Post-apartheid South Africa

Graeme Wood at the WSJ reviews a book by R.W. Johnson about post-apartheid South Africa:

Trevor Manuel, the South African finance minister from 1996 to 2009, got his job when the aging Nelson Mandela asked, at a cabinet meeting, who was a good economist. Mr. Manuel raised his hand thinking Mr. Mandela had asked who was "a good communist." Mr. Manuel served his country ably. But the appointment of the sole competent minister in the first government of African National Congress was a matter of blind luck.
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A self-described liberal who "cheered on" the wave of African nationalism of the postwar era, Mr. Johnson now sees the black supremacist ANC as the third in a trilogy of nationalisms (the first two were British and Afrikaner) that have ravaged South Africa. He is nostalgic for the economic growth of the apartheid era; the country was run by hardscrabble racists who built nuclear weapons, but they increased everyone's standard of living.

Most of the blame for South Africa's failings falls to the leadership of the ANC, in Mr. Johnson's view. Though he makes some allowances for Nelson Mandela, he is here a sad figure: publicly fêted by his ANC colleagues but privately scorned as senescent and incapable.
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While Mr. Mandela comes across as hapless, the villain of this narrative is Thabo Mbeki, who emerges as one of the most cowardly and morally obtuse men ever to lead a free nation. Among Mr. Johnson's most sensational accusations is that Mr. Mbeki knew in advance about the 1993 assassination of Chris Hani, a potential rival. Mr. Johnson builds a strong circumstantial case that Joe Modise, later defense minister, conspired in the killing and that Mr. Mbeki was long beholden to Mr. Modise for the favor.

Less controversially, Mr. Johnson details Mr. Mbeki's support of Robert Mugabe (he claimed to be trying to ease the Zimbabwean dictator out peacefully while actually abetting an African auto-genocide) and his denial of the country's HIV problem. Mr. Mbeki enshrined in policy the ravings of AIDS denialists and encouraged the fighting of the disease with garlic and potatoes. Mr. Johnson traces such missteps to Mr. Mbeki's black revolutionary nationalism and a lingering Leninist tendency to view all dissent as fifth-column activity by puppets of patronizing whites.

Neither Mr. Johnson nor anyone else expected much of the government of Jacob Zuma, Mr. Mbeki's successor, a man known for "simple and unquestioning devotion to the ANC" and for stating that to preserve his health he had been sure to shower after having unprotected sex with the HIV-positive woman who accused him of rape. But recent reports say Mr. Zuma is planning to take innovative steps. Among them: firing incompetent ANC officials, a move that would certainly distinguish him from his predecessors. If Mr. Johnson's descriptions of the farcical political scene in South Africa are even partly accurate, one is left to wonder who besides a few accidental economists will be left standing.

The Afrikaners (those "hardscrabble racists") also happened to be Christians who provided nearly free housing, medical care and education for the Africans paid for by taxing only white South Africans.

A new fix for the needy?

Cash-transfer programs:

As she approaches her 50th birthday this month, Zanele Figlan has seen firsthand what does and does not work in the fight against global poverty. Living in a shack on the outskirts of Cape Town, her family serves as a reminder of South Africa’s 15-year failed effort to house its poor. Instead, Figlan says, the most effective help she receives is the $1 a day the government provides for each of her two youngest sons, which amounts to more than double her monthly income and allows her to make sure they’re well fed. It also means she can afford to send them to a reputable school in a wealthier part of the city, something that was previously unthinkable.

At first glance, simply handing out cash to the poor may seem naive. When cash-transfer programs, as they’re known in the parlance of international aid, first rolled out in Latin America in the 1990s, they were met with skepticism, especially from development agencies more intent on structural reform than redistributing wealth. More than a decade later, however, evidence shows that even modest payments grant the world’s poorest the power to make their own decisions; it also indicates that they make smart choices, especially on matters of health and education. Today, cash-transfer programs are thriving in some 45 developing countries and helping more than 110 million families. The World Bank has put at least $5.5 billion into nearly a hundred different projects.

One of the biggest impacts of these programs: education. Since its launch more than a decade ago, South Africa’s Child Support Grant has cut the number of children out of school in half. South Africans are free to use their payment any way they wish...

Precisely. Unfortunately socialists want attach strings to their hand-outs in an attempt at "social engineering."

The (Orange) Free State

A road trip through the Free State:

Smack in the middle of the undulating emptiness of the Karoo desert, enclosed by towering outcrops with scary names like the Valley of Desolation, Graaff-Reinet looks like a place that has seen a bit of history.

The town was established by Dutch settlers in the late 18th century. Many of the buildings carry the date they were built on the gabling – 1837, 1841, 1852 – just to remind you how long the Afrikaners have been in residence here. They were already well ensconced in 1901, when, according to a monument in the town, several of their young men were executed by the British Army for the crime of wearing khaki in a public place.

Up the main street, flanked by Cape Dutch houses, their verandas freshly whitewashed, their roofs a uniform blue, not much appears to have changed over the years. Walking past the muscular church modelled on Salisbury Cathedral, you half expect to encounter a covered wagon full of determined Voortrekkers making their way north.

But it was a more personal history that was on the mind of one of our party as we arrived in the symbolic heart of Afrikaner land.
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Desolation Valley is appropriately named. An echoing rift of jag-toothed outcrops, it could easily double as Middle Earth or the badlands of Wyoming. With the winter sun setting behind the hills, leaving the eagles to swoop and shriek in a gathering gloaming, it made Death Valley look inviting.

But from the top of the 3,000ft outcrop, the view of Graaff-Reinet was so clear it took us back in time. We could see the old town marked by the bend in the river. The neat clapboard houses, the schools with their trim sports fields, the church with its substantial tower, visible for miles across the desert.

The Free State was one of two Afrikaner republics (modeled on the USA by the Boers) which were defeated by the British during the Boer War and then occupied and turned into colonies of the British Empire. It used to be called the Orange Free State:

The republic's name derives partly from the Orange River (just as the Transvaal Republic was named after the Vaal River), which in turn was named in honour of the Dutch ruling royal family, the House of Orange, by the Dutch settlers under Robert Jacob Gordon. The official language in the Orange Free State was Dutch.
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In 1824 farmers of Dutch, French Huguenot and German descent called Trekboers (later shortened to Boers) from Cape Colony who were seeking pasture for their flocks settled in the country. They were followed in 1836 by the first parties of the Great Trek. These emigrants left Cape Colony from various motives, but all were animated by the desire to escape from British sovereignty.

My mother and my Joubert ancestors came from the Free State.

The Valley of Desolation in the Great Karoo desert:

The best South African movies I've seen this year

I was born and raised in South Africa and still occasionally get home-sick. But it's 12,000 miles away so, when I feel a pang of nostalgia, I rent a South African movie.

Eventhough District 9 was produced by Peter Jackson (who made the Lord of the Rings film trilogy) and was nominated for four Academy Awards in 2010, it was disappointing. I enjoyed the South African in-jokes but it was clumsily made and was probably only nominated out of political correctness.

However these four movies were most satisfying.

Disgrace 2008:

After an imprudent affair with a student, Cape Town professor David Lurie (John Malkovich) flees to his daughter's remote farm to escape the scandal, only to find tragedy when a trio of black youths brutally assaults them. But Lurie is forced to face apartheid's lasting repercussions when he discovers that one of the attackers is related to a trusted employee (Eriq Ebouaney) in this pensive drama based on J.M. Coetzee's novel.

Malunde 2001:

Post-apartheid South Africa is the setting for this drama about a mismatched twosome who end up together on a life-altering journey to Cape Town. Polar opposites Kobus (Ian Roberts), a white ex-soldier who struggles with demons from his past, and Wonderboy (Kagiso Mtetwa), a young black street kid who clings to memories of his family, come together to take on the society that has cast them aside and eventually build a friendship for the ages.

Boy Called Twist 2004:

This contemporary spin on the immortal novel Oliver Twist follows an orphan named Twist (Jarrid Geduld) who survives on the streets of Cape Town, South Africa, by taking up with a band of young thieves. But Twist is soon caught picking the pocket of affluent Ebrahim Bassedien (Bill Curry), who -- instead of filing charges -- finds kinship with the boy and takes him in. Meanwhile, his criminal cohorts conspire to bring him back into the fold.

Beat the Drum 2003:

When a mysterious illness wipes out his entire village, claiming the lives of both his parents, 9-year-old Musa (Junior Singo) is forced to set off on his own, eventually joining the ranks of the scores of orphans who live on the streets of Johannesburg. Directed by David Hickson, this poignant award-winning film examines the heartbreaking effect that AIDS has had on the poor and underprivileged children of Africa.

Drunk baboons plague Cape Town's exclusive suburbs

Baboons are bad enough when they're not drunk and not even a blast of a vuvuzela seems to frighten them:

The sun is setting over South Africa's oldest vineyard and the last of the wine-tasting tourists are climbing onto their buses. But one large family group has no intention of leaving – and there is little the management can do about it.

Groot Constantia, in the heart of Cape Town's wine country, can deal with inebriated holidaymakers – but it is invading baboons which have developed a taste for its grapes that the wine makers are struggling with.

Each day, dozens of Cape Baboons gather to strip the ancient vines – the sauvignon blanc grapes are a particular favourite – before heading into the mountains to sleep. A few, who sample fallen fruit that has fermented in the sun, pass out and don't make it home.
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It is not just the vineyards in South Africa which are under siege, however, but also the exclusive neighbouring suburb of Constantia, home to famous residents including Earl Spencer, Wilbur Smith and Nelson Mandela.
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Before laws afforded baboons a protected status a decade ago, troublesome animals were regularly killed or maimed by home owners and farmers. Now around 20 full-time "baboon monitors" are employed to protect them and guide them away from residential areas. It has proved mission impossible. Last week, a 12 year old boy was left traumatised after confronting a troop who had broken into his family home.

Hearing noises from the kitchen, he went to investigate and found the beasts ransacking cupboards. When the child fled upstairs to find his babysitter, three males gave chase and surrounded him as he made a tearful phone call to his mother, while the animals pelted him with fruit.
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Chickens, geese, peacocks and even a Great Dane dog have been killed in recent weeks by the marauding baboons - the males have huge and terrifying canine teeth. Roof tiles, electric fences, orchards and vegetables gardens have been trashed.

"Lunch parties in the garden are now just impossible," a homeowner complained. "It is so unrelaxing. Rather than chatting over our meal, we are looking over our shoulders and bolting the food as quickly as we can before it is stolen. We can't even leave a window open in summer. We are under siege."

A whale of a tale

Whale lands on yacht:

A South African couple was out sailing near the country's infamous Robben Island when a 40-ton whale breached and crash-landed on their yacht.

"We were watching the whale flipping its tail for about half an hour," said Cape Town Sailing Academy Administrator Paloma Werner, who was enjoying a Sunday sail with her boyfriend and sailing instructor, Ralph Mothes.

"It reached about 100 to 200 meters from us, then it disappeared under water and reappeared about 10 to 20 meters from the boat, but we didn't think we were on a collision course," she told msnbc.com.

The young Southern Right Whale was longer than their 10-meter yacht — most likely between 11 and 14 meters — Werner said.

"My boyfriend told me to go to the other side of the boat," she said, explaining that they thought it would dive under their vessel.

"All I heard him say was 'Oh shit,' and I saw the whale come out of the water and crash against the mast of the boat.

"I ducked behind the coach house and my boyfriend ducked behind the steering wheel and we saw the mast crashing toward us and the whale slip back into the water," she said.
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"Only that evening did we really think about it, and when we saw the photo (taken by a tourist in a nearby boat) in yesterday's paper did we realize we were lucky to be alive," Werner said.

"If it would have crashed into the cockpit it would have sunk the boat."

The photo taken by a tourist:

"Shrek" wins British Open at St. Andrews

Louis Oosthuizen wins the British Open:

Louis Oosthuizen walked over the Swilcan Bridge toward a British Open victory that was never in doubt Sunday at St. Andrews, another big moment in sports for South Africa.

This celebration, though, carried a different tune.

The drone of vuvuzelas, all the rage at the World Cup, was replaced by the skirl of bagpipes coming from behind the Royal & Ancient clubhouse. For the 27-year-old South African, the sound could not have been sweeter.

With a performance that rivaled the dominance of Tiger Woods at the home of golf 10 years ago, Oosthuizen, a 200-1 long shot, led over the final 48 holes and blew away the field by seven shots.

"To win an Open championship is special," Oosthuizen said. "But to win it at St. Andrews ... it's something you dream about."

The timing could not have been better — one week after South Africa concluded a wildly popular World Cup, and the day Nelson Mandela celebrated his 92nd birthday.

"It felt a bit special, really," he said. "When I walked down 18, I was thinking about his birthday."
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He finished at 16-under 272 and became the first player since Tony Lema in 1964 to win his first major at St. Andrews.

Just as Lema did when he won, Oosthuizen ordered bottles of champagne for the press.

Never mind that everyone struggled to pronounce his name. All that mattered was the spelling on the bottom of that claret jug. And yes, the engraver used the abbreviated version, Louis, not his given name of Lodewicus Theodorus Oosthuizen.

With the fifth victory of his career, Oosthuizen moved to No. 15 in the world.
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[T]here was only that gap-tooth smile that earned him the nickname "Shrek" from his friends. And there was amazement across his face when he cradled the oldest trophy in golf, a silver claret jug with his name etched alongside Woods, Jack Nicklaus, Ben Hogan, and the other South African winners: Gary Player, Bobby Locke and Ernie Els, his mentor.

Without the Ernie Els & Fancourt Foundation in South Africa, Oosthuizen, the son of a farmer, could not have afforded the travel required to reach the game's highest level.
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"Shrek is on the move. I knew he had a lot of talent. He grew up in an area (Mossel Bay) that's very windy, so for him, these conditions are normal. The guy's got one of the best swings on tour. I think he'll be around for many years to come."

Some 45 miles away, Player was returning from a golf outing and listening to every shot on the radio, proud as can be. He saw the potential during a practice round they played at the Masters this year.

Player called Oosthuizen on Sunday morning and gave him a pep talk.

"I told him he's got to realize that lots of people are hitting bad shots," Player said, not knowing how few of those the kid would hit. "And I told him the crowd was naturally going to show a bias. But I reminded him when I played Arnold Palmer in 1961 at the Masters, only my wife and my dog was pulling for me. I told him he's got to get in there and be more determined to win."

BTW Oosthuizen is pronounced Oosthayzen. He was born 19 October 1982.

What a South African road taught me

Ian Williams:

JOHANNESBURG – There was a dark mystique about the road to Rustenburg well before I even set foot on it.

It's treacherous, I was warned by friends in Johannesburg. Wild animals wander on it at will, and crime – car-jacking, in particular – is rife. Don’t even think about driving after dark, and if you do, don't stop!

A few days later, I was on that road in the middle of the night, after reporting on a late World Cup soccer match in Rustenburg. Hotels were full, and we had an early-morning appointment in Johannesburg, two to three hours away.
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We'd spent an earlier night at a sprawling guest house, "just up the road." It turned out to be an hour and a half out of town, and was run by a white Afrikaner couple.

They were perfectly polite, but just off their dining room they had built what can best be described as a shrine to apartheid. It included the old apartheid-era flag and a big portrait of Hendrik Verwoerd, the man often described as the "architect of apartheid."

I was worried this would offend Gu Gu, our black South African coordinator, or our (black) driver Colin. Although I learned later that their biggest worry had been that it might offend me.

It wasn't that they didn't care, they just found it rather quaint – and ultimately irrelevant.

They were more amused than angry. They, and their South Africa, have moved on. And in their own way Gu Gu and Colin represented the confident new face of post-apartheid South Africa, that is increasingly asserting itself, proud that its children are growing up largely colorblind.

In San Francisco the leftists always used to tell me that South Africa would be a "blood-bath." That's because leftists are negrophobic. They literally fear black people which is why they like to keep them on the plantation - docile and dependent on welfare. I would tell the commies that they were ignorant and had no idea what South Africa was like. Yes, it has problems but they'll sort it out fine.

Africa at night

Copmparing Israel with South Africa

Since Israel is often compared with South Africa nowadays, I decided to look at the demographics.

In 1990, when Mandela was freed, the population of South Africa was 30 million of whom 5 million were white. Twenty years later the population is: blacks 40 million, whites 4 million. (800,000 whites have left since 1995.) That means that whites are outnumbered by blacks by ten to one.

The figures for Israel are more difficult to determine, but it seems that:

The State of Israel had a population of approximately 7,503,800 inhabitants as of December 2009. 75.4% of them were Jewish (about 5,660,700 individuals), 20.3% were Arabs (about 1,523,900 inhabitants), while the remaining 4.3% (about 319,200 individuals) were defined as "others" (family members of Jewish immigrants who were not registered at the Interior Ministry as Jews, non-Arab Christians, non-Arab Muslims and residents who do not have a religious classification).

That doesn't count the Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza. If they are counted, then the Arab population is nearly 50% of the total.

Obviously Israel and South Africa cannot be compared historically or culturally. Although some Boers thought of South Africa as the Promised Land, it was not regarded by all Christians as such. And, although my Protestant Huguenot ancestors left France for the Cape of Good Hope 330 years ago to escape persecution by Catholics, they were not murdered by the millions like the Jews. (It's estimated that only a quarter of a million French Huguenots were killed or driven from their lands.) The plight of the Boers, in the eyes of sympathetic Europeans and Americans, is that they unfortunately picked the wrong place to settle.

But the plight of Jews is different. Israel was not only their refuge from anti-Semitism but, according to the Bible, it's the land that God gave them.

Now I'm going to commit heresy in the eyes of American conservatives.

I'm not a Bible-believing Christian so the whole "Promised Land" meme is not part of my thinking. I'm not a Zionist and don't understand why European Jews did not come to America to escape European anti-Semitism. Apart from the Biblical meme, what other reason was there for Europeans to settle in that part of the world?

Okay, the Jews are there now but they are not outnumbered ten to one by Arabs as the whites in South Africa are by blacks. So what's the problem? Why can't they face facts like the South Africans did?

Here's something that I did not know:

Israel has two official languages, Hebrew and Arabic. Hebrew is the primary language of the state and is spoken by the majority of the population. Arabic is spoken by the Arab minority and Jews who immigrated to Israel from Arab lands (by 2002 these Jews and their descendants constituted about 40% of Israel's population.)

But I did know that 60% of the Jews in Israel are Europeans. They're immigrants just like the whites in South Africa and will have to adapt to reality.

Maybe the Israeli Jews are up against more dangerous enemies than white South Africans ever were. But the rest of Africa aided and abetted the African National Congress terrorists for decades in South Africa and Russia, through its proxy, Cuba, also waged war on South Africa for many years.

I'm not saying that I am not sympathetic to the Israeli Jews. Of course I am but I'm not more sympathetic to them than I am to white South Africans. It isn't easy being a small civilized and democratic island in an ocean of relative barbarity.

I don't have the answers - mostly because I'm not Israeli and am ignorant of the whole picture but also because I saw how stupid and destructive European and American interference in South Africa was. I also realize that it's probably not fair to compare Israel to South Africa.

It used to drive me nuts when ignorant Americans used to compare South Africa with the American South. South Africa has ten blacks for every one white. In certain states in the Deep South blacks make up 40% of the population. That's not quite the same.

Maybe Israel could be more accurately compared with the Deep South.

The South African connection # 368

The Booker Prize is awarded each year for the best original full-length novel, written in the English language, by a citizen of either the Commonwealth of Nations, Ireland, or Zimbabwe.

Due to "a weird administrative blip", no prize was awarded in 1970, so they are making up for it now. On the short list:

[W]e have Mary Renault's Fire From Heaven, a fictionalised biography of Alexander the Great of a kind that couldn't be more fashionable now.

Although Renault was born in England, she lived in my old hometown, Durban in South Africa, most of her life:

In 1933, she began training as a nurse at Oxford's Radcliffe Infirmary. During her training, she met Julie Mullard, a fellow nurse with whom she established a life-long romantic relationship.

She worked as a nurse while beginning a writing career, treating Dunkirk evacuees at the Winford Emergency Hospital in Bristol, and working in Radcliffe Infirmary's brain surgery ward until 1945. She published her first novel, Purposes of Love, in 1939; it had a contemporary setting, like her other early novels, which novelist Linda Proud described as "a strange combination of Platonism and hospital romance". Her 1943 novel The Friendly Young Ladies, about a lesbian relationship between a writer and a nurse, seems inspired by her own relationship with Mullard.

In 1948, after her novel Return to Night won a MGM prize worth $150,000, she and Mullard emigrated to South Africa, where they remained for the rest of their lives. There, according to Proud, they found a community of gay expatriates who had "escaped the repressive attitudes towards homosexuality in Britain for the comparatively liberal atmosphere of Durban.... Mary and Julie found themselves able to set up home together in this new land without causing the outrage they had sometimes provoked at home."
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It was in South Africa that Renault was able to write forthrightly about homosexual relationships for the first time — in her last contemporary novel, The Charioteer (1953), the story of two young gay servicemen who fall in love during World War II, and then in her first historical novel, The Last of the Wine (1956), the story of two young Athenians who study under Socrates and fight against Sparta. Both these books had male protagonists, as did all her later works that included homosexual themes; her sympathetic treatment of love between men would win Renault a wide gay readership. It would also foster rumors that Renault was really a gay man writing under a female pseudonym. Renault found these rumors amusing, but also sought to distance herself from being labeled a "gay writer."
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Though Renault appreciated her gay following (and the income it provided), she was uncomfortable with the "gay pride" movement that emerged in the 1970s after the Stonewall riots. Like Laurie Odell, the protagonist of her 1953 novel The Charioteer, she was suspicious of identifying oneself by one's sexual orientation. Late in her life, she expressed hostility toward the gay rights movement, troubling some of her devoted fans.

The irony is that she went to South Africa to "escape the repressive attitudes towards homosexuality in Britain" but her Greek historical novels were banned in South Africa in her lifetime. She died in 1983.

The Karoo

From a review of On The Back Roads: Encounters With People And Places by Dana Snyman:

This book rekindles that recurring idea: to give up the madness and the rat race, rummage for the old, "worn Shell road map", fill 'er up and just drive. Dana Snyman seems to be really living his life, travelling the small, unknown roads through South Africa, and telling the stories of simple, salt-of-the-Earth folk.

Snyman is boyishly proud of his "Epol-brown" 1973 Regal Valiant. He writes about his car like the Lone Ranger might talk about Silver. And he associates Valiants, in particular, with the old days in South Africa, so his road trip is also a nostalgic meandering through the memories of his childhood.

Going Nowhere Slowly fans will love Snyman's storytelling. The difference is that Snyman travels on his own so he doesn't take his own company along - he chats up strangers at bars, asks pedestrians and "karretjies-mense" for directions and has tea with people he's only just met. It takes a certain amount of confidence to travel this way but Snyman seems to have an unassuming way about him which people warm to.

On the Back Roads reveals parts of South Africa that are unfamiliar in name but familiar in spirit, sometimes quaint and always intriguing.

He unearths a sense of history and old myths about stock thieves; he hunts for graves, talks about ghost hitchhikers as if they were old friends and jogs the memories of retired train drivers.

He sets out to find the Moordenaars Karoo - "one of the few places in South Africa that doesn't yet have any Eskom power" - and the heart of the Bushveld. Snyman pulls over at a place that sells "17 different kinds of game biltong" but even this is only considered "amateur Bushveld".

Glossary of South Africanisms:

"Epol-brown" - I haven't got a clue what it means. I Googled it and this article turned up as the only reference.

"Regal Valiant" was a Chrysler car made in South Africa between 1960 and 1978 when Jesse Jackson got the factory closed down and threw thousands out of work.

"Karretjies-mense" means Donkey Cart People who are semi-nomadic "Coloureds" (half white/half black people) who travel around South Africa doing farm labor.

"Moordenaars Karoo" - the Karoo is a large semi-desert in South Africa. Moordenaar means murderer. The Moordenaars Karoo is the most remote part of the Karoo. It used to be completely isolated but is now becoming well known for it's game hunting.

"Eskom" is the largest electric power supplier in South Africa.

"Bushveld" is the equivalent of the Australian term "the outback" or the American term "the boondocks."

"Biltong" is the South African version of jerky but it's a hundred times better. It is moist and juicy instead of dried out. It's often made from game such as springbok (and sometimes ostrich) but is usually beef.

I could post hundred of pics of the Karoo but here are just a few. Some of them are huge - click to enjoy. When I think of the Karoo, I think of the aloes as big as trees, the wildflowers that suddenly explode into blossom after a thunderstorm, the ubiquitous windmills struggling to draw water from the parched land, the small dusty towns lost in the immense distances and, yes, the snow-covered mountains.