This picture of a charging African elephant was taken by Gary Freeman (left) a longtime safari guide in South Africa.
We must emphasize that the late Mr Freeman [Wut?! Ed.] was not your typical Great White Hunter, but a guide. He loved animals in general, and elephants in particular. He allegedly once declared that he "would rather be killed by" an elephant than shoot one.
And so he was. Mr Freeman was leading a walking safari at Klaserie Private Nature Reserve in the Limpopo province of South Africa on April 9th when he died in an elephant attack. Mr Freeman was taking a tour group through the reserve, which he owned.
The group had got out of their vehicle to proceed on foot when, according to the polisie, "an elephant suddenly emerged and charged at him. He tried to scare it off with the revolver he was carrying, but he was ultimately attacked by the elephant."
Sometimes life has a sudden yet inconclusive end. Blog posts too.
Walt was in South Africa in the mid-90s when the white-run country was handed over to the Marxist African National Congress. Predictably, it has slid downhill ever since, and is now just a small cut above Zimbabwe in terms of standard of living and everything else that matters. Now they want to seize white farms -- what took them so long? -- to ensure starvation.
South Africa is also (and again predictably) home to one of the world's worst epidemics of HIV/AIDS. At least 8.5 million of its people are living with HIV, and Sky News (the woke British version, not the painfully honest Aussie site) is whining that their treatment is in doubt thanks to President Trump's executive order freezing foreign aid for 90 days.
Until the introduction of Dubya's President Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) in 2003, African sufferers from the deadly disease were at the mercy of their witch doctors (not kidding -- look it up!) there was no medication. Nelly Zulu, an activist and mother living with HIV in Soweto told Sky News, "The government would tell us to take beetroot and garlic. It was very difficult for the government to give us treatment but we fought very hard to win this battle. Now, the challenge is that we are going back to the struggle."
In this video, a prostitute walks up to the security guards outside a shuttered USAid-funded sexual health clinic in Johannesburg's inner-city district. She looks around with confusion when she is told the clinic is closed. She tells Sky's reporter it has only been two months since she came here to receive her usual care. Now, she must scramble to find another safe place for her sexual health screenings and pre-exposure prophylaxis. Like many sex workers, free sexual health clinics are her lifeline. "You don't have to quit working. Just keep taking these pills, provided by those nice Americans."
Too bad, eh. But ask yourself why South Africa, still a comparitively wealthy nation -- compared with Zimbabwe, say -- should be receiving handouts from American taxpayers to mitigate the poor lifestyle... and political... choices of its citizens.
Meanwhile, South African boers (white farmers) say they are deeply worried by a land seizure bill has been signed into law by President Cyril Ramaphosa. Basically, this bill gives the government power to take the farmers' land, and even their domestic houses, and not pay any compensation, if there is "good reason" for so doing. What constitutes "good reason" has not been stated, but "to give it to blacks" is Walt's guess. (Lifetime pct .989)
Farmers who choose to move to someplace where they won't experience reverse racism will be looking to Australia, Canada, maybe even the US of A, where their agricultural expertise will be welcome. Souoth Africa's loss will be our gain! And here's a shining example...
Susanna Heystek's family migrated to Canada around the turn of the century. Things have gotten worse in South Africa since then. They're getting worse in the Great No Longer White North too, but for the time being, it's a better bet than the land they left.
This Sunday afternoon's TV schedule offered a choice between foorball and Hallmark Christmas movies. The former doesn't interest me and the latter sicken me, so I just about broke my wrist looking for something, anything else.
Imagine my surprise to find (on the Aboriginal People's Television Network!) an excellent but little-known sci-fi movie, District 9. Released in 2009, the film was directed by Neill Blomkamp, written by him and Terri Tatchell, and produced by Peter Jackson and Carolynne Cunningham.
Set in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 2002, it tells what happens when alien refugees -- in this case real aliens from outer space -- colonize an earthly city over which their spacecraft has been stranded. Multinational United (MNU) is the agency of the world government charged with giving them humanitarian aid.
Wikus van der Merwe, played by novice actor Sharlto Copley, is a minion of MNU tasked with getting the loathesome "prawns", as the earthlings call the aliens, ready for resettlement in a new encampment to be known as District 10. District 9 is the story of how Wikus becomes infected with an alien fluid, slowly turning him into one of the reviled prawns.
District 9 was the first documentary-style film to be nominated for Best Picture Oscar, as well as three other Academy Awards. It didn't win any of them, not even the Oscar for Best Achievement in Visual Effects, even though the CGI "prawns" and all the other SFX were beyond top-notch.
The movie is just too politically incorrect. It was banned in Nigeria, for instance, because that country's government felt that it unfairly portrayed Nigerians -- the only humans who could coexist with the aliens -- as cannibals and savages. Imagine that.
Stateside, the many admirers of the "New South Africa" were upset that all the shacks in District 9 were actual shacks that existed in the slums of Johannesburg, which were to be evacuated and the residents moved to better government housing, paralleling the events in the film. Only one shack was created specifically for the movie.
Similarly, the mutilated animal carcasses in the background of many scenes were all too real and, with only a few exceptions, were already in the real slums and shacks used for the filming.
The MNU headquarters buildings shown in numerous scenes throughout the film are, in reality, the Carlton Centre complex belonging to South African state transport company Transnet. The shorter of the two buildings is actually the former Carlton Hotel which was mothballed in 1997 "due to low occupancy." When Walt stayed there near the end of the apartheid regime, he was warned not to leave the building except to catch an approved taxi in the daytime, and never at night.
15 years after the release of District 9, the question of what to do when a horde of alien invaders takes over your country is more germane than ever. Residents of Los Angeles, San Francisco and Oakland, where "encampments" of aliens and other undesirables were largely unknown in 2009, will feel uncomfortable watching this movie now.
At the end of the film we are told that District 9 was dismantled, and its unwelcome residents moved to District 10, which is growing bigger and more foul every year. Let that sink in....
UPDATE ADDED at 1800 FMT: Our attention has been drawn to "Visit California: It's America's Future", a gem of a video just dropped by the Babylon Bee (natch!). Watch it and understand why the gliberals hated District 9.
As Walt's friends and regular readers know, I called Zimbabwe -- known in earlier, better days as Rhodesia -- home for some years in the 1990s. Zimbabwe (aka the Land of Bambazonke) was one of the last African countries to achieve independence from their colonial masters, in this case "Great" Britain. Today, 44 years after independence, Zimbabwe is an economic basket case, an effective one-party state ruined by its government's ignorance, incompetence and kleptomania.
While I lived there, I often visited RSA, the Republiek van Suid-Afrika, orRepublic of South Africa, which was on the verge of overthrowing the National Party and its apartheid régime of racial separation. The 1994 elections, held for the first time under a one-man-one-vote system, brought to power the African National Congress, led by Nelson Mandela. The ANC has ruled South Africa ever since.
In the run-up to the handover of power to the black majority, my friends and colleagues told me, "You just watch. The blacks are incapable of running a country. In a few years, it'll be just like 'up north'."
This weekend, the people of South Africa are celebrating -- sort of -- the 30th anniversary of freedom from the rule of the white settlers. In the week leading up to the anniversary, countless South Africans were asked what three decades of freedom from apartheid meant to them.
The dominant response was that while 1994 was a landmark moment, it is now overshadowed by the joblessness, violent crime, corruption and near-collapse of basic services like electricity and water that plague "the new South Africa" today.
The 1994 election changed South Africa ("Republic" has been dropped from the official name) from a country where black and other non-white people were denied not just the right to vote, but many basic freedoms. Apartheid laws controlled where they lived, where they were allowed to go on any given day, and what jobs they could have.
After the fall of the apartheid system, the country's new constitution guaranteed (supposedly) the rights of all South Africans regardless of their race, religion, gender or sexual preferences. However, it doesn't give all those "marginalized" folks the white houses, white cars and white women they coveted.
Nor has it brought about freedom from want. Quite the opposite. The black majority -- more than 80% of the population of 62 million -- are still overwhelmingly affected by severe poverty. The official unemployment rate is 32% --, the highest in the world -- and more than 60% cent for young people (aged 15 to 24).
South Africa is still the most unequal country in the world in terms of wealth distribution, according to the World Bank, with race a key factor. More than 16 million mostly black South Africans (a quarter of the country's population) rely on monthly welfare grants for survival.
Seth Mazibuko, an anti-apartheid activist in the 1970s, sums things up, thus, "Let us agree that we messed up." So they did. Things are worse now than when the Afrikaners were in charge, and the chances of returning to those not-so-bad-after-all days are slim and none.
"Oh dear!" (Walt hears the libtards cry!) "How dare you, how dare you, give space to senophobic, racist, white supremacist, yada yada yada propaganda? Except it's not. It's the honest opinion of a black woman, Zandile Dabula, who last June was elected President of Operation Dudula, a movement set up in South Africa two years ago to formalise what had been sporadic waves of vigilante attacks against foreigners dating back to shortly after blacks took power in 1994.
Ms Dabula is calm, charismatic and emphatic about the group's message: Foreigners are the root cause of South Africa's economic hardship.
When a reporter for the BBC (Britain's very woke state broadcaster) argues that this campaign is based solely on hate, she tells her: "We must be realistic here that most of the problems that we have are caused by the influx of foreign nationals.
"Our country is a mess. Foreign nationals are working on a 20-year plan of taking over South Africa."
When challenged, she admits the "20-year plan" was a rumour but says she believes it is true. "You see drugs everywhere and most of the drug addicts are South African rather than foreign nationals. So, what's happening? Are they feeding our own brothers and sisters so that it can be easy for them to take over?"
Operation Dudula calls itself a civic movement, running on an anti-migrant platform. "Dudula" is a Zulu word meaning "to force out". With one in three South Africans out of work in one of the most unequal societies in the world, foreigners in general have become an easy target. The South African Social Attitudes Survey for 2021 found that almost half of the population of 60 million people believed there were between 17 and 40 million immigrants in the country.
Current polling suggests support for the Communist-backed African National Congress (ANC), the party once led by Nelson Mandela which has governed South Africa since 1994, could fall below 50% for the first time. Operation Dudula has ambitions to fill that vacuum and has now transformed itself from a local anti-migrant group into a national political party, stating its aims to contest next year's general election.
Operation Dudula's most pressing complaint is the huge influx of drugs into South Africa's most deprived communities. With drugs comes crime. South Africa's justice minister says that immigrants made up 8.5% of all convicted cases in 2019 and 7.1% in 2020. The figures are lower than those for the US of A, but, unlike Americans, South Africans intend to fight back, and they mean "fight" literally.
In Diepkloof, in eastern Soweto, the BBC joins a so-called Dudula taskforce. Men in trucks are going to confront a Mozambican shopkeeper who a South African landlady alleges has not paid his rent. A confrontation ensures, in which one of the men, Mandla Lenkosi, threatens to beat up the foreigner.
When the BBC asks, the Dudula group maintain they are enforcing the law.
Mr Lenkosi, also from Soweto and out of work, takes part in raids on migrant homes and workplaces, people who are suspected of anything from drug dealing to remaining in the country past their visa date.
"We grew up in apartheid times, where things were much better than what it is now," he says, pointing to the drug problems. "The law was the law [then]."
His fellow Dudula supporter, Cedric Stone, agrees: "South Africa needs to go back to the old South Africa that we know.
"Our fathers started the tuck shops but today all those tuck shops are all foreigners, especially, Bangladeshis, Somali and Ethiopians. Why?"
Ms Dabula says critics of Operation Dudula who maintain it is a collective of violent vigilantes are wrong.
"We don't promote violence and we don't want people to feel harassed," but adds, "We cannot be overtaken by foreign nationals and do nothing about it."
Hundreds of supporters travelled to attend Dudula's first national conference in Johannesburg in May, where members voted to register the group as a political party. Waving South African flags, dancing and singing their way through the streets to the City Hall, it felt like a celebration.
However, the songs they sang carry a threatening... and plain... message: "Burn the foreigner. We will go to the garage, buy some petrol and burn the foreigner."
At the same gathering, Isaac Lesole, Operation Dudula's technical adviser, posed a question to the cheering supporters: "Do we make peace with illegal foreigners?" In union, they shouted back, "No!"
Footnote: Americans are fed up to the teeth with the problems caused by "migrants" and "uncodumented aliens". But they would never take up arms to resist the invasion of their communitiees, would then. No, of course not.
Also forgotten (momentarily) in Walt's rush to get ready for Christmas Winter Holiday was the commemoration by Afrikaners around the world of the Day of the Vow (Geloftedag, in Afrikaans) , December 16th.
The Vow refers to a promise to God made during the Battle of Blood River on 16 December 1838. About 400 Voortrekkers vowed that if God rescued them out of the hands of the approximately 20,000 Zulu warriors they were facing, they would honour that day as a sabbath day in remembrance of what God did for them.
Originally called Dingaansdag (Dingaan's Day), December 16th was made an annual national holiday in 1910, before being renamed Day of the Vow in 1982.
In 1994, after the end of Apartheid, it was officially replaced by the Day of Reconciliation, an annual holiday also on December 16th. But, as noted above, many still celebrate it unofficially.
So you'll be ready for it next December 16th, or in case you've forgotten, Walt is please to present here Die Stem van Suid-Afrika, also known as "The Call of South Africa" or simply "Die Stem", the national anthem of South Africa from 1938 to 1994. It is sung here first in Afrikaans, then in English.
That South Africa is now gone with the wind -- the ill wind of anti-colonialism that swept through African in the second half ot the 20th century, bringing good to no-one, including those the fight for majority rule was meant to help. The colour of the rulers changed, but the lot of the ruled only got worse. "Mother Africa Wins Again."
Groete aan al ons Suid-Afrikaanse lesers! Long-time readers of WWW may remember that I spent the better part of the `90s in southern Africa, chiefly in Zimbabwe with forays into the Republiek van Suid-Afrika / Republic of South Africa.
I was there for the transition from "white settler rule" or "the apartheid regime" to "majority rule" or the "new South Africa" -- the original rainbow nation.
In the bad old days (prior to the worse latter days) the country had two official languages, Afrikaans and English. Afrikaans is a simplified -- some would say degraded -- form of the Dutch which was spoken by the original European settlers in the 17th century.
It is not a hard language for English-speakers to learn and pronounce, although the English, being English, mostly refused to make the effort. Most native speakers of Afrikaans are able to speak English. When they do, their accent sounds like that of the bad guys in Lethal Weapon II.
One of our agents, who amuses himself by trolling dating sites and chat rooms looking for fake profiles, says that he often sees (black) Africans from such fraud hotspots as Nigeria and Ghana claiming to speak Afrikaans, thinking that the word refers to an African language. Apparently they do this also, to prove their citizenship, when using fake South African passports to board flights to the UK/Europe and North America.
This is the reason why discount airline Ryanair has started requiring South African passengers to prove their nationality before travelling by completing a test in Afrikaans, even though that language is now used by just by 12% of the country's population.
The Irish airline does not operate flight to/from South Africa, but says that says any UK-bound passengers flying to the UK from another part of Europe must fill in a "simple questionnaire" due to what it describes as a high prevalence of fraudulent South African passports. "If they are unable to complete this questionnaire," a Ryanair spokesthingy told the meeja, "they will be refused travel and issued with a full refund."
What an interesting idea! Wonder what would happen if the Brandon administration ordered guards along America's southern border to demand that all those African and south Asian-looking people claiming to be "refugees" from Mexico and Central America prove they can speak Spanish!
VIDEO ADDED 7/6/22: Ed. forgot to embed this video of Susanna Heystek playing "Bowing the Strings". This is a Canadian fiddle tune (written by Ned Landry), played in Canada by Ms Heystek -- 15 years old at the time -- whose Afrikaaner family immigrated to Canada from "the new South Africa".
The wildlife images are from South Africa, where the Heystek family were prosperous Boers (that's Afrikaans for "farmers"). They left that all behind to come to what they thought was the Great White North. Hope they haven't been too disappointed!
Something that many of our readers may not understand about the current rioting and looting in South Africa is that the problem is not so much racism as tribalism. Things were quieter yesterday in Johannesburg -- all that "reparations shopping" tires you out, eh -- but still out of control in Durban, the biggest city of KwaZulu-Natal (KZN), where whites and "Asians" (read: south Asians) have formed armed self-defence militias to protect themselves and their property.
Most of the looting, though, is black-on-black.
Like many other African countries whose borders were established by Europeans in the 19th century, South Africa is an amalgam of different tribes who dislike each other almost as much as they dislike whites. The biggest groups are Zulus (21 %), Xhosas (17 %) and the Sotho (15%). Smaller minorities are the Tswana, Venda, Ndebele, Swasi, and Pedi, among others. The Khoi-San -- the ones we used to call "Bushmen" (see the excellent movie The Gods Must Be Crazy) -- are originally hunter-gatherers who have inhabited the land for a long time.
As you might guess from the name, Kwa-Zulu Natal (formerly just "Natal") province, is the homeland of the Zulus, a fierce and warlike people whom the British imperialists fought hard to displace in the 19th century. Pictured below is a painting of the Battle of Isandhlwana, fought on 22 January 1879, the first major encounter in the Anglo-Zulu War between the British Empire and the Zulu Kingdom.
Eleven days after the British commenced their invasion (for such it was) of "Zululand" (as they called it), a Zulu force of some 20,000 warriors attacked a portion of the British main column consisting of about 1800 British, colonial and native troops and perhaps 400 civilians, killing most of them
During the final hour of the battle, a contingent of about 4000 Zulu warriors broke off from their main force to attack a small mission station at Rorke's Drift, about six miles distant. A force of about 150 British troops -- mostly Welshmen of B Company, 2nd Battalion, 24th (2nd Warwickshire) Regiment of Foot -- held off the attackers in a fierce two-day battle which has been immortalized in one of Walt's favourite films, Zulu, starring Stanley Baker and Michael Caine.
Here is a clip of one of the opening scenes of the movie, showing some handsome men and beautiful women doing a pre-marital dance, in preparation for a mass marriage.
Readers who were not transfixed by the sight of the dancing girls may note that the missionary (played by Jack Hawkins) had a little conversation with the Zulu chief, who was actually... wait for it... a Zulu chief! Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi played his grandfather, Cetshwayo kaMpande, king of the Zulu Kingdom from 1873 to 1879 and its leader during the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879.
After a lot more fighting, "Zululand" was incorporated into Natal province, which was renamed KwaZulu-Natal in the transition from the apartheid era to the "new South Africa". Mr Buthelezi was still the Zulu Chief, and from 1975 to 2019 led the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), the main opposition to the Communist-dominated African National Congress (ANC), which has ruled South Africa since 1994.
They do have elections in South Africa, about as free and fair as the American presidential election of 2020. The IFP never had a chance of forming a national government because it is supported almost exclusively by the Zulus. The other tribes fall into line with the ANC, and the whites and Asians make up the Democratic Alliance, never really a force in SA politics, nationally.
What does this have to do with this week's riots? Just this... Some Zulus, seeing that the IFP would never get their hands on the levers of power, defected to the ANC, which is now split along tribal lines. The disgraced ex-President, Jacob Zuma, is a Zulu, and it is his people who are now in the streets. If Mr Zuma lived like a traditional Zulu chief, well, why shoudn't he?!
Mr Zuma adheres to many traditional Zulu customs, including polygamy. This has endeared him to some segments of the population but has also been a source of criticism from others, who find some customs to be at odds with what they consider to be "modern societal norms". In February of 2010, Mr Zuma addmitted that he had fathered a child out of wedlock, something frowned upon in traditional Zulu culture.
He also had to deal with allegations of impropriety regarding extensive upgrades -- "for security reasons", of course -- to his private homestead at Nkandla in KZN. An official report in March of 2014 concluded that many of the publicly funded improvements made to Zuma’s homestead, such as a swimming pool, an amphitheatre, and a cattle kraal, were... wait for it... not security-related. Mr Zuma was found to have "benefited unduly" from the "upgrades" ans was asked to pay for some of them. Whether he ever did so is not known.
The list goes on, but the present hoorah comes down to the feeling of Mr Zuma's supporters that he was persecuted for living the life to which he was entitled. And if he corruptly received certain benefits, well, what American president could plead "not guilty" to similar accusations? And anyway, it's not like Mr Zuma is white! He's just another victim!
Besides, in today's South Africa, any excuse for rioting and looting will do as long as it is somehow tied to making non-black people pay for the oppression of black people, once upon a time. Thank goodness that's only South Africa and not any place closer to home!
You could see it coming. Here's what happens after years of crime and corruption, economic stagnation and rising unemployment, the crumbling of the state in key sectors such as electricity and transport, a growing lawlessness in many regions, and an unofficial policy of impunity for violent street mobs.
What you see in the pix is not "reparations shopping" in Chicago, St Louis, San Francisco or Portland -- all those fine Democratic cities -- but black people rioting and looting in Johannesburg and other cities of South Africa. Happening right now, it's what the gliberals call "mostly peaceful protests" against the imprisonment of former president Jacob Zuma after convictions on charges of corruption and malfeasance.
As in the Excited States of America, folks of the coloured persuasion seize on any excuse for rioting and looting.
So bad is the situation that the SA government has called up 25,000 army reservists in an attempt to restore order. They will likely find themselves outnumbered, as tens of thousands continue to attack shopping malls and set factories ablaze. ("No more work! Let's go shoppin'!")
In Durban (the largest city in Mr Zuma's KwaZulu-Natal province), some 45,000 businesses have been affected by the "unrest" (the PC term). Across the country, food and fuel shortages are worsening. At least 200 shopping centres have been ransacked by looters, and national highways have been shut down, endangering alrelady tenuous supply chains.The official death toll, as of this morning, stands at 72, but unofficial reports put the number of deaths in stampedes and shootings in the 1000s.
Who is to blame for all this? Must be whitey, right? Isn't South Africa the country where they have that apartheid system to keep the fuzzy-wuzzies down and the white on top? Errr, no. "Settler rule", as the United Nations called it, ended in 1994, when Nelson Mandela became president.
That was 27 years ago. And -- trust me on this, I was there -- that's when the decline of what was theretofore the most developed, most prospereous country in Africa began. That's when smart Afrikaaners started leaving for places where white folks still run things, like Australia and Canada. [Those who went to Canada must be really disappointed! Ed.]
South Africa was given back to its aboriginal peoples, and has now become just like all the other shitholes of darkest Africa. There's a lesson there somewhere, for those who are not blinded by ant-white racism and political correctness.
Who's running the municipal governments of Chicago, Atlanta, Detroit and Baltimore? Not white Republicans! And what is happening in those and similar failing American cities? Persistent crime and corruption, years of economic stagnation and rising unemployment, etc etc.
The difference between those cities and, say, Johannesburg, is that in the USA, it's all because of things that some white people did to some black people nearly two centuries ago. Maybe if we tear down some more statues, rename some more streets, and start teaching white kids about how rotten they are, the rioting and looting will stop. Right? LMAO!
Regular readers of WWW will know that I have an abiding interest in Zimbabwe, a dictatorship in southern Africa which went from being the second-most prosperous on the Dark Continent to what Still-President Trump would now call a "shithole".
I lived and worked in Zimbabwe in the 90s, and could see the handwriting on the wall after the former Big Man, Robert Gabriel Mugabe, decided to pay all his "war veterans" gratuities of Z$50,000 each after they had staged a series of protests, claiming that they had not received the "benefits" of their revolt against the "white settler regime", viz: white cars, white houses and white women.
The unbudgeted payouts saw the Zimbabwe dollar lose its value by 70% in one day -- I remember it well -- and analysts say the move signalled Zimbabwe's well-documented economic collapse. Banknotes were issued in denominations of billions and even trillions of dollars and were literally not worth the paper they were printed on.
The Mugabe government abandoned the "Zimkwacha" because of hyperinflation in 2009 -- 1 US dollar was worth around Z$35 quadrillion at the time -- and started using American dollars and South African rand.
But I digress. I was about to tell you that when I first went to Africa, there was no Zimbabwe. The country was then known as Rhodesia, a former British colony which declared its independence from No-longer-great Britain on 11 November 1965. I went there about four years later, over five years before William F. Buckley Jr. went there to record this interview with Prime Minister Ian Smith.
I went to Rhodesia on a fact-finding mission, to see for myself whether the Africans (by which was meant "blacks") were so badly off under white minority rule as was argued by the "progressives" at the United Nations, the World Council of Churches and elsewhere. I concluded that it would be a mistake -- detrimental to the well-being of the Africans -- to overthrow the "white settler government" and impose "majority rule". But it was clear even then, in 1969, that the mistake was going to be made, in the name of "freedom and equality, yada yada yada. The mistake was made, and the result is the shithole that is Zimbabwe today.
In this interview, recorded in April of 1974, Ian Smith makes the case for the continuation of minority rule until the majority population should be ready to govern themselves. Mr Smith was right, but of course that doesn't matter now, does it.
One thing to note, at about the 38-minute mark, is that Mr Smith asserts that the black revolutionaries were financed and trained by Communist China. Of course today's China would never do that kind of thing.
There are millions of videos on YouTube. You could keep your eyeballs glued to your screen 24/7 and you'd never see them all. In fact, every hour you watched, you'd get farther behind. So you'll excuse me for being a bit late to see and repost this interesting video from the "new" South Africa, originally uploaded in May of 2015. The subtitles added by Mr Coetzee tell you all you need to know about what went down.
In the USA, Canada or western Europe, the Coetzees would likely be facing charges for shooting at these poor disadvantaged yoofs. But not in South Africa. That country's new post-apartheid constitution has no Second Amendment, nor anything resembling it. Yet no-one questions the necessity of keeping... and sometimes using... firearms to protect their homes and themselves. They have to do so, for incidents such as this are all too common. Thank goodness it hasn't come to that in our countries. Right? Errr...
Footnote: Every now and then you'll see, somewhere in the liberal media, an argument that "white flees" from South Africa should not be allowed to immigrate to the countries of the West. They might infect us with their racism, you know...
Until 1994, voting in South Africa was restricted to whites and "honorary whites" (like Japanese), with a limited franchise for "Asians" (= South Asians) and "coloured" (= people of mixed race). If you were black -- sometimes identifiable by the measurement of your lips -- you couldn't vote at all. This was just one aspect of the apartheid (= separate development) system for which South Africa condemned as hopeless neadnderthal racists by liberals and "right-thinking people" around the world.
All that changed on 27 April 1994 when all citizens were allowed to vote, regardless of colour. The result -- a foregone conclusion -- was just what the gliberals and United Nations demanded -- "majority rule". Saint Nelson Mandela became the first black president, and blacks -- the majority in question -- were at last empowered and given their rightful place at the trough. April 27th is now a national holiday -- "Freedom Day".
Those who suggested that the majority were perhaps "not quite ready" to run their country, and that South Africa would "go back to bush, like the countries north of the Limpopo" were dismissed as sore losers, churls, racists, yada yada yada.
In 1994, the murder rate in Cape Town, seat of South Africa's parliament, was on the order of 20 per 100,000 people. Not great, but also not as bad as places like, errr, Chicago. By Y2K it had shot up to 45 per 100,000. In the first six months of this year -- the 25th year of majority rule -- nearly 2000 people were murdered in the Western Cape (Cape Town's province), according to Albert Fritz, a provincial official tasked with ensuring community safety.
Mr Fritz spoke following more than a dozen murders over one weekend in June. "Many of our most vulnerable residents in the province are living in a war zone," he told the meeja. Most of the bloodshed has been in black and coloured areas, particularly a vast area called Cape Flats, where high rates of unemployment and drug abuse have fuelled gang activity.
In a crime made headlines last week, six women between ages 18 and 26 were killed when unknown gunmen entered a home and opened fire. The next day, another five men, aged 18 to 39, were shot dead and one was injured in two separate shooting incidents in Philippi, one of the shanty towns within Cape Flats.
Police Minister Bheki Cele visited Philippi following the "incidents" to announce that the national government will shortly deploy a battalion of soldiers to help police quell a surge in violence in gang-infested parts of Cape Town, a step normally only taken over the Christmas and New Year period when crime spikes in poorer neighbourhoods. This initiative will be known as "Operation PROSPER". Seriously.
Hardly a lasting solution, according to Gareth Newham, of the Pretoria-based Institute for Security Studies, who called it "a short-term, unsustainable response to a crisis." But what would he know? He's a whitey, obviously a racist living (in his mind) in pre-Freedom Day South Africa. Why doesn't he just leave, as so many other "white flees" have done and go to a safe place like, errr, Chicago.
Footnote: In a report this year by the The Citizens Council for Public Security and Criminal Justice, only three of the world's top 50 most dangerous cities not from the Americas 50 were in South Africa, with Cape Town at 11th overall with a homicide rate of 66.36 per 100,000 residents.
Among the South African farmers who saw the handwriting on the wall back in the 1990s (see my earlier post, today) was the family of Susanna Heystek (great name for farmers!), who joined the "white flees" leaving for the Old Dominions, in this case Canada, where the challenges to farming are of a different nature (read: colour) than they are in Suid Afrika.
The Heysteks settled in Alberta (Canada's answer to Texas!), and Susanna began playing the violin at age five in her hometown of Rocky Mountain House. She went on to study violin in Red Deer and joined the Red Deer Youth and Community Orchestra, of which she was concert master. After graduating high school, she went on to study at the Victoria Conservatory of Music and joined the Artemis Trio. The trio competed at the provincial level in British Columbia and won first place in the Senior Chamber category. Last year, Susanna had the honour of being accepted into the National Art Centre Orchestra's apprenticeship program.
Susanna has developed into a fine classical violinist, and also plays the viola, but hasn't forgotten her country roots. Here she plays "Bowing the Strings", written by Canadian fiddler/composer, Ned Landry. This was recorded in Airdrie AB on 9 May 2015. Intercut are some nice pictures of the wildlife of the homeland of her Afrikaner ancestors, plus picture proof that this talented young lady can still handle the ropin' and ridin'.
Further reading and viewing: Click here to visit Susanna Heystek's website, where you'll find her bio, plus links to other music videos and lots of other good stuff. On the landing page is the link to my favourite of all the classical pieces Susanna has recorded, "The Last Rose of Summer".
Yesterday, black South Africans celebrated the 25th anniversary of "Freedom Day", the day in 1994 when they were allowed to cast ballots in the country's first "one person one vote" election. President Cyril Ramaphosa said, "On this day 25 years ago, we founded a new country defined by the principles of equality, unity, non-racialism and non-sexism. Despite the passage of time, we remember vividly...the exhilaration of seeing nearly 20 million South Africans of all races waiting patiently at polling stations around the country to cast their ballots."
Walt was there at the time -- based in Ha-ha-harare, the fun capital of Zimbabwe -- and remembers opening a book (read: started taking bets) on how long it would take for the most prosperous nation in Africa to regress to levels of poverty and inequality like those of Zimbabwe, the Congo, Sudan and other shithole states of the Dark Continent.
It didn't take that long. Today, widespread poverty and corruption mean that, 25 years after the end of apartheid, many South Africans are still not free. In yesterday's speech, President Ramaphosa praised the work of South Africa's first black president, Nelson Mandela, but said that the country could not be free "when so many live without enough food, without proper shelter, without access to quality health care, without a means to earn a living."
South Africa's black majority were promised that once they were "empowered", they would have white cars, white houses and white women. Pictured above is what they got.
Yesterday, President Ramaphosa (who replaced Jacob Zuma, President No. 3, who was forced out over a string of corruption scandals and a penchant for polygamy) said, "As we celebrate 25 years of democracy, we need to focus all our attention and efforts on ensuring that all South Africans can equally experience the economic and social benefits of freedom."
The reality of post-apartheid South Africa is that any progress made to fulfill the promises made to the country's blacks has been undone in just five short years. Today, South Africa is one of the most consistently unequal countries in the world. More than half the population lives in poverty, while a staggering 27% of people are unemployed. And that's according to the government's statistics, which are believed to be wildly over-optimistic.
Since 2011, three million more South Africans have been pushed below the poverty line, according to a study by the national data agency, Statistics South Africa, released this week. More than 30.4 million South Africans (55.5% of the population) live on less than 992 rand (about $75) per person per month.
Those figures, collected in 2015, are actually more optimistic than numbers from 2006, when two-thirds of South Africans were living in poverty. But it captures the painful one-step-forward, two-steps-backwards dance the country has been engaged in over the last decade trying to improve the lives of its population. In 2006, 28.4% of the country was found to be living in extreme poverty. That number had only inched downwards to 25.2% by 2015.
Those numbers aren't likely to improve. In the last year alone, South Africa has entered recession and seen its sovereign debt rating adjusted to junk status, making life harder for everyone, especially the poor. The national power supplier, Eskom, is effectively bankrupt. With massive power outages threatened, those who can afford to are rushing to buy generators and storage batteries. The "povo" (= truly poor) are buying or making candles.
Because of the seizure of productive white farms (and the murder of the white farmers, detailed previously on WWW), millions of South Africans are now facing "food insecurity" -- shortages of food, hunger, even the prospect of starvation -- the crisis which now besets Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Malawi and other black-run states to the north. This in a country which was once a net exporter of foodstuffs.
The reality of post-apartheid South Africa is that the majority of its citizens live in grinding poverty. The full effect of the 2008 global financial crisis, initially hidden by the euphoria and capital injection of the 2010 FIFA World Cup, is now being felt. The country has also fallen victim to the sluggish growth seen by other commodities-driven economies, unable to improve on 3.3% growth in 2011, the highest GDP has peaked since the financial crisis.
The real problem, though, is South Africa’s inability to implement its own policies. In other words, the black government is incapable of managing the economy or the country. In 2012, the country launched a "National Development Plan" with much pomp and an explanatory animated video showing how much better life would be once they got organized. (18 years after the end of apartheid, they couldn't blame the whities any more.) But a lack of political will and simple competence have left the plan adrift. By almost all measures, South Africa is going to miss the goals -- reduction of poverty from 39% in 2009 to 0%, and the complete eliminate of hunger, by 2030 -- it set for itself in the plan.
Even the commission tasked with seeing the plan through is frustrated by the lack of government support to do so, despite having an office a few doors down from the president. The group's deputy commissioner told the meeja recently, "We have a plan, we like it very much, we take it to parliament, the whole world praises it... And we are the ones that don't implement it." Nothing more need be said. Mother Africa Wins Again.
It's very rare that there's any good news out of Africa, but Walt does have some to pass on, and it appears to be due to the intervention of President Donald J. Trump. (Eat your hearts out, gliberals.)
The fact that land seized from the Boers (= "farmers", in Afrikaans) would almost certainly have been handed over to friends of the ruling African National Congress, who would have let it go back to bush, just as happened in neighbouring Zimbabwe (see "What happens when black Africans turf out white farmers", WWW 24/8/18 - includes two videos), probably had something to do with the decision as well, but for now Walt will give credit not just to President Trump but to the new South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, who seems to have a degree of sense uncommon to the Big Men of Africa.
The day before yesterday, President Trump (Yes, lefties, he's still POTUS!) tweeted that he had directed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to investigate the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and large-scale killing of farmers.
The lamestream media, not to mention the gliberal media (Hello Clinton News Network and MSNBC) are having a field day (no pun intended) saying that the President is doing this only to deflect attention from the supposed problems created for him by the legal embroglio into which Messrs (((Cohen))) and Manafort have sunk or been dragged. The rabid anti-Trumpers at Vox call the dispossessing and murder of South African farmers "a virulent, racist conspiracy theory that has been a pet cause of hardcore white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and the alt-right."
Since I posted those, a number of videos have appeared which tell the truth about what's happening in South Africa, and why its far-left government (not to mention its hungry people) will soon regret turfing out the boers (= farmers) responsible for the majority of SA's food production. Here's the first of them, asking a very good question.
And here's the second, produced by an Australian news team, in which we learn that Zimbabwe (known in more prosperous days as Rhodesia), where the landgrab idea was applied at the turn of this century, is now begging the "white settlers" to come back and restart its moribund agricultural sector.
The speaker in the first video asks if the South Africans have learned nothing from the example of their neighbours to the North. Walt answers: apparently not, but they will learn... the hard way. While they're learning, millions of dollars in food aid will be supplied by the western democracies, because to let them starve would be, errr... you know... racist... wouldn't it.
Walt has some good news for all the Boers (Afrikaner farm folk) who were wondering what they were going to do when the black invaders come for your farms... not to mention your cars and your wives and daughters! (See "South Africans won't slaughter white farmers... at least not right now", WWW 3/3/18.) If you're smart enough to get out while the getting is good -- before South Africa turns into Zimbabwe -- Australia will welcome you!
Peter Dutton, Australia's home affairs minister, told the Sydney Daily Telegraph today that the Aussie government is ready to consider issuing special visas to South African farmers due to the "horrific circumstances" they face -- land seizures, violence and murder, at the hands of the now-"empowered" black majority. Such is the level of violence in South Africa that thousands of mainly white, Afrikaans-speaking farmers have taken to the streets to protest and plead for help.
Last October, #BlackMonday protests (pictured) were organized after the AfriForum civil rights group released figures showing a murder rate for South African farmers of 156 per 100,000 -- well above the already high national average and making farming in that country arguably the most dangerous occupation in the world outside a war zone!
South Africa's new president, Cyril Ramaphosa, has vowed to pursue the same course as Zimbabwe's former dictator, Comrade Robert Gabriel Mugabe (who's still alive, by the way!) in expropriating farmland owned by whites without compensation. South Africans of all colours -- black, white and striped -- are worried that doing so will destroy the country's already tottering economy, just as it did in Zimbabwe, Zambia and other black-ruled countries.
At the same time, the number of slain farmers, farm workers, and family members — most of them white — had hit 71, surpassing the estimated death toll for 2016.
Now Australia stands ready to offer help. "If you look at the footage and read the stories, you hear the accounts, it's a horrific circumstance they face," Mr Dutton told the Telegraph. He said Australia has refugee, humanitarian and other visa programmes which have the "potential to help some of these people." He had asked his department to look at the options, he added, "because from what I have seen they do do need help from a civilized country like ours."
"White cars, white houses, white women!" That's what black African terrorists were told they get, once they had wrested independence from the colonialists and white settlers. That's what they were fighting for. Not democracy but white cars, white houses and white women!
On 24 October 1964 Britain granted independence to Northern Rhodesia, which was promptly renamed Zambia. One of the first things the new black government of the Marxist Kenneth Kaunda did was to expel the mostly white commercial farmers, so their farms could be "indigenized" -- turned over to his relatives and cronies. The new farmers knew nothing about commercial farming (or even subsistence farming, in some cases) and to no-one's surprise the fertile land went back to bush. Zambia went from being an exporter of food to a net importer.
One of the countries Zambia imported food from was Rhodesia, which was run by white settlers. Rhodesia was the second-most prosperous country in sub-Saharan Africa, after South Africa, which was also run by, errr, white volk. The perfidious Brits sold out their Rhodesian kith and kin in 1980, handing the country over to Comrade Robert Mugabe and his merry band of kleptomaniacs. It took them until 2000 to seize the famously productive white farms, which were handed over to Mugabe's family and friends.
I was there, and on doctor's advice left, just in the nick of time. The botched and often violent redistribution (read: theft) of land left many farms in ruins, and the drop in production triggered an economic crisis that still haunts the country. Uncle Bob's cronies and comrades not only were ignorant of large-scale farming, but had no interest in it. They treated their farms as good places for a Sunday braai, nothing more, and just as in Zambia, the land went out of production and Zimbabwe was plunged into permanent food insecurity.
The other country Zambia, and later Zimbabwe import food from, even today, is South Africa. That country had been independent for a century or so, but didn't come under the control of black Africans until 1994, when the whites saw the black writing on the wall and made a deal with the Nelson Mandela-led African National Congress under which there was to be no wholesale seizure of farms or other sectors of the economy. I was there for that too, and remember a friend warning me "Don't be fooled. In another ten years things will be just like up north." He was wrong, but only about the timeline.
When apartheid ended in 1994, white farmers -- the word in Afrikaans is "boers" -- owned about 85% of South Africa's better farmland. A 2017 government audit found the percentage had fallen to 72%. That is 72% too much, according to Julius Malema, the avowed Marxist leader of the opposition in the country's parliament. This week he introduced a motion, which passed almost unanimously, calling for the amendment of South Africa's constitution to allow for the confiscation of white-owned land without compensation... as was done in Zambia and Zimbabwe.
The Honourable Mr Malema has a long-standing commitment to taking land (or houses or cars, etc) without compensation. In 2016 he told his supporters he was "not calling for the slaughter of white people -- at least for now." The policy was a key factor in new president Cyril Ramaphosa's platform after he took over from the incredibly corrupt Jacob Zuma in February.
In introducing the motion, Mr Malema called white farmers "criminals", and said "the time for reconciliation is now over. Now is the time for justice!" Justice for white South African farmers will look something like this.
"We must ensure that we restore the dignity of our people without compensating the criminals who stole our land," said the Honourable Mr Malema. The ruling ANC's rural affairs minister "There is no doubt about it, land shall be expropriated without compensation."
One small point that neither speaker addressed was the likely effect on South Africa's agricultural output. Ernst Roets, the deputy chief executive of civil rights group Afriforum, said the motion was a violation of agreements made at the end of apartheid. "This motion is based on a distorted image of the past," he explained. "The term 'expropriation without compensation' is a form of semantic fraud. It is nothing more than racist theft."
Freedom Front Plus party leader Pieter Groenewald said the decision to strip white farmers of their land would cause "unforeseen consequences that is not in the interest of South Africa." Leaving aside the grammatical lapse (for which we'll forgive Mr Groenewald since his first language is Afrikaans), he is wrong only in his use of the word "unforeseen". It is easy to foresee that this will all end badly, just as it has in Zambia and Zimbabwe.
A classic paradigm of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting to get a different result. By that definition, the decision taken by South Africa's parliament last week is indeed insane.
Katie Olivia Hopkins will celebrate her 43rd birthday in five days and Walt will join the many others wishing her many happy returns. She's my kind of people! [Does "kind of people" = "peoplekind"? Ed.] Mrs Hopkins is an English media personality, who first came to notice in 2007 as a reality television contestant. Nothing wrong with that. She might even become a politician some day. Like tomorrow! Later on, she became a columnist for British newspapers, initially the Sun and later the MailOnline.
Mrs Hopkins has been accused of racism by the usual gang of leftie journalists and politicians, SJWs and assorted snowflakes for daring to tell the truth about the hordes of bogus "refugees", asylum-seekers and other third-worlders who have turned London into "Londonistan". Last May she lost her job as a presenter on London radio station LBC for her comments on the Manchester massacre. (WWW 23/5/17).
Katie Hopkins has now joined The Rebel, to which she contributes Hopkins World[Clever title! Ed.], one of the site's featured sections. At the moment she is in South Africa to cover the impending resignation of President Jacob Zuma... unless she gets booted out of the country first!
Last fall "the biggest bitch in Britain" (as the Islamophiles call her) visited Lalaland, and gave an excellent speech for which she received a standing ovation. She called on Americans not to let their country fall apart and become another Britain. And she presents three ideas for fighting back against the Islamization of the USA. It's well worth listening to every one of the 24:27 minutes.
Thanks to our old buddy, Agent 17, for alerting us to this item. There are many more videos featuring Katie Hopkins on YouTube. Just search her name and you'll find hours of interesting and provocative listening.
Malaysian Airlines flight MH370, a Boeing B-777, vanished into thin air -- or deep water -- on 8 March 2014, on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. 227 pas and 12 crew members were on board, and are presumed dead after a 22-month search of a large chunk of the Indian Ocean failed to find the lost plane or any trace of it.
Conspiracy theory? You damn betcha! Just because it's a theory doesn't mean there was no conspiracy. All it means is that there's no proof!
But proof may yet be found. Today, Malaysia's government announced that it has approved a new attempt to find the wreckage of MH370. Earlier this week, an American company called Ocean Infinity sent a search vessel to have another look for debris in the southern Indian Ocean. Malaysian Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai said the company, which is working on a "no find, no fee" basis, "are willing to search the area of 25,000 square kilometers (9,653 square miles) pointed out by the expert group near the Australian waters." He did not offer further details.
The company itself said in a statement that the search vessel Seabed Constructor left the South African port of Durban -- take note of that -- on Tuesday, and was taking advantage of favourable weather to move toward "the vicinity of the possible search zone". But where is that, exactly? The first search, from the surface of the Indian Ocean, covered an area of several million square miles west of Australia. The subsequent underwater search mapped 710,000 square kilometers (274,000 square miles) of seabed at depths of up to 6,000 meters, slightly to the west of the initial search area. As Walt predicted, nothing was found. (Lifetime pct .988.)
However... this is where it gets interesting... some debris was found, on Réunion Island and off the coast of Moçambique and South Africa, 1000s of miles away from where the "experts" were looking, on the other side of the Indian Ocean. Here is a nice neat map showing the locations from which debris has been recovered.
How did the bits and pieces, identified specifically on the map, get so far from where the "experts" thought the plane had gone down after (they hypothesized) running out of fuel? Let's look once again at Walt's not-so-nice-and-neat diagram of the ocean currents which likely carried the debris to the south-western shores of the Indian Ocean.
I've drawn in the location of three major ocean currents -- the Moçambique, Aquinas and South Equatorial currents -- as well as the location of Diego Garcia, a small island leased by the USA from the British and the site of a huge American military establishment. There is some evidence of a sighting of a large airplane with red and blue stripes low in the sky near the Maldives -- due north of Diego Garcia, in the path of the South Equatorial current. See "MH370 - Just fancy that!", WWW 18/12/14. Now then...
My theory is that MH370 was shot down or brought down by some other type of weapon -- a laser beam or interference with the plane's onboard computer -- by persons or forces unknown (not necessarily American, you understand), for reasons only they know, somewhere in the vicinity of Diego Garcia. The wreckage then drifted west and south with the ocean currents named above, with bits of it washing ashore at the points shown on the nice map.
The logical place to search -- as I've been saying for well over three years -- would be around Diego Garcia. Since that's still a pretty large area to cover, especially nearly four years after the fact, I have an even better suggestion. Since the disappearance of MH370, the US of A has had a change of administration. Some of the "mistakes" of the Prez and his Secretary of State Hellery Clinton -- like the Libya debacle -- are coming to light. I suggest that the Malaysian authorities ask President Trump to order an investigation into what the US military knows about the disappearance of MH370. My guess is that if they didn't do it, they know who did!
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