| | | You said .... "Frankly I am surprised SA has survived the post Mandela era as well as it has."
Personally, I'm not surprised at all.
You mustn't compare what has happened in other African countries, which were originally colonies of European countries. There you had Caucasians that settled in an African country that had been colonized. That didn't mean that the white people "raped and pillaged" the country. On the contrary, the country generally flourished under them. There was general law and order, agricultural development, mining development, etc, etc.
IMO, the colonialists that probably did the best job were the British, in countries such as Kenya, Tanganyika, Northern and Southern Rhodesia, etc.
You only have to do a "before and after" to see what a mess those countries are now in since the Union Jack flag was pulled down and the British were virtually forced to leave.
But one of the primary reasons why South Africa hasn't gone the way of African colonies is contained in ........
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"Therefore, even though we cannot trek any further, we say just like the Voortrekker of old: ‘We can still fight.’ And we will fight, even if we must perish, but we will keep fighting for the survival of the white man at the southern end of Africa and the religion that was given to him to spread here. And we will do it just as [the Voortrekkers] did: man, woman, and child. We will fight here for our existence, and the world needs to know it. We can do nothing else. We stand like Luther with the Reformation, with our back against the wall. We fight not for money or property. We fight for the life of our folk.
And the white man [who] came to Africa. . . has remained to stay. And particularly we in this southernmost portion of Africa have such a stake here that this is our only motherland, we have nowhere else to go. We settled a country [that was] bare, and the Bantu came in this country and settled certain portions for themselves, and [we believe in granting] rights for those people in the fullest degree in that part of southern Africa which their forefathers found for themselves and settled in.
But similarly, we believe in balance, we believe in allowing exactly those same full opportunities to remain within the grasp of the white man who has made all this possible."
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You are probably not aware of who the "Voortrekkers" were.
Well, think of those who trekked West in the early history of your country. Off they went in their wagons, into the unknown. No doctors en route. No Walmart on route. No telephone connections in case anything went wrong. No one to fix a broken wagon wheel with its steel band holding it together. No ammunition store to replenish your rifle's stock. No refrigeration unit to keep your food from going bad, etc, etc, etc.
That was much the same with the Voortrekkers .... they left Cape Town and headed North. The first main obstacle that they had to encounter was a mountain range. There was no mechanical winch or bulldozer to pull their wagons over the top. They unhitched their oxen and pulled that wagon up those steep slopes. Today, you can still see the grooves in the rock that were cut in by their steel banded wagon wheels.
They trekked over 1000 miles until they reached that part of South Africa which is now Johannesburg and Pretoria. And there they stopped and settled down and built a life for themselves, much as your own frontiersmen and women did.
So as is said in the above quote, the Caucasian South Africans have nowhere else to go. This is the country where their ancestors were born. And if black Africans think or believe they can deprive them of that then they have A BIG PROBLEM IN FRONT OF THEM.
I believe the likes of Nelson Mandela was smart enough to realize that and was probably why he decided to enter into Negotiations with the white President at that time, F.W De Klerk, and draw up what is probably one of the best Constitutions in the world today. |
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