Given the history of the country, it seems to me, the absolutely remarkable thing is the relavite lack of racist retribution against white people in South Africa. They are dealing with a difficult situation and a tangled history, and I think they should be commended, both black and white people, for the good will and genuine efforts at reconciliation, as imperfect and incomplete as those efforts may be. And on this thread, thanks to Earnest for sharing some facts and personal experience to counter the general climate of ignorance on the topic. Genocide is not a word to throw about lightly for the purposes of political rhetoric. Neither should the politics of South Africa be exploited by those ignorant of its details as a vehicle for promoting agendas closer to home.
More on South Africa
by zeb 24 Replies latest jw friends
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LoveUniHateExams
They are dealing with a difficult situation - that's an understatement.
Imagine Chicago, a city where black people make up 35% of the population but commit 70% of the crime.
Then apply that country-wide, imagine a country that's 80% black, with violent crime everywhere.
Most of the crime is black on black but there's also a virulent strain of anti-white racism.
That's contemporary South Africa.
Mandela's reconciliatory attitude and actions were remarkable but he was only one man.
When the time comes, and the situation becomes impossible for whites, I hope the UK and other Western countries take them in.
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Earnest
slimboyfat : Given the history of the country, it seems to me, the absolutely remarkable thing is the relative lack of racist retribution against white people in South Africa.
You are quite right. It is remarkable but it is true, there is very little desire for retribution against white people in South Africa. Part of this is due to the African/black sense of ubuntu, people are people through other people. This is quite foreign to Europeans and Americans but South Africans of all colours know exactly what it means. It is also due to the remarkable Truth and Reconciliation Commission chaired by Desmond Tutu, the last remaining giant of his time. The report is available here and is grim reading of man's inhumanity to man, by both black and white, during the apartheid years. But there was both truth and reconciliation, and this averted the bloodbath that may have been. It is mandatory reading for anyone who wants to understand South Africa today.
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Bungi Bill
Are we forgetting how the white Dutch stole their farms from the indigenous people
The reality is a little less clear-cut than one might imagine. Southern Africa's indigenous peoples were of a group of non-Bantu people, referred to collectively as the "Khoisan". This included the hunter-gatherer San people (formerly called "Bushmen") as well as the pastoralist Khoikhoi (formerly known as "Hottentots").
At the time the Dutch established their 17th Century outpost in what is now Capetown, they found the district already settled by the Khoikhoi. These peoples had previously experienced displacement from the north by various migrations of the Bantu, and now faced similar displacement from Dutch settlement. Later, during a period known as the "Mfecane" (1815 - 1840) widescale warfare between various African (i.e. Bantu) tribes left large areas depopulated; and therefore ripe for settlement by others - including Trek-Boers from the Cape.
Regarding the whole of Southern Africa, the matter of who did what to who is just a little bit more involved than merely the good guys wearing white hats / black skins and the bad guys wearing black hats / white skins. (For a starter, the "indigenous" people weren't black; but were more Asian in appearance).
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Earnest
If anyone wants to understand what it is like for both black and white in the rural areas of South Africa in our time (2016-2020), there has been a 15-minute program on Radio 4 in the United Kingdom each afternoon this past week. The programme is entitled "Blood Lands", which is summarised as follows:
At dusk on a warm evening in 2016, two men arrive, unexpectedly, at a remote South African farmhouse. The frenzy that follows will come to haunt a community, destroying families, turning neighbours into traitors, prompting street protests and threats of violence, and dividing the small farming and tourist town of Parys along racial lines. Blood Lands is a murder investigation, a political drama, a courtroom thriller, and a profound exploration of the enduring tensions threatening the “rainbow nation". Over the course of three years, correspondent Andrew Harding has followed every twist of the police’s hunt for the killers, the betrayals that opened the door to an explosive trial, and the fortunes of all those involved – from the dead men’s families to the handful of men controversially selected for prosecution.
The account can be accessed here, but please don't comment on it unless you have listened to it in full.