Extract from Dan Roodt’s letter last week to the UN:
Mr Jim McLay
New Zealand’s Permanent Representative to the UN
Your Excellency,
I am writing to you on behalf of the Pro-Afrikaans Action Group, an NGO in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Currently there are serious and consistent human rights abuses in South Africa, directed against the Afrikaner minority.
Many of our people are emigrating or more precisely, fleeing, to your country, which you probably know.
The violence takes the form of ethnic murders on our farmers, widespread incidences of rape, as well as statues and other elements of our historic heritage that are being vandalised, with government giving its tacit support to such crimes which are in direct violation of the Unesco (UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation) rules, as well as South Africa’s treaty obligations.
Over the past few days, there has been renewed ethic violence in the form of attacks and murders of foreign Africans residing in our country, dubbed “xenophobic violence” by our local media.
I look forward to your response.
Yours sincerely,
Dan Roodt
This is a letter written last Thursday by Roodt, the self-confessed defender of whatever is left of the ghost of apartheid.
Roodt’s deception is precisely shared by the general wealth and privilege white South Africa still enjoys 21 years into democracy.
But wait. It does not end there. Roodt mischievously weaves in the continuing xenophobic attacks on foreign nationals into what he calls the ethnic cleansing of Afrikaaners in South Africa.
He pontificates: “Over the past few days, there has been renewed ethic (sic) in the form of attacks and murders of foreign Africans residing in our country dubbed ‘xenophobic violence’ by our local media.”
“Marxism-Leninism is also gaining ground in South Africa, especially through a radical political party known as the Economic Freedom Fighters that is advocating the occupation and confiscation of land.
“The party is known for its slogans aimed at ethnically cleansing South Africa of the Afrikaner minority.”
Under normal circumstances, straight thinking South Africans would not even bother themselves with the likes of him.
They would simply laugh Roodt off as someone who is spurring such lies out of boredom from his highly secured home in Dainfern, in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg, where an average house costs north of R2.5 million.
Reasonable South Africans would just carry on with their lives and spare not one second on denialists like him and many others who believe that the past has nothing to do with the squalid conditions that black people still find themselves living under 21 years into democracy. But therein lies the problem. Roodt is not alone.
There is an army of fringe lunatics who believe in his nonsense – people like Steve Hofmeyr, Sunette Bridges and Charl and Naira Nel – the last two are white South Africans who, despite not having experienced crime directly, are fighting for political asylum in Canada because they fear genocide and rape in the country of their birth. Add to that the so-called civil rights group Afriforum and the Front National party and you will smell just how foul the cocktail is.
But for Roodt to exploit the genuine fears African immigrants have at the moment smacks of nothing but opportunistic hypocrisy. I doubt that Roodt and his ilk have been to the black townships that surround their opulent residences.
For if he had, he would know that until the foreign nationals came and injected life into them, township economies had all but died a slow, painful death many moons ago.
At their peak these economies were run by locals who sold everything from salt and vinegar to meat and bicycles. When my late mother Sis Rebs wanted something, she simply walked to Bab’uNgwenya’s shop in Good Hope general dealership.
If she failed to find it, she would simply walk a few blocks away to get it from Blackchain – the largest retailer in the townships – in what we called a shopping centre back then.
Only when she could not find it at Blackchain would she begrudgingly board a taxi to town to get it.
When Sis Rebs wanted her beautiful hair done, she simply went to Lydia’s hair saloon in the neighbourhood, which up to this day uses Herman Mashaba’s Black Like Me products.
Shadow
But both the Blackchain and Ngwenya’s corner café have died. The once busy centre of the local economy has become a shadow of its former self.
It died partly because the locals who ran them got so drunk with the power they wielded on prices for goods, and also because white capital suddenly woke from its slumber and built real shopping centres around the townships when it realised that the potential of the market it had paid no attention to could no longer be ignored.
Whatever was left of the township economy today hobbles on make shift restaurants, which you find dotted all over the township selling anything from tripe to bunny chows.
There are resilient ones like Lydia and Nthabiseng Maseko who run shebeens and have never let go of their clientele.
At Maseko we mix easily with people like Chavito from Mozambique and Louis wa Gadango of Tanzania, and we talk mostly about nothing of particular importance except our love for the contents of the brown and green bottles.
In turn, Sis’Nthabiseng has managed to raise two beautiful daughters out of our thirst. But Chavito and wa Gadango are not the only foreign nationals who have joined our midst.
There are others, who having fled their countries for political and economic reasons, jolted life into the economies and occupied the abandoned shops that spread throughout most townships.
They repair our cars and tyres at a very reasonable price.
The foreign nationals have also simplified the complications of economics and the power of buying in bulk.
They put their money together and buy the goods as a group, thereby soliciting good discounts from wholesalers.
But the foreign nationals do not keep the discounts to themselves. They extend it to consumers, mostly the old and the unemployed and offer low prices to the delight of all that are involved in this powerful but simple value chain.
They also pay a good rental for containers and add a few more plates to stomachs that would otherwise be reliant on social grants for survival. These shops also extend credit to poverty-stricken communities.
Even the large retail chains that are in the shopping centres are beginning to feel their presence. That is why level-headed people like the leadership of the Gauteng government have put aside R1 billion to build and improve infrastructure for township economies.
This is what stereotypes like Roodt and his type do not understand: the interwoven labyrinths of this mutual respect and peaceful co-existence that exists between the locals and the foreign nationals.
Ashamed
They should be ashamed of themselves because they bathe in opulence and use the economic power that they still enjoy as a powerful tool to shape the country’s political direction.
Just look at the millions Solidarity spends in courts in order to challenge affirmative action to see what I am talking about. In the current political configuration, the majoritarian power of the ballot has become a mirage. Money, the market and the economy run this country.
Without money our political rights – and the values on which our society is founded – have become a joke for people like him.
It has given them the kind of power that has translated in to political capital that they use to scuttle progressive and redistributive policies.
Roodt’s propaganda, which is spewed with abundant nonchalance, is also used quite often to hype poor white South Africans into hysteria and to oppose the government’s redistributive policies.
To them these are just part of black revenge against white South Africans. Their indifference and indignation about black poverty and its relationship to apartheid is one of the reasons why we have xenophobia in the first place.
But enough of fools who take themselves too serious for anybody’s liking.
Let me address myself to more important South Africans like King Goodwill Zwelithini kaNyangayezizwe Zulu. Ndabezitha! Hlanga Lomhlabathi! (Your Royal Highness).
I am a humble descendent of the Dlamini clan.
I am told that my great-great grandfathers, Mbilini kaMswati and Mthakathi kaVukayibambe Dlamini Nkosi fought in some of your greatest battles in defence of our future.
They call you Ngangezwelakhe because your lands stretch from the seas to the four corners of the winds, which is the reason why I do not bother myself about what you may or may not have said in Pongola two weeks ago.
On Monday, as you stood tall at Mabhida stadium, I felt the little bit of pride that I still have grow as you called on all your subjects to the defence of foreign nationals. Your mouth that tells no lies showed me the kind of a leader you are.
I remembered Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi asking the nation to spare a thought for AU’s Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma as she answers questions in Addis Ababa. Suddenly, I realised that wasting my time on Roodt and his small group of cronies is just that – wasting time.
And that those who use nyaope addicts to vent their jealousy at foreign-owned shops in the townships do not represent me.