Apartheid:
Lest We Forget (Or Never Knew)

Nelson Mandela bimetallic coin

3,996 words

French translation here

South Africa’s “architect of apartheid,” Dr. Hendrik Verwoerd, and its leading opponent, mining magnate Harry Oppenheimer, both died in the month of September, albeit over three decades apart. It is an opportune time therefore to consider the legacies of the two, within the context of renewed agonizing over the 1981 Springbok Tour of New Zealand with a team here again, this time multiracial, for the Rugby World Cup.

New Zealand’s hosting of the Rugby World Cup provided an opportunity for what a little state does best: become loudly self-righteous. New Zealand’s civic religion is rugby – something shared with the Afrikaners. Among the teams coming to New Zealand were the Springbok. Since rugby is not really the Bantu sport of choice, the Springbok team appears to have one African and one or two “Coloureds” out of 23 players, with a Coloured head coach. As ironic as it seems to some, New Zealand has its own apartheid rugby team: the Maori All Blacks but, unsurprisingly, this does not offend the disciples of “racial equality” who work on the dictum “Everyone is equal, but some are more equal than others.”

New Zealand’s Liberal Hand-Wringing

As odd as it might seem to outsiders, New Zealand was brought as close to civil war as it is ever likely to be when the Springbok whites-only team toured New Zealand in July 1981. The National Government acted on the principle that the State should not interfere with sport, and most New Zealanders supported that. However, a cadre of Leftists and their liberal useful idiots were able to organize a large mob that for the first time included in the front ranks members of Maori and Polynesian gangs that had not hitherto been known for their political commitments. One suspects that it was the opportunity to battle with the police rather than any comradely feelings for Africans that motivated these gang members.

For years a protest movement called Halt All Racist Tours (HART) had focused on disrupting sporting events that included South African teams. Not surprisingly they were heartily hated by the majority of sports-obsessed New Zealanders.

Of course, virtually all New Zealanders who supported the Springbok tour claimed to do so solely because “sport and politics don’t mix,” and they would be petrified by any accusations of “supporting apartheid.” Hence most of those who supported sporting relations with South Africa did so from a defensive position.

So far as the “silent majority” could be said to have organized on this issue there were a few groups whose tactics were typically genteel; primarily the War Against Recreational Disruption (WARD) whose founder, Robert Fenton, became a National Party Member of Parliament, albeit confined to the backbenches.

The most active on the “Right,” which did not flinch from supporting apartheid, were the New Zealand Southern Africa Friendship Association, led by Lt. Col. Sam Elderton and Major Barry Wilcox, the latter having served in Kenya during the Mau Mau insurgency, while Elderton had served the Raj. There was also the Association Defending South African Tours (ADSAT), a small group of Christchurch activists led by Brian Thompson who had ca. 1969 co-founded a New Zealand branch of the newly formed British National Front. Ironically, the only politician to forthrightly defend apartheid per se, was a Maori Mormon, the Hon. Ben Couch, who was promptly told to shut up by his Caucus.

When the Springboks arrived in New Zealand in 1981, such was the civil disobedience, the violence, and the vandalism, including the invasion of sporting venues, and the buzzing of a rugby field by a light plane, by the anti-apartheid movement, that it is widely regarded as having severely demoralized the Afrikaners and led in significant measure to them eventually voting themselves out of authority and into the present quagmire.

The anti-apartheid movement mobilized thousands of mostly liberal New Zealanders, who marched behind a vanguard donning motorbike helmets and wooden shields, confronting the thin blue line at every rugby match throughout New Zealand. The following is a description of this. Please note that it comes not from the nutter Left but from a website sponsored by the Ministry of Culture & Heritage, and is representative of the type of banality posing as history, that is particularly utilized by schools[1]:

The 1981 tour was part of a long process that led to this significant change in South Africa, and in this respect, it represented New Zealand’s contribution towards a major international event in the closing decades of the 20th century.

The anti-apartheid movement in South Africa was buoyed by events in New Zealand. Nelson Mandela recalled that when he was in his prison cell on Robben Island and heard that the game in Hamilton had been cancelled, it was as ‘if the sun had come out’. Some back home in New Zealand maintained that how South Africans ran their country was none of our business and criticised the anti-tour movement for being run by ‘perennial protesters’ and ‘rent-a-mob’ demonstrators interested only in fighting the police. In this way sections of New Zealand society tried to mask, or at least minimise, the long-term impact of the tour and the questions it posed for New Zealand society.[2]

This is the way most New Zealanders — even those who supported the Springbok tour and relations with South Africa during the apartheid era — now look back on those years, and agonize over how they could be so out of step with the modern world. While there were conservatives who defended apartheid as the most realistic system for South Africa, conservatives will now base their opposition to Maori “affirmative action”-style policies as being akin to that horrid “apartheid.” What is now regarded as the “Right” in New Zealand has adopted the liberal position.

With the presence of a marginally multiracial Springbok team now in New Zealand for the World Cup, New Zealanders have lately been reminiscing about the 1981 riots. Listening to radio talkback, for example, what is evident is that even those now middle-aged and elderly people who had supported the tour, they today shudder that they could have been so morally wrong. Their instincts of yesteryear have been atrophied by several decades of propaganda that invariably portrays Nelson Mandela as a Jesus-like figure[3] and South Africa as a luminous example of what the world could be: a Rainbow Nation of peace and love.

Another African Sinkhole

Yet in 2008 even one of the primary leaders of the anti-apartheid movement, John Minto, declined to accept a nomination for the Companion of O. R. Tambo Award given to those outside South Africa who contributed to the ending of apartheid.[4] Even Minto is disappointed with the failure of South Africa to become the paragon of Black justice, culture, and virtue that multitudes assumed was only being prevented by the Boer brutes.

But while he is also displeased with Zimbabwe’s ruler, Robert Mugabe, is this because Minto, or any others of his ilk, have looked at the travesty called Black Africa and reconsidered that perhaps the rule of the European was preferable? Heaven forbid. Like the communist who insists that Marxism has failed only because it has not been implemented properly, Minto et al. will not concede that African rule per se is the problem.

Rather, although the promise of a Black paradise in Southern Africa has turned to hell, he is now focusing on “minority rule” for New Zealand, and has become one of the luminaries of the recently formed Mana Party of former Maori Party Member of Parliament Hone Harawira.[5]

As for Hone, his own ideals are something less than liberal, but that is all the better for some whites possessed of a masochistic desire to be bootlickers for other races. Hone’s replies from his Parliamentary office to e-mails from Pakeha[6] referred to “white motherf…ers”[7] White liberals would be fine with being called “white motherf…ers,” but more disquieting for liberaldom is Harawira’s distaste at the thought of his daughter coming home with a white boyfriend.[8] Such forthright sentiments spill the beans on New Zealand’s posturing on the world stage as the epitome of racial brother- and sisterhood.

However, what none of these enthusiasts for the destruction of white rule in Africa have understood is that behind the slogans of “human rights” and “equality” stand the very interests that these Leftists and liberals thought they were opposing: International capitalism. One of the great myths of recent history is that apartheid existed in the interests of monopoly-capitalism. To the contrary, apartheid was inaugurated as a resistance to monopoly- capitalism, and to protect basic livelihoods from those who saw Black labor as the means of forcing living conditions to the lowest denominator.

“White Workers of the World Unite for a White South Africa”

How many of those who were committed to the dispossession of the Afrikaner “exploiters” have heard of the epochal 1922 revolt on the Rand? This Afrikaner syndicalist revolt against the mining interests was the catalyst for the victory of a Nationalist-Labour alliance that inaugurated the first steps towards apartheid. The same mostly Jewish monopolists who had opposed the Afrikaner from start to finish intended to use Black labor to undermine the white miners.

In late 1922 the Chamber of Mines announced that 25 semi-skilled job levels reserved for Whites would be given to Blacks, and that there would be thousands of White redundancies. At the same time coal mine owners announced wage cuts. The Mineworkers Union called a General Strike. While the Communist Party was involved, the main influences were the Afrikaner Mynwerkersbond; mostly former Boer farmers and war veterans who had been left destitute by the British scorched earth policy during the Anglo-Boer War, and allied Labour Party supporters.

When the mineworkers raised their banners proclaiming “Keep South Africa White” and “White Workers of the World Unite for a White South Africa,” the Communists were in no position to object. The coal miners, gold miners, engineers, and power workers on the Rand voted to strike and had the backing of both the Labour Party and the National Party. Prime Minister Jan Smuts urged the Chamber of Mines to negotiate, but they refused, and instead arrogantly announced a new labor ratio of 2 Whites to 21 Blacks, meaning many more redundancies.

The Labour Party-backed South African Industrial Federation created a “strike commando” to resist Black scab labor, although resisting calls for a General Strike. Smuts caved in to the demands of the monopolists and ordered the miners back to work. In response, the Miner Councils of Action deployed commandos throughout the Rand. Smuts responded with force and three Whites were killed by police at Boksburg. The National Party demanded a Parliamentary enquiry.

The SA Industrial Federation wanted to negotiate but the Chamber refused. Only then was a General Strike proclaimed. Armed commandos seized Johannesburg and proclaimed a “White Workers’ Republic.” Mine officials, bosses, and Black scabs were executed. Government forces attacked, and the air force levelled the miners’ quarters. On March 14 1922 the strike headquarters was overtaken, and the strike leaders were killed. The last resistance was put down on March 16.[9]

Such was the outrage against Smuts that in 1924 the Afrikaner Nationalists, in alliance with the Labour Party, assumed Office, and starting with labor laws, the foundations of apartheid began to be laid.[10]

Plutocratic Crusade Against Afrikaners

As in 1922 the primary enemy of the Afrikaner was the Oppenheimer mining, industrial and media empire, which includes Anglo-American Corp., and DeBeers. The traditional enemies of the Afrikaner had always been “Anglicized” Jews, from the time of the First Anglo-Boer War when the likes of Alfred Beit and the Rothschild interests around Cecil Rhodes tried to consolidate their authority under the authority of the British Flag.[11] However there was no more persistent enemy of the Afrikaner than the Oppenheimer dynasty, routinely referred to in the early Afrikaner Nationalist press as the “Hoggenheimers.”

The head of the dynasty during most of the apartheid era was Harry F. Oppenheimer. He became a Member of Parliament for the United Party when that party was the main opposition to the Nationalists. When anti-Nationalist veterans founded the militant Torch commando in 1950 Oppenheimer provided the funding.[12] When the Progressive Party was formed by a breakaway from United in 1959 Harry F. became the financial patron of the Party. When the Progressives first contested the Coloured seats in 1965 Harry F. funded all the campaigns then and subsequently, with 40,000 Rand annually. In 1966 he funded with Progressive General Election campaign with 50,000 Rand.[13]

Something of Harry F.’s motives can be discerned from his statement on the formation of the liberal think tank, the South Africa Foundation in 1960:

In effect the advent of the South Africa Foundation reflects the return of big business to active politics. Picture the industrial revolution that will take place in Africa if the Black Man’s economic fetters are struck from him! Think of the millions of skilled men who will enter the labour market. Think of the vast new consuming public! I think I can claim the main credit for this exciting vision of the new Africa, yet all that I have done really is to allow myself to be guided by the best interests of Anglo-American. [14]

Nearly two decades later Harry F. was explaining: “Nationalist politics have made it impossible to make use of Black labour.”[15] Perhaps “the good and the righteous” should contemplate that, the next time they pontificate about how they “marched against apartheid”?

Up until the assassination of Verwoerd on September 6, 1966 the Nationalists remained acutely aware of the identity of their real adversaries, Prime Minister Malan stating: “What we have against us is money power, principally under the leadership of Oppenheimer.”[16]

If the Left ever take some cognizance of their guru Professor Noam Chomsky on such issues they might reach some understanding, but can the willfully blind and the psychologically problematic be changed?:

See, capitalism is not fundamentally racist – it can exploit racism for its purposes, but racism isn’t built into it. Capitalism basically wants people to be interchangeable cogs, and differences among them, such as on the basis of race, usually are not functional. I mean, they may be functional for a period, like if you want a super-exploited workforce or something, but those situations are kind of anomalous. Over the long term you can expect capitalism to be anti-racist – just because it is anti-human. And race is in fact a human characteristic – there is no reason why it should be a negative characteristic, but it is a human characteristic. So therefore identifications based on race interfere with the basic ideal that people should be available just as consumers and producers, interchangeable cogs who will purchase all that junk that is produced – that’s their ultimate function, and any other properties they might have are kind of irrelevant, and usually a nuisance.[17]

Ironically, the Rightist position on capitalism has perhaps been no more cogently expressed than by this Leftist academic.

Dr. Hendrik Verwoerd, Prime Minister of South Africa, regarded as the “architect of apartheid,” and a statesman of immense stature who had the respect of Black Africa, provided the philosophical basis for separate development and the defense of the European in Africa.[18] After his assassination in 1966 his successors lacked the ideological coherence and a comprehension of the forces working against them, and adopted a defensive and inadequate — even apologetic — position. They tried to counter their opponents defensively, from the viewpoint of “the white man’s burden” instead of from the standpoint of white survival that had been the basis of Nationalist doctrine until the death of Verwoerd. In 1962 Verwoerd stated of these anti-Afrikaner forces in a speech before Parliament:

The directors, when they meet, hold private discussions. In the case of such a powerful body there is also a central body which lays down basic policy. The influence of that central body, to say the least, must be great in our economic life. Nobody knows, however, what they discuss there. In the course of his speeches, Mr Oppenheimer, the leader, makes political statements; he discusses political policy, he tires to exercise political influence. He even supports a political party. . . . In other words he has political aims; he wants to steer things in a certain direction. He can secretly cause a great many things to happen. In other words, he can pull strings. With all that money power and with his powerful machine which is spread over the whole country, he can, if he so chooses, exercise enormous interference against the Government and against the state.[19]

In 1953 even Saint Nelson stated of the Oppenheimer empire:

Rather than attempt the costly, dubious and dangerous task of crushing the non-European mass movements by force, they would seek to divert it with fine words and promises and divide it by giving concessions and bribes to a privileged minority.[20]

Yet when Harry F. died in 2000 Saint Nelson eulogized:

His contribution to building a partnership between Big Business and the new democratic government in the first period of democratic rule can never be appreciated too much.[21]

Predictably, Saint Nelson had whored himself to plutocracy, and has received the worshipful accolades of the world ever since. It was the pattern that was followed all over post-colonial Africa, where plutocratic neo-colonialism arose over the ruins of the European empires.

The Long Road to Capitalist Serfdom

While journalists, politicians, clerics, academics, and other sundry mental retards worship Mandela as the Risen Christ, even getting tearful when they speak His name, South Africa has descended into a hell on earth, as becomes evident not only by reading news sources from South Africa such as the journal Impact, but when one meets an Afrikaner refugee (of which there are many in New Zealand) who can be persuaded to open up on the reason they left their ancestral homeland.

What has been the result of post-apartheid South Africa? The answer is that the “anti-apartheid struggle” ushered a regime of privatization and globalization on the ruins of the state-directed economic structure that the Afrikaners created. So far from being exploitive capitalists, whipping old Darkie with the sjambok, as stereotyped by Marxist propaganda and the democratic press, the Afrikaners were an anomaly in the world economy: the last of a traditional European peasantry bonded to faith, blood, and land. The industrial structure included the parastatals, state-owned or partly owned corporations. With the advent of Saint Nelson’s ANC/Communist Party coalition, as one would expect, the “comrades” have set about delivering South Africa to international capitalism. In 1996 Saint Nelson, despite once having supported nationalization, stated: “Privatisation is the fundamental policy of the ANC and will remain so.”[22]

ANC economics adviser C. Mostert has detailed the history and ideology of privatization in South Africa, stating that the Nationalists introduced state supervision of the economy in 1948; a policy which began to be dismantled by the [corrupted] National Party in 1987, and which has been continued by the ANC Government.[23] Mostert states that the ANC has embarked on a policy recommended by the International Monetary Fund. He states that the word “privatisation” is not generally used, but rather it is the phrase “restructuring of state assets,” which is widely associated with privatization. The Government Communication and Information Service (GCIS) uses the two phrases interchangeably when it describes economic developments and policy.[24] He writes:

These privatization initiatives have taken different forms and include:

• The complete sale of companies, like Sun Air and seven radio stations to consortiums;
•  Build, Operate and Transfer arrangements for the building of roads;
•  The opening of private-public partnerships at local government level for the provision of services like water;
• Selling a partial stake (30%) in Telkom to combined American-Malaysian consortium; and
• The proposed sale of a 25%-30% stake of South African Airways

The ANC has stated: “Eskom is one of a host of government owned parastatals created during the apartheid era which the democratically elected government has set out to privatise in a bid to raise money.”[25]

Why does a country that had hitherto been so prosperous now need to raise capital by selling off its assets? The answer lies in South Africa having been quickly reduced to a basket case, a bottomless economic sinkhole, like every other “decolonized” state on the Dark Continent. The plutocrats who pushed for the destruction of so prosperous a nation apparently had a long-term dialectical plan that seemed, in the short-term, to undermine their profitability. In the long term, however, the impoverishment of South Africa by the incompetence that invariably results from “majority rule” has obliged South Africa to become an open economy operating an ongoing garage sale. But so long as South Africa now has universal franchise and has put the redundant Boer in his place, it matters not to most of the useful idiots of the Left who were merely performing their historic role as lickspittles of Money.

Notes

1. “The Classroom,” NZ History Online, http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/the_history_classroom