Police opened fire on a surging mob of angry mine workers on August 16th at South Africa’s Marikana platinum mine. When the guns went quiet, 34 were dead and at least 78 wounded. This came a few days after the killing of 10—including a pair of policemen who were hacked to death—bringing the total death toll to 44 and shock to the “Rainbow Nation.”

These deaths cast yet another pall of doubt over the ruling party’s ability to lead the people to the “promised land” that “liberation” was supposed to deliver.

It had started with a dispute between rival unions—the NUM (National Union of Mineworkers) and the feistier AMCU (Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union). Disputes over low pay led to abuse being heaped on the “greedy capitalists” who care naught for the worker. The press took a hit for allegedly publishing false figures on pay scales. The mine’s owner, a London-based company called Lonmin, said that wages were higher than those reported. Politicians had a stab at Lonmin executives as well as the unions. Then virtually all but the accused agreed there had been a massive failure of political leadership.

When unions, politicians, and mine bosses had caught their collective breath there was fury and pandemonium as the pointed fingers flew in every direction and the ANC scrambled for political cover. 

Not to be left out of the fray, in came crashing the redoubtable Julius Malema, former leader of the ANC Youth League, with his shaved pate shining bright to lay the blame squarely at the feet of the man he once promised to die for, President Jacob Zuma.

But now we know everyone missed the mark badly. A dead rabbit was the real reason unrest turned to tragedy.

Eyewitness accounts reveal the protesters’ pugnacity was not all the fault of the capitalists, unions, or politicians but the result of the intervention of a witch doctor known as Nzabe who had been summoned to minister to the miners. 

A miner named Bulelani Malwana told the Daily Dispatch that the “traditional healer” led strikers through the following aggression-boosting ritual:

They were cut several times on their upper body and a black substance was smeared on the wounds….After they got the muti people were so aggressive. They just wanted to fight. They felt so invincible.

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Each recipient of the “muti”—a Southern African term meaning “traditional medicine”—reportedly paid the “healer” SAR 1,000 ($120), and with this treatment they were assured the police bullets would become harmless. They were then instructed to simply look forward and charge the men in blue and victory was assured.

Armed with this knowledge they prepared for their attack. The “medicine man” also gave them a rabbit and told them not to harm it. Unfortunately, this proved too onerous a task and the rabbit’s demise is apparently the reason 34 people died. 

A mine worker told the Saturday Star newspaper:

The traditional healer warned all of us several times on the day not to kill the rabbit, but some among us decided to chase it around the hill and killed it….If we had let the rabbit free all of the dead would still be alive, I swear.

There’s an embarrassing resemblance between Marikana and that infamous example of “racist” brutality, the Sharpeville Massacre of March 21, 1960. That day is an iconic one on the South African calendar, held out to all as a constant reminder of apartheid’s beastly iniquity. In that instance an angry crowd of thousands laid siege to a police station and after all other tactics failed the cops fired, killing 69 people. Because it was Boers doing the shooting the matter went straight to the UN’s hallowed halls the next month and a condemnatory resolution was promptly passed which some suggest heralded the beginning of the end for the “racist” nationalists then led by Hendrik Verwoerd. 

In Africa they say you can take people out the bush but you can’t take the bush out of the people.

Nelson Mandela

The great South African Ernie Els recently won the British Open golf tournament in epic style. In victory he was gracious, kind, and humble.

But then, as is the norm for white South Africans in the limelight, Els went on to praise Nelson Mandela:

I’ve got to thank, obviously, first of all, you know, President Mandela, who’s been such a great influence in our country. We have been truly blessed to have a man like President Mandela take us through a very difficult time in our country. And everybody now, we can see the success of the country, now, and it’s only because of President Mandela.

It would be wonderful were it so.

Mandela was magnanimous in political victory, but then so was Robert Mugabe, whose leadership in Zimbabwe has resulted in around a million refugees arriving in South Africa. This has exacerbated unemployment, spiked crime, put immense pressure on social services, and worsened ethnic tension.

Corruption is now endemic in the country at every level. It was on Mandela’s watch when the now-notorious South African Arms Deal was planned, ultimately consuming a mountain of public money and yielding very little of benefit to anyone other than the “previously disadvantaged” (a euphemism for black people) clique at the higher echelon of the ANC. Current President Jacob Zuma was almost certainly one of the beneficiaries (Schabir Shaik, Zuma’s former business partner, was convicted of paying bribes to Zuma), but charges against Zuma were dropped on spurious grounds presently being challenged by opposition party the Democratic Alliance.

Ernie gushed with a commendable spirit of goodwill, but it appears Zuma isn’t so kindly disposed. Earlier this year Andre Visagie, leader of an Afrikaner pressure group, lodged a hate-speech complaint against Zuma, accusing him of exhorting his audience to commit murder by singing the song “Dubul’ iBhunu” (“Shoot the Boer”) at January’s ANC celebrations. In a case brought earlier against former ANC Youth League President Julius Malema for singing the same song, the court ruled it was indeed illegal because it encouraged violence against a specific, race-based group.

How much direct impact Zuma’s “Shoot the Boer” entreaties have had on his followers will never be known, but statistics suggest they are listening. Ernie’s fellow Afrikaners on the farms are under siege. Andre Botha of the farmers’ union Agri SA says there have been 11,785 attacks and 1,804 farmers murdered since the ANC assumed power, an average of two murders per week. Many of these have been grisly in the extreme.

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The official response to these killings is that there is no political or racial motive, that they are unfortunate, random, and merely symptomatic of a high-crime society. Farmers are unconvinced: “We are killed in this country just because we have white skins,” insists Visagie.

In a recent editorial writer David Hill was strident in his criticism of the South African government, referring to it as an “ineptocracy”:

Consider that South Africa is the only country in the world where affirmative action policy favours a majority who also happens to have complete political control….In the end something has got to give as no economy can bear 20 million people supporting 50 million people.

But the word “inept” might still be a tad light. Following a spate of deaths from lightning in the province of Natal, Nomsa Dube of the Provincial Executive Council promptly called on the National Department of Science and Technology to investigate what causes lightning:

We will do an investigation and talk to the department of science and technology on what is the cause of the lightning, and if it only happened to the previously disadvantaged, as I have never seen any white people being struck by lightning.

Robert Mugabe has said he is Zimbabwe’s president by divine sanction:

Only God, who appointed me, will remove me….Only God will remove me!

These profound words were echoed in South Africa by President Zuma, who said:

God expects us to rule this country because we are the only organization which was blessed by pastors when it was formed. It is even blessed in Heaven. That is why we will rule until Jesus comes back.

We should not allow anyone to govern our city when we are ruling the country.

Ernie Els will go down as one of South Africa’s greatest sportsmen who is loved and admired by millions, but he should probably concentrate on his putting. Politics might not be his game.

Ian Smith

As a white man born and bred in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) who has watched events unfold both in my home country and in the African subcontinent, I look at the United States and Western Europe with a sense of having seen the same horror movie before. I fear my fellow palefaces abroad are rapidly heading for second place like we did, and for many of the same reasons.

Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith pleaded with an unsympathetic world to understand his call for a qualified franchise based on merit and not race. He told his multitude of detractors that universal suffrage was a recipe for disaster in a polity where the vast majority had only recently been discovered in a very primitive state before being suddenly exposed to Western Civilization with all its complexities and alien systems and values. He insisted it would be disastrous to rush the process. He asked for time to educate and inspire the populace to take their place in a sophisticated democracy, but he was universally damned. Just as he feared, a flawed election followed in 1980 under the auspices of a Thatcher-led British government. Robert Mugabe and his criminal cabal, poorly disguised as Freedom Fighters, assumed power and a catastrophe began to unfold.

Now many Americans and Europeans are having to confront the same paradigm. As the demographic winds of change blow stronger, the number of illiterates and itinerants grows at an alarming rate. Those that contribute the least to the common good seem set to seize and retain power at the expense of the minority that contributes the most. All this is thanks to the seemingly sacrosanct principle of “one man, one vote.” But just as in Rhodesia, that minority dares not voice its displeasure at this development for fear of being condemned to the special dungeons reserved for those committing the cardinal sin of “racism.” And they can be sure of this punishment because of the mainstream media, which so cunningly manipulates the minds of the millions of simpletons who have the vote and therefore the power to elect those who will serve their destructive purpose.

It was a media cut from the same cloth that broadcast to the world a compelling, biased, and bogus story about white brutality and “racist” abuse of power and won the world to their destructive cause. Desperate appeals from the minority whites in Salisbury to be given an opportunity to present their case were ignored. The media bullyboys had the “colonials” by the throat and went for the jugular; this was simply a story about white villains and black victims and there was no need to know more. Leading this charge of the misinformation brigade were the men and the women of the BBC, who went beyond the call to destroy Africa’s best governed country.

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In his book Banana Sunday, Chris Munnion—who covered Africa for the London Daily Telegraph for 20 years—tells a mildly amusing story about the lengths to which the BBC went. He relates events immediately after Ian Smith’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence when Ronald Robson, the BBC’s resident correspondent in Salisbury, looking for “action” that was not there, took a film crew to Cecil Square where many black office workers were dozing during their lunch break. While the cameras rolled he gravely announced, “There has been another revolution in Africa,” with the implication that the prone bodies were dead people victimized by some white-orchestrated horror.

BBC personnel were simultaneously dispatched to broadcast from stations in Zambia and Botswana urging the overthrow of white rule. So much for the corporation’s commitment to impartiality!

Also voluble was the late Christopher Hitchens, who wrote of the “white supremacist junta” in power in Salisbury and called stridently for British military intervention to remove Smith’s government. In a case of “too late, he cried,” Hitchens later made it known that one of his life’s regrets was remaining silent about Robert Mugabe despite the fact he knew “he had a terrible capacity for fanaticism and absolutism.”

In an article for the Guardian, Sir Max Hastings, former editor of the Daily Telegraph and the Evening Standard who reported on Rhodesia, referred to the white Rhodesians as

…a smug, ruthless white minority, beer guts contained with difficulty inside blazers with RAF crests, proclaiming themselves the guardians of civilisation in the heart of Africa. They killed carelessly, tortured freely, and exploited censorship to conceal their worst excesses.

Those of the above still with us can look at Zimbabwe today and take a bow. They were important players in the exercise to rid the country of a white administration.

Events in the developed world bear a stark resemblance to the Rhodesian experience. While it would be unfair to compare Robert Mugabe to Barack Obama, it is fair to say the American president is also a beneficiary of a biased media which has worked diligently to misinform and suppress uncomfortable truths about the world’s most powerful man. Had the American media scrutinized Obama as closely as they would have treated any white Republican, his road to the White House would have probably been impassable, but another agenda had to be served.

Just as Mugabe rose to power on the back of a dumb electorate and a conniving media, so has Obama. One can only hope the movie doesn’t have the same ending.

In his book The Trouble With Africa, Robert Calderisi recounts the sad story of two African teenagers who stowed away in the cargo hold of a Brussels-bound Airbus. They died on the journey from asphyxiation and cold. One of them was still clutching a crumpled note that lamented their misery while petitioning Europe:

Therefore, we African children and youth are asking you to set up an efficient organisation to help with the development of Africa. Thus, if we are sacrificing ourselves and putting our lives in jeopardy it is because we are suffering too much in Africa and we need your help to fight against poverty and bring war to an end in Africa.

The left-of-center British monthly Prospect has also ventured out of comfortable territory with an intriguing article by Paul Romer on “charter cities.” He makes a strong case for the construction of metropolitan areas under a charter granted to a foreign entity. Using Hong Kong as an example, he argues in favor of importing experts to Africa who know how to create the conditions needed for economic prosperity. He argues that hundreds of billions in foreign aid have already been squandered and proposes that future financial flows to Africa should be channeled into schemes which will provide engines for economic growth.

Both The Trouble With Africa and Paul Romer’s article appear to call for a form of neo-colonialism. A relentless flow of empirical evidence from Harare to Haiti and from Dakar to Detroit shows that “black”-dominated administrations follow a familiar path. They destroy established structures, leading to degradation, ruin, and chaos.

In South Africa the Western Cape Province (which includes Cape Town) is one of precious few highly developed, heavily populated areas on the continent where there is a semblance of order, where services are provided and the rule of law is enforced. It is also the continent’s last white-led political entity of any significance. The Provincial Administration is led by the formidable Helen Zille of the Democratic Alliance, who is setting an embarrassing example of good governance for the ANC, which rules all the other eight provinces with varying degrees of incompetence and dishonesty. Mrs. Zille recently attracted furious fire from the media and the ANC leadership for referring to people streaming west from the atrociously governed Eastern Cape as “refugees.” She was right, but she struck a raw nerve.

Sadly, success is a double-edged sword because good news travels fast. Thousands from all over Africa are stampeding to the Western Cape fleeing ruin in their homelands to seek the shelter that functional governance allows. At the same time many more of their compatriots are fleeing northward in an attempt to find refuge in Europe. With that uncontrollable influx comes trouble, because service-demand inevitably exceeds supply and unemployment increases, leading to violence and crime. Already Somalis are fighting gun battles in Cape Town and Nigerians are wresting control of the drug trade from the older gangs while local blacks are burning foreign blacks out of the tented camps. Desperation drives them into more prosperous areas. Sooner or later the structures will be overwhelmed, the system will collapse, and Cape Town will lose its luster.

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In a sense Africa is simply reverting to type. Prior to the colonial era most Africans lived in rural fiefdoms commanded by chiefs who ruled on a whim with absolute and savage power. There were no courts to speak of, no elections, few property rights, and little protection of the individual. Freedom was a foreign concept. European colonials in some cases halted and in others merely constrained this process, but they at least introduced variable degrees of order. This has dissipated.

The answer to Africa’s gloom is obvious: Reinstate the rule of law through intervention that leads to effective governance. We now know that African leaders, no matter how much financial assistance is provided, are seldom capable of this endeavor, so it has to come from outside.

Europe now needs to take this problem by the scruff of the neck and not only through altruism. Europe faces the same sort of problem as the Western Cape does in containing an immigrant onslaught which is already causing civil unrest, straining structures, and draining resources. This has led to economic collapse in some countries. The only possibility of reversing this trend is if they intervene in the African homelands and engage in making these countries orderly and prosperous.

This could provide a platform for economic growth in Africa which will provide work for thousands of poor Africans. These Africans will then have reason to stay at home rather than run. Who knows? Brazzaville may become more appealing than Brixton, Malabo better than Milan, and Bangui more comfortable than the banlieues of Paris.

Unpalatable as it may be, without the intervention of “white” governance skills, there is little hope for Africa.

Victims of the RUF

Former Liberian President Charles Taylor has become the first African head of state to be convicted of a crime by an international court and the first national leader anywhere since Admiral Karl Dönitz at Nuremburg. Presiding Judge Richard Lussick, reading a unanimous finding, found Taylor “criminally responsible” for aiding and abetting the perpetrators and therefore “guilty of 11 charges including terror, murder, rape and conscripting child soldiers.”

Taylor’s conviction is due to his support for Foday Sankoh’s rebels of the RUF (Revolutionary United Front) in neighboring Sierra Leone, who murdered tens of thousands and displaced, mutilated, raped, and robbed hundreds of thousands between 1991 and 2002. Sankoh’s mob will be long remembered for their practice of lopping off limbs. Victims were often asked if they wanted “short sleeves” (arms off) or “long sleeves” (hands off) before being chopped.

The tribunal has concluded this “revolutionary” force was heavily dependent on President Taylor for military, logistical, and political support which was generously supplied in return for diamonds. One of these diamonds was presented to supermodel Naomi Campbell following a dinner in 1997 with President Nelson Mandela in South Africa.

Al Venter (author of Gunship Ace, which covers the Sierra Leone Civil War) says he recalls seeing two pregnant women having their bellies butchered, their fetuses removed and boiled before they were forced to eat the remains. Rather than use rope the RUF would string human entrails across roads at roadblocks.

My friend Bob MacKenzie, a former Rhodesian SAS officer, was captured by the RUF after he had run to the aid of a comrade who turned out to be dead. A nun who survived says she watched the rebels hang MacKenzie from a tree and bayonet him for hours before strips were cut from his body and eaten. The rebel leader was then given the honor of consuming his liver.

The real tragedy is that much of this bloodshed need not have happened. In March 1995, with Sankoh at the height of his powers, less than 200 South African mercenaries operating under the direction of private military company Executive Outcomes arrived with little bang but plenty of balls and brawn. They smashed the RUF bully boys, sending them scuttling into the countryside. Suddenly confronted by real soldiers up for a fight, the RUF fled in confusion. The South Africans soon secured control of most of the diamond fields that were feuling the violence, and relative calm rapidly returned to the capital city of Freetown and much of Sierra Leone.

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The calm would be short because the UN did not approve. Kofi Annan, then Under-Secretary-General, had just been promoted from Peacekeeping Operations Director. While in that position he presided over the murder, often by machete, of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis in Rwanda. Canadian General Roméo Dallaire, then heading the UN force in Rwanda, writes in his book Shake Hands With the Devil of his anger and utter despair when Annan intervened to halt the reinforcements and logistical support Dallaire desperately needed to stop the genocide.

Annan and his UN colleagues were faced with an embarrassing PR dilemma. After all, these South African mercenaries were muscular super-racists fresh from Fortress Apartheid. They were supposed to be flogging black people, not freeing them from an entirely black-orchestrated terror. This exercise constituted an intolerably dangerous debunking of the officially sanctioned dogma. Annan had built his career on the idea he was a beacon of light emerging from colonialism’s black hole. UN reaction was swift; ditch the nasty Boers and replace them with a limp-wristed UN force that quickly lost control. Annan became Secretary General beginning in 1997 and on his watch the RUF and Taylor were soon back in the mix. The bloodletting continued until the belated intervention of the great colonials themselves, the beastly British.

Kofi Annan went on to become co-recipient of a Nobel Peace Prize before supervising the scandalous Iraqi “Oil for Food” program in which his son Kojo was a beneficiary. Now he is the point man in the combustible mix that is Syria. If his track record is anything to go by, expect more posturing and mayhem.

Media reports suggesting South Africa has been “shocked” by the viral rape video involving a young Sowetan girl are almost certainly exaggerating the public reaction. South Africans are inured to this sort of news. Last December a male nurse in Bloemfontein was charged with raping a cancer patient while a female nurse pinned the victim to a bed. With an estimated one in 25 rapes being reported—and then only one in 25 charges resulting in conviction, meaning that only one in every 625 rapes leads to conviction—rape is a way of life. Most South African males seem ambivalent about the illegality of forcible entry.

In South Africa youths jokingly refer to gang rape as “jackrolling,” and the poor Sowetan girl savaged in this incident was known as “Jackpot.” Retarded and in her teens, she was allegedly raped repeatedly by at least seven men between the ages of 14 and 20. Mental-health organizations say the mentally impaired are vulnerable because they are unable to make a cogent report to the authorities.

It was not long ago that Jacob Zuma, South Africa’s jocular president (he has just taken his fourth wife) was on trial for rape and the country’s public was availed of all the lurid details. The gist was that a young girl found herself exposed and defenseless in a strange home when the future president demanded sexual relief. After a lengthy trial that included Zuma’s revelation that he once showered after having unprotected sex with an HIV-positive woman, Zuma was acquitted.

In the midst of the trial Julius Malema, now the leader of the ANC Youth League, entered the fray with visible glee and publicly ridiculed the girl’s claim of rape. Instead of complaining, Malema said the poor girl should have been grateful for the masculine attentions the country’s future president showered on her. This view attracted raucous applause from a wide spectrum of African supporters. Old habits die hard, and in the traditional African culture, total female submission to male demands is the norm.

This fact, along with evidence to suggest that African males have higher testosterone levels and libidos compared to the majority of their white or Asian counterparts, sets the stage for excess. It has also helped spread HIV around the continent.

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In such a “rape culture,” foreplay is for sissies, condoms are scorned, and females are encouraged to present with dry vaginas. If this cannot be naturally achieved, then ash, urea, and even sand are allegedly employed to facilitate traumatic entry. Invariably, there is vaginal damage, some of it serious, which accelerates the risk of STD transmission. While these observations might smack of unacceptable brutality, to some of those involved it is little more than agreeable sexual activity.

These differences in perceptions sometimes lead Africans to question whether Europeans are fit to judge their sexual proclivities. Critics are routinely damned as interlopers, while Western so-called “colonial” laws and Christian values are condemned as “racist.” It is widely accepted that the average African woman’s role is clear-cut. With few exceptions, they are there only to bear babies and burdens.

South Africa does not stand alone in some of these sexual excesses. As we have seen in recent African military conflicts, being a “soldier” armed with a gun guarantees unlimited opportunities for sexual gratification along with obvious perks such as looting and pillaging.

In some parts of Africa, female genital mutilation—the removal of the clitoris with the help of a razor or a piece of broken glass—is rampant. The UN estimates that between 130-140 million African women have endured such forcible primitive surgeries.

Women’s liberation has yet to reach the Dark Continent.