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| Professor Julian Cobbing |
South Africa, on a world-wide scale shall be the land with the loudest cry for reconciliation with itself at this moment.
The promise of ultimately ranking among the very best nations on Earth will otherwise be gone forever in the next ten or twenty years. And we will occupy the typical candidature for one of those fabulously rich countries peopled by incredibly asinine societies!
Our preoccupation as individual South Africans will be the task of waiting for other nations and even mere foreign organizations to come not only to rule us, but to extrude for foreign consumption even the richness in the bowels of our earth.
At that time, fraternal blood will be the only legal tender in Pretoria as the Rand will be long dead and what we currently call South Africa will be the proverbial gangster's paradise!
At that time we will grovel. We will thank the ruthless foreigners for just allowing our individual selves share in their ruthlessness against our own people.
For the more enterprising amongst us, our gory fingers (curled around portable and forlorn vessels), brother's blood ominously characterizing the vascular contents of our overflowing watering cans and sprays, all for the foreigner's permission to stand next to the mine dumps in the hope for a chance to spray the export-market stones clean with our national blood.
You think I'm kidding?
YOU are kidding!
SIGNS WRITTEN ON THE NATIONAL WALL READ "DISUNITY"
You walk into the midst of any ethnic group in the country today and you will hear the jeremiad and the wails blaring away and flaring your ear drums miles off from even their closed doors.
The Coloured communities will cacophonously warn you from afar Don't call us Coloureds we are maybe So-called.
Boers who only yesteryear were proud to be Boers, will scream back yes we do boer and farm but don't you call us that name, or we'll bleksem and strike you with the lightning for a kick in your butt, you impudent K*!
The fellow-African immigrant from Somalia, Tanzania etc who's been here in South Africa for 10 years already will say I don't want to have anything much to do with you, Phiri, neither with your language nor with your friendship. I simply want to establish myself financially in the cocoon of my own house.
The local South African Bantu community will desire to garland your shoulders under the flames of a tyre for not solely calling them "African" (as if the Boer, as if the Coloured, and as if the derogatively so-called Kwerekwere or more properly, fellow-African immigrants) are no Africans!
Rattled a bit, you stand back and think, Phiri Matanje WaMphunongandunyungu, what have you let yourself in for?
Then a voice says to you: "Settle down!
"You understand, don't you? Why these peoples are so agitated and negative in their narrow peoplehood?"
Names that used to bear descriptive connotations about them have since changed ring if not meaning. But that is only on the surface of their scowls.
Deep down below those frowns upon your offer for racial harmony, for friendship and for tolerance, lies the elusive Lochness Monster otherwise called IGNORANCE.
POLITICAL IGNORANCE RULES 2011 SOUTH AFRICA: A HISTORY LOST TO THE NATIONAL PSYCHE
This is a thorough INFORMATION BLACKOUT about the history of South Africa and the essence of what makes the scowler a South African or an African, for that matter!
You ask: Where am I going with this Doomsday scenario and can I really back my argument?
The meaning of "The Battle of Dithakong" as a prime example in my thrust.
And if I were talking rather than writing you would for sure go: "Battle of what?" you asked me.
But now, I am writing and I must ask: "You can read, can't you?"
Now you gracefully can confess to ignorance, can't you? Don't you worry! This is not a blemish on you; we are all of us ignorant of something all of the time!
Yet, Dithakong is a black hole in our national concious; she is like a mother, in your infancy invaded and cast out of the household by a poltergeist and a demon, utokoloshe who, while titillating and festooning Baby You, continued to muzzle your mother while burning down and out all evidence she is your mother.
You grow up one day to see a despicable woman scavenging for food in your neighbourhood. Yet, that she is your mother, you have no clue. So, ask me again: "Dithakong who?."
While Black Hole Dithakong , the eye of the South African storm, continues to suck in many in her infinite ignorance, our current so-called political leaders are making a kill for racial votes hence the ANC gets its votes from Bantu Africans while the DA makes do with votes from the Coloureds as well as from the Africans known as Boers (whites of Dutch and German descent).
We know that no self-respecting Boer will vote ANC principally because even the white area where Nelson Mandela lives (Johannesburg's Houghton) has never voted ANC in any local government election despite the incessant ink to flow from pens of white intellectuals glorifying their South African angel and icon, Mandela!
Maybe the DA and ANC politicians themselves do not know any better when it comes to Dithakong as indeed South Africa remains one of the least literate countries in the whole wide world, skyscrapers and fancy cars notwithstanding!
POLITICAL IGNORANCE RULES 2011 SOUTH AFRICA: A HISTORY LOST TO THE NATIONAL PSYCHE
This is a thorough INFORMATION BLACKOUT about the history of South Africa and the essence of what makes the scowler a South African or an African, for that matter!
You ask: Where am I going with this Doomsday scenario and can I really back my argument?
The meaning of "The Battle of Dithakong" as a prime example in my thrust.
And if I were talking rather than writing you would for sure go: "Battle of what?" you asked me.
But now, I am writing and I must ask: "You can read, can't you?"
Now you gracefully can confess to ignorance, can't you? Don't you worry! This is not a blemish on you; we are all of us ignorant of something all of the time!
Yet, Dithakong is a black hole in our national concious; she is like a mother, in your infancy invaded and cast out of the household by a poltergeist and a demon, utokoloshe who, while titillating and festooning Baby You, continued to muzzle your mother while burning down and out all evidence she is your mother.
You grow up one day to see a despicable woman scavenging for food in your neighbourhood. Yet, that she is your mother, you have no clue. So, ask me again: "Dithakong who?."
While Black Hole Dithakong , the eye of the South African storm, continues to suck in many in her infinite ignorance, our current so-called political leaders are making a kill for racial votes hence the ANC gets its votes from Bantu Africans while the DA makes do with votes from the Coloureds as well as from the Africans known as Boers (whites of Dutch and German descent).
We know that no self-respecting Boer will vote ANC principally because even the white area where Nelson Mandela lives (Johannesburg's Houghton) has never voted ANC in any local government election despite the incessant ink to flow from pens of white intellectuals glorifying their South African angel and icon, Mandela!
Maybe the DA and ANC politicians themselves do not know any better when it comes to Dithakong as indeed South Africa remains one of the least literate countries in the whole wide world, skyscrapers and fancy cars notwithstanding!
The very controversies, suspicions, misgivings and identity crises on the part of those Africans introductory to my script, suggest utter midnight for true South African reconciliation and national oneness despite all efforts by our government in that direction.
SO, WHAT, EXACTLY, SEEMS TO BE THE PROBLEM, MR PHIRI MATANJE, SIR?
OK, I will never be popular for this, but who cares, I never took interest in beauty contests anyway! But, the lack of education aside, methinks mainly there is a propaganda proxy war silently raging in the minds of politicians here: Pro- Britain or Pro-USA.
"Is that all that there is?" you ask.
"Bugger-all, nothing else!" I say.
My readership may recall that the USA was once a British Colony as much as the RSA, which creates a lot of cultural similarities and even affinities between the average South African and his/her American counterpart.
All of this amounts to making it simple for particularly an American to effectively make informed comment on South Africa's current dispensation, comment which may initially sound terrible and murderous sometimes on the first hearing, but comment still that turns out to be well-researched and easily defensible on closer scrutiny.
On that score, and very very naturally, Britain did not kindly lose out on that American War of Independence; nor did they with a humiliated smile succumb to a combined onslaught on them from the South African Boers and the crushing military might of Shaka Zulu's nephew (some say "son") King Cetshwayo at the Battle of Isandlwana.
"Bugger-all, nothing else!" I say.
My readership may recall that the USA was once a British Colony as much as the RSA, which creates a lot of cultural similarities and even affinities between the average South African and his/her American counterpart.
All of this amounts to making it simple for particularly an American to effectively make informed comment on South Africa's current dispensation, comment which may initially sound terrible and murderous sometimes on the first hearing, but comment still that turns out to be well-researched and easily defensible on closer scrutiny.
On that score, and very very naturally, Britain did not kindly lose out on that American War of Independence; nor did they with a humiliated smile succumb to a combined onslaught on them from the South African Boers and the crushing military might of Shaka Zulu's nephew (some say "son") King Cetshwayo at the Battle of Isandlwana.
What Britain has done to make up for ground lost in all those real battllefields of both the Anglo-Zulu War and the Anglo-Boer War in South Africa on one hand; and the American War of Independece on the other hand, IS TO OPEN A VIRTUAL NEW FRONTIER IN CLINGING TO THE REPOSITORY THEY EMBODIED AND SUPERIORITY THEY BOASTED IN THE KNOWLEDGE THEY HAD AND STILL HAVE ON BOTH FORMER COLONIES, ALL IN ORDER TO STEER THE FUTURE BY MEANS OF DOCTORING THOSE HISTORIES! Unresearched, for me it may also be untrue where the USA is concerned; but that is the definite case with South Africa.
Remember that the first task of a colonizer, just like an enslaver, is to attack, to steal or at least to foul and poison the host nation's knowledge base about itself. And colonial Britain, just like the Arabs who invaded and colonized North Africa millenia before the Europeans, was notoriously thorough in that respect.
That is why South Africa is in this current position of not only wallowing in ignorance over her own history and and her means of identifying stepping stones towards true national reconciliation, but this tip of Africa (unless we get more history-focussed political leadership than we've done so far post-1994) renders the people of this land walking zombis in the selfsame direction of Libya where the two giant intellectual protagonists (America and Britain) will one day, one year, one decade OR ONE CENTURY FROM NOW have to fight it out around a table on how to effect the proverbial regime change (from the forever-ruling-ANC) while our children will be murdering one another in the streets of Pretoria! Remember the gory watering cans I started off with?
In my view, there is no better example of the protagony between Britain and the USA over South Africa than in the two greatest leaders of South Africa: ANC Founder Pixley ka Isaka Seme (in many respects a child of the American Board of Commissioner for Foreign Missions and thus "pro-American") on one hand; and Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela (pro-Britain with a monument to boot built for him in London's Trafalgar Square; what with his anglophilia reflected in his own autobiography "Long Walk to Freedom" as well as in on-line snippets of Samuel Willard Crompton's "Nelson Mandela, Ending Apartheid" p. 45 ) where the struggle veteran belts out his pro-British worldview in the following fashion:
"I confess to being something of an Anglophile. When I thought of Western democracy and freedom, I thought of the British parliamentary system. In so many ways, the very model of the gentleman for me was an Englishman".
Clearly Mandela does not know anything about the undemocratic and unfreedom-like atrocities committed by British colonialism in South Africa against Africans of Bantu as well as of Boer stock in the aforementioned Anglo-African wars in this country. Nor does he know that the Mfecane was also a creation of British settlers in the very Cape Colony where he was born.
Or else, what is the explanation for almost blindly praising he who was supposed to be an enemy of your forefathers?
Now the ANC (as an organization, rather than as a ruling party which will be having a paltry but very solid 18 years come 2012) is turning 100 years in those less-than-200 days from now. Guess who is gonna shine? Britain of course and those who are predisposed to viewing Brittania as the ultimate South African Saviour! You won't hear anything about the American-spotted and -trained South African mammoth political genius called Pixley ka Isaka Seme! Blogger knows this because even as of this late hour in preparations towards a great centenary event next year, there are no plans to give Seme, the founder of the ANC (and not a "co-founder") his rightful place!
I would have know if that is the case seeing that Seme's grandchildren are my cousins by affinity and we communicate regularly!
This blind eye turned to Seme is all part and parcel of the British model of running the affairs of my country, South Africa AND IT IS AN UNWRITTEN RULE THAT YOU CANNOT MIX THAT MODEL WITH ANYTHING THAT IS TAINTED WITH AMERICANISM, TO SAY NOTHING OF GENUINE AFRICANISM!
This pro-British model is a tried and tested one even from the days of anti-apartheid struggle when "CIA agent" was the worst but common insult bandied around against any fault-finding comrade (and anybody who'd ever set foot in America was taken for granted to recruitment by the local Secret Service) while "MI6" remained a term as romantic as the fictional James Bond himself and nobody suggested that the many of the most important leaders of both the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania and the African National Congress (both liberation movements) who found themselves overwhelmingly going through doors opened for them in London rather than in Washington could as well have turned MI6 agents destined to short-change South Africa's ultimate liberation!
Without blaming the current South African government (seeing that the governmental stance on the aforesaid proxy war reflects what is going on in all political parties and circles in South Africa whether ruling or opposing (whether even radical or conservative), the wheels are nonetheless fast rolling out of the axis of this moribund model. This pro-British flunkeyism is for me a shambles from its own genes since it was in any case never meant to sustain our country as a sovereign, cohesive and viable entity for good. On the contrary, Pretoria was always going to troop along London for directions towards a self-identity, and there was no other avenue left for Tshwane to consummate her own self-determination and true economic freedom and success in that process.
For evidence that we are nowhere near those ideals, you need nothing much to see than only the escalation of poverty, the living corpses to trip over around smelly and urinated-upon street corners on every morning's walk to work in the Capital. A squalor in the heart of town concommitant with xenophobia, tribalism, racism and well-protected high-level corruption.
Once again, this is not a governmental shortcoming; as individuals from even opposition parties are known to dabble in the filth of protecting louts for comrades in high positions: so it has finally boiled down to a societal problem and a one-way street to hell save for divine intervention for which at least I pray every day!
Go for example into the heart of the aforementioned acts of xenophobia and tribalism in the country and state departments. Who does not know about them? Who does not know how to go about tackling the cankers? Why then is there a collective political swearing-in to silence and even obvious collaboration as getting elected becomes more important than the tenets of arguably the world's finest constitution?
IT IS BECAUSE YOU CANNOT TACKLE TRIBALISM AND XENOPHOBIA IN SOUTH AFRICA WITHOUT IDENTIFYING ITS GENESIS: BRITISH COLONIAL BRAINWASHING WITH WHICH SOUTH AFRICAN POLITICIANS OF ALL HUES AND SHADES HAVE LONG BEEN DYED IN THE WOOL FROM THE DAY THEY WERE BORN!
Take another example: the new and disturbing evidence that drug-smuggling is virulent even at the highest echelons of supposedly responsible citizenry; who among the opposition wants to loudly take this matter up in a more meaningful way? Ah yes, South Africans we are an impressionable nation, a fool for particularly Britain, in that when we hear theories that a highly-placed British profile is suspected of drug running, then we do not only on face value take such theories of the likes of American Lyndon LaRouche but we begin to say If they can do it at that level why can't we?
Popular though the 88-year-old American's theories are in the undercurrent of black politics in South Africa today (which partly explains the aforesaid disillusionment with the British model of A Self-Annointed Panacea For South Africa, LaRouche will easily be dismissed with a lot of epithets in the international arena despite the great Swahili people's saying that LISEMWALO LIPO NA KAMA HALIPO LAJA ("THERE CAN BE NO SMOKE WITHOUT FIRE.")
To the point, though (and the reason why we sported hereinabove the picture of Rhodes University's intensely erudite Professor Julian Cobbing), no South African politician pro-Britain or pro-America will dismiss with equal disdain one professor's comparatively nuclear-powered intellectual muscles with regards to his interrogations and interpretations of the first recorded wave of so-called black-on-black violence in South Africa some 200 years ago (known as Mfecane/Difaqane).
To simplify the concept of the Mfecane which had a domino effect thoughout an entire subcontinent, I would direct the historically-uninitiated towards a comparison with the turf wars fought in the last century by the Mangosuthu Buthelezi-led Inkatha Freedom Party against the Nelson Mandela-led ANC then, ALL COMBINED WITH THE WAVES OF XENOPHOBIA WE ARE SEEING IN THE CURRENT CENTURY DIRECTED AGAINST OTHER AFRICANS WHO ARE NON-SOUTH AFRICAN.
What Professor Cobbing may in that regard tell you without quoting him even for his best frame of mind is: In all these so-called black-on-black strifes the white man, particularly the British one, WILL BE NOWHERE TO BE SEEN! AND IF HE'S SEEN, HE'LL BE PORTRAYED WRINGING HIS HANDS IN UTTER SHOCK. BLACKS ARE JUST INCORRIGIBLE CREATURES PREDISPOSED TO DESTROY EACH OTHER SAVE FOR THE GRACE OF WHITE PRESENCE, WHICH SHOULD NOT BE OWED TO BLACKS!
Closer scrutiny shows a different picture, though; where colonial brainwashing through a falsified history of South Africa has been conducted by particularly the very colonial Britain over the centuries.
That is why a senior politician can easily parrot anti-Shaka Zulu British propaganda of "black domination of other blacks" and get away with it even though there is no HISTORICAL FACT TO BACK COUNTRY-WIDE BLACK-ON-BLACK DOMINATION EVER HAPPENING IN THE ENTIRE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA, WHEREAS WE ARE SEEING TRIBAL DOMINATION BEING VOCIFEROUSLY FOMENTED IN SOUTH AFRICA RIGHT NOW NOW POST 1994 COMING FROM THE DIRECTION OF THE THE ANTI-SHAKA POLITICIAN!
Let me end my tirade by saying, I am not advocating pro-Americanism, nor Pro-anyism. Nor should we be Anglophobic towards one of the finest peoples in the world in many respects. But even supposing that the British were the most detestable colonizers with the most debilitaing legacy to leave for mental tentacles in a post-colonial nation like South Africa, THEY NEVER EVEN ONCE PUT A GUN ON THE HEAD OF ANY SOUTH AFRICAN POLITICIAN TO SAY "LICK OUR BOOTS AND BUY OUR YARN FOR YOUR HISTORY". On the contrary, we follow their model of post-colonial and culturally-subservient attitude towards them PER OUR OWN VOLITION. We voluntarily take British anti-African colonial propaganda as the Bible truth to the extent of teaching our kids such even where evidence mounts every day to expose the colonial lie for what it is.
In that respect, allow me to quote the exemplary Professor Cobbing word-for-word in relation to the Never-Existed-Black-On-Black-Violence-Led-By-King-Shaka-Zulu. The venerable Prof is talking about the so-called "Battle of Dithakong" (a euphemism for a raid and trade in Bantu slaves, accompanied by the looting of their cattle by British settlers, the very models of gentlemen, who were assisted in the aforesaid murder and maiming by nobody else but two of their fellow settlers who masqueraded as missionaries and servants of God).
(Page 492 &493)
In 1829 Shane Bannister wrote of the early and mid-1820s:
“Amongst the Griquas and Bergenaars, who are... in considerable connection with the Cape, slaves obtained by barter, or by capture from Bootchuanas or Bushmen, are a common article of saleable property...They sell some of them into the Colony at a low price”.
The first surprise is that the ‘battle’ of Dithakong was one such slave (and cattle) raid, unprovoked, on a still unidentified ‘enemy’, who became immortalized as Mantatees [read Bantu per Blogger's comment]. This is clear from the writings of Moffat, Melvill and Thompson, the former two of whom, both missionaries, were the instigators and organizers both of the raid and the disposal of the prisoners. This emerges best in Melvill’s account. In Moffat (whose account shouuld be read slowly) we have to wade through a surreal, self-exculpatory version of events, in which the missionaries are depicted as restraining their brutal Griqua and Tlhaping allies, solicitously protecting the women and children, wringing their hands at the bestiality of man. It was, however, Moffat who in early June 1823 interrupted a journey to the Ngwaketse and returned at top speed to Griqua Town on the basis of unsubstantiated rumours of a Mantatee presence. It was Mr Melvill who brought the three most feared Griqua leaders of their generation-Waterboer, Adam Kok and Barend Barends --together, and organized the arms and powder. It was Moffat and Thompson who spied out the positions of the victims; and Moffat and Melvill who guided the army into ‘battle’ on 25 and 26 June.
In a seven-hour massacre possibly two or three hundred Mantatees [read Bantu per Blogger's comment] were shot dead and their villages burnt. The Griqua rounded up over 1000 cattle, one of their major objectives in joining the expedition. Thirty-three cattle were given to Melvill ‘according to the custom of the country’. Moffat, Melvill and a mission labourer named Hamilton used armed Griqua to round up the women and children who were not dead or had not been able to escape. Over ninety prisoners were taken back to Kuruman on 26-27 June. There a squabble broke out between the missionaries and the Tlhaping chief, Mothibi, over their disposal. Griqua guns decided the issue in favour of the missionaries. During the next few days Melvill scoured the countryside and captured at least fifty more women and children. He avoided the men. Women and young males were what the Cape market preferred. Melvill immediately despatched fifteen Mantatees for sale to Graaff Reinet in the north-eastern Cape, for which he received payment in ammunition. At least thirty remained with the Griqua in Griqua Town. Moffat kept several at Kuruman, and took one boy as a personal servant who was ‘affectionately domesticated in the family of his benefactor [sic]’. Others, including five women—who fortunately ‘indicated nothing of cannibal ferocity’—and a ‘fine boy’, Moffat took with him for distribution in Cape Town in January 1824 to the applause of the local press. Almost certainly the rest were sent to various destinations in the Cape.
The missionaries tried to depict themselves as succouring the prisoners, and rescuing them from their evil chiefs and starvation (with all those cattle?). There is not doubt, however, that they were fully and consciously engrossed in what they were doing [Blogger's emphasis], i.e. collecting slaves, and that the cover of hypocrisy was intended to deflect the certain censure from the government in London and from their seniors in the London Missionary Society if it had leaked out that they were selling people into slavery. The word Mantatee was probably coined as a euphemism for forced labourers taken from the Tswana and Sotho north or the Orange [River] and driven south into the Cape. At least that is what the word meant throughout the Cape in the 1820s.
TODAY, THE SO-CALLED BATTLE OF DITHAKONG HAS EXACTLY TURNED ONE MORE YEAR OLD, ITS 188TH, YET NO SINGLE SOUTH AFRICAN POLITICIAN MAKES MENTION OF IT WHEREAS WITH IT OBVIOUSLY STARTED THE CURRENT ILL-FEELING AND ALIENATION BETWEEN COLOUREDS AND BANTUS, BETWEEN BANTUS AND BANTUS. ULTIMATELY, WITH IT ALSO STARTED THE UPHEAVALS THAT, ON REACHING THE EARS OF THE LIKES OF PATRIOTIC ZULU KING SHAKA ON ONE HAND AND SOMHLOLO (KING SOBHUZA I OF THE SWAZIS AND BLOGGER'S THIRD GREAT GRANDFATHER MATERNALLY) RESULTED IN THE GALE FORCE THAT SAW AFRICANS CROSSING THE LIMPOPO, THE ZAMBEZI AND MANY MANY OTHER RIVERS OF CONQUESTS NOT WITHOUT THE COMPANY OF BLOGGER'S PATERNAL THIRD GRANDFATHER, GENERAL PIKAMALAZA PHIRI WHO HAILED FROM THE MATANJE PEOPLE PRE-SHAKAN KWAZULU-NATAL AMONG THE CURRENTLY DISDAINED ETHNIC-TONGA SECTIONS OF PRESENT-DAY ZULU PEOPLE WHERE EQUALLY-UNDERMINED ANC FOUNDER PIXLEY KA ISAKA SEME ETHNICALLY ORIGINATED. IT IS INDEED A HISTORY THE UNDERSTANDING OF WHICH CAN BUILD TRUE ETHNIC COHESION IN PRESENT DAY SOUTH AFRICA, I DECLARE.
WHY IS SUCH AN IMPORTANT DAY NOT COMMEMORATED IN SOUTH AFRICA TODAY! WHY IS IS NOT EVEN MENTIONED EVER?
WHY IS SUCH AN IMPORTANT DAY NOT COMMEMORATED IN SOUTH AFRICA TODAY! WHY IS IS NOT EVEN MENTIONED EVER?
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