thought.]
To conclude: Your grandchildren will look at you with incredulity when you tell them 30 years from now that the whole place was once run by whiteys… because the only whiteys they’ll be familiar with will most probably be tourists and the Robot sentries. And it’s no use trotting out the old “we love South Africa it’s our home” bit… Surplus people have migrated for centuries in pursuit of opportunity, that’s how we all got here in the first place.

Thus the newly superfluous white middle class is pretty well on its way. Mr Mashele’s alleged ‘white elites’ no longer need them, they seem to have “the new black grammar of suffering” to exploit. So the white exodus is not going to stop, short of the Apocalypse: it can’t; they have no choice: the economy is effectively shrinking, a fact masked by stealth inflation, massive debt funded State expenditure and inadequate electricity supply. This together with the expanding nature of BEE means that opportunities for white upwardly mobile aspirants who don’t have access to connections or hereditary wealth are shrinking even faster, while the outside world is truly “alive with possibility’”: current recession notwithstanding.

The trend line is irreversible. The decision to re-racialise our country [with racially prescriptive legislation] has been taken and the die is well cast. The fact that the M&G has seen fit to run this ‘Race Issue’ series is testimony to it. It cannot be stopped; and won’t be stopped because the Africanist agenda rules and the vested interests it carries with it are absolute until the next revolution [which, as we have been told will not happen until after the arrival of the next Messiah]. Those who witnessed the recent film version of Coetzee’s novel: Disgrace” know what the [foreign] director saw, more clearly than we want to: White people are today, in reality, no more than spectators now, at this final feast where the goodies are being redistributed. This is notwithstanding the pretentious “skaam* making” toy toying* Western Cape Premier, Helen “Queen Canute” Zille [someone for whom I did not vote by the way, Ms Dodd*.] [*another contributor][OR Skaam = Afrikaans= shame ,embarrassment… what your kids feel when you take them to school in an inappropriate motor vehicle. Toy toying: a curious shuffle type dance movement that characterizes protest demonstration behaviors in SA]
In case you think I’m being a negative alarmist, bear in mind that the present, post- Africanist-agenda, white population of Zimbabwe is today less than five percent of the 1970 pre-independence figure. Anecdotally there are more Chinese citizens in Zimbabwe today than white people. The Black agenda has triumphed gloriously and now needs to prove it can deliver on the promise of the better life without the honkeys, very few of whom, will ever return, no matter how much nostalgia they feel: that for which they are nostalgic no longer exists… And anyway Africa doesn’t have a monopoly on trees even if it does have one on sunsets.

I could gaan aan but I won’t, this is all well-worn territory. [* OR: Gaan aan: Afr: to agonise endlessly beyond a point of tedium]
What should be really worrying you’re various contributors, is not, whether White people are polite to you in the workplace Mr Mateboge* [we aren’t actually polite to anyone really, why do you think the motivation industry never runs out of customers?] because that is really not important: we are no longer important. What is important is what you think of yourselves, as Mr Mngxitama so confusingly, post-structurally asserts.

The real issue behind the misdirected handshake is why all the black guys who have become obscenely wealthy over the past fifteen years on the untold billions that have evaporated from the public purse since 1994, have not been piling more black owned and empowered businesses onto the JSE, which, in case you didn’t notice [again], has declined from some 700 listed companies in 1994 to about 360 now. Or, why black controlled competition commissions are unable/unwilling to tackle the growth strangling oligopolies that reinforce “the grammar of black suffering” [whatever that evocative phrase means].
There are no rules, I believe, other than the chains in your own minds, to stop black owned businesses from achieving success in a black owned country run exclusively by black people are there? There don’t seem to be any that apply to former black universities, which seem to this casual observer, to be carefully avoiding any [so-called: OR] ‘transformation’ agendas. There are black clubs that refuse to admit white patrons albeit no putative ‘white’ one is allowed to refuse anyone, [in fact so-called ‘white’ clubs no longer exist by law] so why shouldn’t we have many more exclusively black businesses? [Denial again, perhaps]. Of course there is the sub-textual open conspiracy of socialist trade union/big business collaborationist agenda to make life so impossible for small, emerging [especially black] businesses that many are stillborn at birth, or, later, strangled by embittered and corrupt State officials… at least according to many of my many new black neighbours.

Then what else should be really worrying your contributors in our post Polokwane [O.R. see earlier blogs] era where we Whitey’s are reduced to mere spectators, is that, Mr Manuel aside, there is no apparent plan to deal with the post 2010 story, which is almost here and gone. Does no one perhaps want to acknowledge that Mr Manual’s vision for 2025 could be the year of total Black ascendancy… all the hated whiteys gone at last, or at least, relegated to oblivion? I am sure you could just pay us all to leave; [there’s a vision] it would be so much less angst filled, and probably cheaper than struggling with this dubious Africanist agenda, which, like its Afrikaner inspired Apartheid forbear, promises only extended misery, in a forthcoming era of low to stagnant economic growth. At least you would be able to focus on where we are going rather than endlessly agonising over where we have been.

The primary reason why your various contributors have angst about whitey and his alleged control of the working environment is simply because the decision that was taken years ago, to go for the re-distribution of the existing pie, instead of building the biggest pie possible, has been successful; and the shrunken residue is now being grudgingly fought over by those who are still on the outside trying to oust those grimly hanging onto the inside. The yawning wage gap between elites and the rest of us has more to do with an historical undersupply of clever, talented, skilled black management workers, relative to the artificial demand created by legislative fiat, bidding up the price of their labour, than it has to do with white intransigence: [just the iron, economic law of scarcity in practice that we teach in 9th grade]. It also has more to do with the reality that political connections and cadre deployment are more important than knowledge, for emerging black management workers.

However when Mr Manyi* has his way, and he will; and the fat cat Corporates are forced to shed white knowledge workers, because the shrunken pie does not allow for growth, then gradually, but inevitably, the truth, that this resurgent race issue is simply a smokescreen, will become apparent. [* Manyi: new political commissar of Labour: intent on bulldozing demographic employment quotas on all ‘non-compliant’ businesses ie 93 % all level must be ‘black’]

Thus the 2019 September Heritage weekend edition of your newspaper [assuming it survives a possible democracy meltdown, when black opposition parties become strong enough, to challenge the current hegemonic dispensation, as they will; and/or the world itself does not succumb to the post-depression apocalypse predicted in my new novel “The Jonker Memorandum”] will be about the issue between those workers who belong to the Party [limited membership only] and those who do not. Race will no longer be an issue at all, except as an ongoing knee jerk diversion for those who are too blind to notice that [again regrettably] almost the only whites left are the tourists.

So can you please prove me wrong?
Sincerely:

theblogospherian



Letter # 2

This was the final straw: written in a state of delusional hysteria

My Grandmother’s cousin
My late grandmother had a first cousin who played violin in an orchestra on a ship called the Titanic, and according to family legend the band played on while the ship went down with most of the passengers because, as is well known, the boat didn’t have enough lifeboats for everyone

After reading the M&G “Race Issue” supplement, with its curiously old fashioned ranting on the issue of ‘bad whitey’s, in bed on Heritage Day, over a few guzzles of vodka, I fell into an exhausted and deeply troubled sleep during which I had a most disturbed dream. In my dream my extended, late violinist, relative came to me and told me, what he said, was the real story, about the sinking of the Titanic.

He said, that some time before that fateful meeting with a largely submerged iceberg there had been a revolt on board the ship. Apparently the poor people who travelled in the lower decks, known as “steerage”, were incensed. It seems they had not been invited to a concert on the upper decks being held to celebrate the current state of the ‘Blue Riband’ record-breaking journey, at that particular point in time. They took over the ship and deposed the captain and most of the older members of the crew.

At the precise moment when the iceberg alarm was sounded, a huge debate was raging amongst the newly emancipated passengers, regarding who should qualify to sit in the front seats at the concert. The main point of unanimity was that all the deposed rich folk on the upper decks should be expelled, and stand on the wind exposed deck, while those who had been disadvantaged by the absence of music in their lives, got to see the concert instead.

Therefore at the time of the ignored warning, but before the ship hit the iceberg, orders had already been issued that the expelled passengers, were not wanted on board at all; and were to leave the ship; they were thus busy being loaded onto the lifeboats when the actual impact occurred.

Meanwhile down n the ballroom the argument continued to rage over which were the best chairs; and whether they should be repainted into the newly fashionable red toned hues that were being touted as the future of design, by the more militant members. The departee’s: Colonels John Astor and Archibald Gracie attempted to convince the steerage passengers that they were in immanent danger, but they ignored him and insisted that the orchestra play the Marseillaise, which struck up just as the icy ocean poured across the ballroom. The band being trapped with all the steerage passengers simply played on

Colonel Archibald was later rescued hanging onto a newly painted railing: the rest went down with the ship… The rich people who were tossed out of the ballroom onto the main upper decks were rescued by passing ships.

Then my grandmother’s cousin went on to tell me that Ninety-seven years later, a country on the south end of the remote African continent found itself sailing in the troubled waters of the greatest financial meltdown in the history of the human race. Leaders everywhere on the planet were desperately seeking ways to stave off universal bankruptcy, and the treacherous under tips of the ravaging icebergs of financial failure were littered about like corpses on a battlefield. Simultaneously the world’s climates were everywhere undergoing terrifying changes. The general chaos of the financial meltdown was exacerbated by constant flooding, fires and terrible storms. The world, he said, was entering a time prophesied as Apocalyptic.

Fortunately though, the country’s leadership had substituted grand lies for bold action. The populace, knowing that their leaders lied about most things chose to believe them anyway. Lying was fashionable and acceptable, a comfortable legacy of the politics of resistance to oppression..

The global dilemma was declared irrelevant to their own agendas. Most importantly, they had to argue over who should have the best seats at a forthcoming concert at the country’s most important airport. They were going to welcome home a victorious, albeit troubled young suffragette, who had recently won a gruelling contest against embittered and jealous opposition.

The country’s most promising young firebrand leader had sworn to rally support against those who were the enemies of the young person and therefore the State, and had plotted against them both. These people were publicly castigated for their non-attendance at the concert, notwithstanding that they were not invited anyway. Other leaders distracted the populace from global floods with the issue of generous promissory notes while knowing they had left the doors open, to allow the water in: and the people cheered and called for the doors to be opened wider….

I woke up in a cold detoxifying sweat and fell off the bed reaching blindly for the vodka bottle that had fallen onto the floor.


Farewell cruel world

Theblogospherian.