In the movie, The Manchurian Candidate, a very British sounding man turns out to be an extremely evil South African neuroscientist, who orders, among others things, soldiers in an American army unit, under a kind of surgically induced hypnosis, to murder and strangle each other. There seems to be this idea that white South Africans are somehow more German than Dutch, and more Nazi than nice. Thanks guys. I guess that means Charlize Theron must give her star back (she recently got one on the Walk of Fame, not far from where she was first 'discovered' in a bank.) Charlize incidentally is German, on her mother's side anyway, and French, on her father's side.
South Africans also get a bad rap in movies like Lethal Weapon 3 (huge Nazi overtones there) and The Beach (where the South African character is a real jerk called Bugs, and even his girlfriend cheats on him).
Every now and then, South Africa seems a useful addition, as the infamous pariah, to the 'axis of evil', if only in the minds of moviegoers. Maybe the next James Bond movie will have a South African mogul try to ice the world with a diamond powered laser gun. Stranger things have happened.
Earlier this evening I watched a Lonely Planet documentary on Nambibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe (all bordering South Africa), and the Aussie dude trekking through these countries at one point opens up a discussion on a beach with a black woman, asking her about apartheid. The black woman says whites have a 'bad attitude'. Maybe they do in Luderitz, I don't know.
The problem with demonising a country is you might find you reinforce bad behaviour, instead of encouraging good behaviour. If everyone believes South Africans are still racists, or should I say, that all white South Africans are racists, even though 70% of the country voted out their own white government, well what are the majority of well meaning South Africans supposed to think?
I remember, growing up in South Africa, watching CNN and noticing that every single story just showed the same images. Death, squalor, tyres or vehicles burning, and some kind of racist injustice. Even I thought, "God, I'd hate to live there."
You know, if you really want to bother thinking about South Africa, or reading about it, then you should think about the real problems that exist there now. Not sensational stories. The undercurrent that effects the majority of people in serious ways every day. Focus on that, and if you care, contribute.
Do you know what the real issue is in South Africa? It's called AIDS and more people are dying, have died, and will die, than died in the Holocaust. This is a real live holocaust in our time. And the people who are dying, you know, are the poor, and many of these are black people. If a white government was as intransigent and ineffective in providing anti-retroviral drugs as Mbeki's government still is (the President still does not acknowledge that HIV causes AIDS) that would make CNN news probably on a daily basis.
There is still Apartheid in South Africa, and it's based on one thing. The rich versus the poor. Except now many of the rich are black people, probably just as many black people in the rising middle class as whites. So who is to blame now?
The answer is that it is better to find solutions than to lay blame, but as in the case of New Orleans, people who don't show leadership in a crisis should be made accountable.
Having said all that, despite the AIDS terror (which provides South Africans with their own 'war on terror', except, one that makes sense, one based on saving lives and keeping people healthy and alive) - despite AIDS South Africa's GDP has expanded to over 6%. The USA's GDP this year will be half that figure if they're lucky. Although this figure is good, South Africa needs a minimum of about 5.5% GDP growth just to employ its school leaving population, an ever increasing number.
I've been asked, directly and indirectly, whether I am a racist, and if that's the first thought that pops into your mind when someone introduces themselves to you as a South African (thanks CNN) then that's really too bad. I won't pretend that there aren't any racists in South Africa today. There are. I know some. I don't approve of racial slurs, of racist jokes. Yes, I don't have much of a sense of humor about it. Why should I? I grew up in a country that was locked out of the Olympics, and the Tour De France, and we got mostly American TV because the British Actors Guild or something, didn't want their sitcoms or documentaries entertaining racists.
So we missed out on a lot. More if you're into your sport. We in South Africa were locked out of international rugby and cricket, and I'm not saying the country didn't deserve it. Once we were readmitted, we quickly became the Rugby World Champions, and came within a hair's breadth, at least twice, of becoming World Champions in cricket. That was exciting to watch and to be a part of. It made you proud of your country, and gave the young boys their own dreams for the sports field. But when I grew up, life was altogether less exciting in many respects. All the games we saw were of South Africans playing with each other. Naas Botha was a national hero, and the most exciting show on TV was The A Team. TV was dull, and the feeling of being isolated was real. Our crocodile-like president at the time, not unlike today's Kim Jong Il, sustained ongoing TV campaigns, using the statecontrolled SABC to promote the propaganda that the world is bad and we are good, and we won't change. PW Idiot managed to rule his roost and shut us out until he got booted out by his own colleagues. Let's hope the North Koreans do something similar.
I felt my skin crawl whenever PW Botha made a speech on TV. Some of that was also because his English was so atrocious.
Now what I am saying is, Did I deserve that? I was born in the country and basically, by the time I was a teenager, everyone basically was going, This is a bad idea and it's a bad situation and it's getting worse so let's get rid of it. But we missed out on a lot growing up, and the reasons didn't seem to have much to do with me. This is why I still have a bone to pick with smart-ass politicians who spin and swagger and use government as a sort of private money laundering business.
I'm pissed off at our leaders, and also at your average person in authority. Why? Because a lot of the time they fuck up other peoples lives. Why are people such parasites to each other? When will people learn that the best way is together, through co-operation?
Meanwhile, our futures are being fucked up in the present. Leaders all over the world are doing things we don't approve of. We shouldn't let them.
So racist jokes...I've heard them quite a lot. And sometimes I feel like Tom Hanks in Philadelphia, who plays a homosexual. In one scene he's in a sauna and his boss starts cracking crude gay jokes. He halfheartedly laughs along, while internally he feels revulsion, and who can blame him?
Obviously you sometimes hear racist jokes in South Africa. I heard them a lot while working in Bristol in England, and I heard them almost daily working in Korea - from coworkers who were Scottish, Canadian, American and from New Zealand.
I think a better question, before you ask a South African whether he or she's a racist is to ask, "Am I?" A simple yes or no will do.
But to come back to the original question, No, I'm not.
What many people who have never been to South Africa don't understand, is that many blacks work in the homes and gardens of whites, babysit their children, cook their food and wash their clothes. There are plenty of close relationships, but they don't always work.
At my home in South Africa we employ a gardener and a maid. When I visited there my father was helping our housemaid to buy a house. She is a genial woman, with a big white smile and a can do attitude. When I was at home, I was aware of my father helping her get a loan approved, helping her get the deeds from his attorney, and providing the collatoral for that loan. Why not? She does, after all, live on our property, and has done so for more than 10 years. My father is a widower, and this woman, Maria, cooks for him and takes care of him. The new house that my father's helping her to buy (along with a government subsidy) will allow her and her family to live somewhere else in a home that she will own. Now that's a great partnership. And that's a remarkable achievement for a domestic worker in South Africa. For people who have struggled much of their lives, things are starting to improve.
But for every heartening story, there's also a tragic disheartening one.
My father also has a farm, and the man who stayed on it murdered his wife, and then went to jail. When he came out, my father allowed him to come back to the farm and continue working there. I didn't really agree with that. I'm not one for walking around in the bush with a convicted murderer camping nearby. I complained to my father about this, but he said, "At least I know him. If I get another guy, I have to go through the whole business again of him understanding me and me understanding him." I understood the point, but didn't really agree with it.
Time passed and the guy started stealing...running amuck on neighboring farms...the police were called. Eventually my father asked him to leave and he wouldn't. The law actually states that if someone has lived on your property for 10 years or 20 years or something, they get a kind of right of ownership. So he had to start a legal process. A feel sorry for that man. I remember how he helped me scrape a mountainbike track, using a tractor and a plough, in the dirt and in the veld all along the river of our farm. I couldn't have done it without him. Where can you go as an old dying man (he picked up AIDS in jail, and was soon in an advanced stage of it), when you own nothing? I wonder if he is even still alive today.
So if someone asks me, "Are you a racist?" I find it a bit ironic. Maybe they should say, in a chirpy tone, "I'm not a racist, are you?"
"Does not liking you count?"
You see you can't really ask someone that question and expect to get a sincere answer. They'll tell you what they think you want to hear, or maybe what they want to hear.
It's something like asking someone, "Are you fat?"Watch and learn.
Now the story below is interesting. Disgusting yes, but CNN and Yahoo and world media seize on it because it confirms the stereotype of the brutal white killing the helpless black victim. Sterotypes are based on some truth, let's be clear on that at least. But this time it doesn't conform to Lethal Weapon's Nazi Afrikaaner (this guy's name is Mark Scott-Crossley, maybe a more realistic sounding name than the whacko name for the South African used in The Manchurian Candidate).
Not only is this guy not an Afrikaaner, but he coerced another black man (three I think) to help kill his former employee.
If he forced this other guy to commit murder, why is the other guy getting 15 years?
And how do you force someone to commit murder anyway? Do you say, "If you don't kill him you're fired?" Maybe. I just think this is inaccurately portrayed as white vs black. And there's a bigger picture than just this picture.
You know Charlize Theron's mother shot a man that was attacking her, on their farm in South Africa. It was her husband. No racism involved.
People want to believe the worst about other people, when often there is a lot more than a stereotype going on in the background. The same is true when we consider going to war. Sometimes it is better to hesitate before making up our minds. Sometimes, he who hesitates (for long enough) is not lost, but is enlightened to something new, that makes sense.
Here's the article:
By TERRY LEONARD, Associated Press Writer 1 hour, 55 minutes ago
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa - In a case that shocked South Africa for its brutality, a white farmer was sentenced to life in prison Friday for the murder of one of his black workers, who was attacked with machetes, tied up and thrown into a lion enclosure, where he was devoured.
The trial brought impassioned protests from demonstrators who saw the killing as another racial attack in a country still grappling with its apartheid past.Many in the courtroom in the northern town of Phalaborwa whistled and cheered in approval when Mark Scott-Crossley, 37, was led out after the sentencing.
Human rights advocates said the killing also highlighted the plight of farmworkers in a country with a culture of violence and a history of racial hatred and mistrust. South Africa's Human Rights Commission said in a 2003 report that attacks on farm workers were common. Most are black or mixed race, and their bosses are white.
Note: If you've lived in South Africa, as I have, you're also familiar with an expression, 'one settler, one bullet'. For the past several years, black farm workers have attacked and murdered farmers (commonly their employers) and their families in isolated farm houses. Usually the women are raped, the men killed, and valuables stolen. Almost every week (a trend that continues today)the newspapers flash another murdered white farmer.
Today, when you read the paper, this kind of thing no longer makes the front page. There's a sort of obituaries-come-classified column for crime. They basically summarise the crime on one page that might have 10 abbreviated stories. Each day, in local newspapers. But you don't see any of these stories making CNN news.
Judge George Maluleke sentenced Scott-Crossley to the maximum of life in prison for the killing. Scott-Crossley's employee and co-defendant, Simon Mathebula, was sentenced to 15 years because the judge found he had been coerced by his employer. The pair were convicted in April.
The judge said life sentences should only be imposed to protect society from a repeat of the crime or when the offense is so monstrous it demands harsh punishment.
"No crime fits this description more than the one before me and there is no doubt it would warrant this extreme punishment," the judge said.
Nelson Chisale, 41, had been fired two months before his Jan. 31, 2004, murder for allegedly running a personal errand during working hours. According to testimony at the trial, Chisale was assaulted with machetes after returning to pick up some belongings and then was tied to a stake.
After being left bleeding for six or seven hours, Chisale was taken to the Mokwalo White Lion Project and thrown over the fence, screaming as the animals tore at his body.
Later, investigators looking for Chisale found only bones and bloodstained clothing.
Maluleke said Scott-Crossley had masterminded the attack, dragooning his employees to participate in the crime.
Witnesses at the trial portrayed Scott-Crossley as a man with a history of aggression and violence.
The judge said there were substantial and compelling circumstances to justify a lesser sentence for Mathebula. The judge said Mathebula had limited participation in the crime and had nothing to gain from the death of Chisale, whom he had befriended and visited.
"More importantly, he disclosed to the police his complicity in the crime shortly after he was arrested," the judge said.
The trial of a third suspect, Richard Mathebula, a former Scott-Crossley employee who is no relation to Simon Mathebula, was postponed until November because of illness.
A fourth man, Robert Mnisi, was given immunity from prosecution when he agreed to testify for the state.
Scott-Crossley was married (BIZARRE!) by a magistrate Friday morning before his sentencing and was led from the courtroom with his bride. His attorney, Charl van Tonder, said the verdict and sentence would be appealed.
Mathebula's legal aid-appointed lawyer, Mduduzi Thabede, also said he intended to appeal.
Now the question you really have to ask is, who is the wench that married Crossley? If he feeds a farmworker (who he catches running an errand), to lions what will happen to her when he ever gets cross with her?
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