Ode to the Library by The Riiik Tripple K Rikkki and the Bard of Bat, Yam Poet Laureate of Zion

Everyone is welcome to walk through the door.
It really doesn't matter if you're rich or poor.
There are books in boxes and books on shelves.
They're free for you to borrow, so help yourselves.
Come and meet your heroes, old and new,
From William the Conqueror to Winnie the Pooh.
You can look into the Mirror or read The Times,
Or bring along a toddler to chant some rhymes.
The librarian's a friend who loves to lend,
So see if there's a book that she can recommend.
Read that book, and if you're bitten
You can borrow all the other ones the author's written.
Are you into battles or biography?
Are you keen on gerbils or geography?
Gardening or ghosts? Sharks or science fiction?
There's something here for everyone, whatever your addiction.
There are students revising, deep in concentration,
And school kids doing projects, finding inspiration.
Over in the corner there's a table with seating,
So come along and join in the Book Club meeting.
Yes, come to the library! Browse and borrow,
And help make sure it'll still be here tomorrow.

#RIPUSA Trump's New World Order?

Though he might be a novice in foreign policy, Donald Trump could bring about dramatic changes in the global arena by aligning with Russia against China. In this scenario, Russia would have an opportunity to align with Western civilization, ending a millennium-long schism. Will Russia be ready to end its cozy relations with the radical regime in Iran to become a true US ally in the fight against militant Islam?

US President-Elect Donald Trump lacks foreign policy experience, and during the election campaign did not proffer any comprehensive outlook on global affairs. He offered bits and pieces of ideas (building a wall along the Mexican border, moving the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, disparaging NATO, and demanding that allies raise their defense expenditures). Overall, he expressed isolationist sentiments alongside inconsistent and unpredictable thoughts. In any case, his focus is likely to be on domestic affairs.

Still, Trump might surprise observers. It is already emerging that he does, in fact, have clear preferences in global affairs. It seems he likes Russia (or, specifically, Vladimir Putin) and dislikes China, the two most powerful international actors other than the US. Trump probably admires Putin as a strong, charismatic leader who is intent on making Russia great again. Trump’s nomination of Rex Tillerson, a man with excellent contacts in Moscow, as Secretary of State signals a planned thaw in American-Russian relations.

In contrast, when Trump looks at China, he sees an economic rival that needs to be cut down to size. Trump feels that American industries and jobs have been stolen by China, and that Beijing is playing unfairly with its currency and taxes on US-made products. Significantly, Trump has already departed from America’s qualified “One China” policy (dating back to 1979) by taking a phone call from Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen. This, together with the presence of strong Taiwan backers in the incoming administration, and with Trump’s recent meeting with Prime Minister Abe of Japan, hint that Trump might be heading towards a policy of confrontation with China.

It is possible that these moves are purely tactical, and are aimed at securing a better opening position in negotiations over elements of the US-China bilateral relationship. But Trump will soon hear from his foreign policy and defense advisers that a rising China is a major challenge to “making America great again” in a geopolitical sense.

Acting on his basic instincts, Trump may well be capable of grand Kissingerian diplomacy, without possessing Kissinger’s historic, intellectual and strategic baggage. Trump could be aiming for détente with Russia and the enlistment of Putin against China.

If this happens, it would constitute a radical shift in the global balance of power, considerably enhancing American leverage in international affairs. Moreover, it holds the potential for Russia’s integration into the West. After all, Russia is culturally part of Western civilization in many ways. Obvious examples are Russian literature, music and ballet, and of course its Christian heritage.

The American post-Cold War stance regarding Russia was very problematic. In the 1990s, there was an opportunity to bring Russia into the Western architecture. A Russia characterized by a resurgent Christianity and a desire to modernize could have become an integral part of the Western world, ending a millennium-long schism – or, at least, a valued ally.

But the expansion of NATO and the EU eastward, which ignored historical Russian sensibilities, heightened the threat perception of the Russian leaders who had lost the Cold War. Western attempts to politically engineer Ukraine, so close to Moscow’s heartland, and the subsequent imposition of economic sanctions on Russia’s moves in Crimea and Ukraine are the most recent examples of Western geopolitical mistakes that pushed Russia away.

Western pressure on Russia also led to a partial Chinese-Russian entente. The Chinese demographic threat in Siberia and the struggle over central Asia were put aside to form an anti-American front.

Trump seems ready to move in a different direction.  In July 2016, candidate Trump defied political correctness by saying he would consider recognizing Crimea as Russian territory and lifting sanctions against Russia. He may well accept the return of Ukraine to Russia’s sphere of influence.

Trump also seems to have little patience with European allies who prefer that the US bear most of their defense burden. It remains to be seen whether Trump will be able to overcome anti-Russian and anti-Putin sentiment in Congress, particularly among Republicans. Many of them are unforgiving regarding human rights violations by Moscow (while more forgiving about those committed by Beijing).

The big question, of course, is whether there will be a Russian quid pro quo. Trump is a businessman and is likely to expect something valuable in return. He will need visible benefits with which to market any grand deal with Russia to Congress and the American people.

Will Russia be ready to end its cozy relations with the radical regime in Iran to become a true US ally in the fight against militant Islam? Will it settle for a small, Assad-ruled Syria without Iranian and Hezbollah control? Will Russia be flexible enough to end its territorial conflict with Japan over the Kurile Islands to buttress the anti-China realignment?

Trump probably expects Russia to take these steps. Will Putin take a historic gamble and align with the West, as did Peter the Great?

There are no clear answers yet. For its part, Israel should be cognizant of the fact that a Trump administration will be capable of radical change in global affairs. The changes to the big picture that Trump might produce could have fateful implications for the Jewish state. Israel should work assiduously to promote its interests in this new environment, capitalizing on its strong strategic partnership with the US and good working relations with Russia.

#RIPUSA, #AmericaHangsItsHeadIn Shame Trump Outsmarts Experts All the Way to White House

 Donald Trump was right.

During a rally last week in Minnesota, as the GOP nominee rooted around in traditionally Democratic turf for electoral votes that could launch him to the White House, he shrugged at detractors who doubted his seemingly long-shot strategy.


“So far, in two years, I’ve been right and they’ve been wrong,” Trump said of the television pundits who had declared the race finished. “We’re going to have some surprise on Tuesday.”

The vote Tuesday indeed unfolded as one of the great stunners in American political history. Trump will be the next president of the United States, having surged on Election Day in states, including Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, that many Republicans had written off. His victory signaled the rise in America of populism and nationalism, under Trump’s banner of “America first” and his pledge to “make America great again.”

Trump addressed his supporters early Wednesday at a hotel in midtown New York City, shortly after the major television networks had called the race. Acknowledging the acrimony of the campaign and adopting a softer tone, he promised “every citizen that I will be president for all Americans.”


“Now it is time for America to bind the wounds of division,” Trump said. “It is time for us to come together as one united people.”

“I promise you that I will not let you down,” he added. “I love this country.”

Although Hillary Clinton did not deliver public remarks, Trump said she called to congratulate him and concede the race.

“She fought very hard,” he noted. “Hilary has worked very hard over a long period of time, and we owe her a debt of gratitude for her service.”


The evening marked a stunning finish to Trump’s unlikely rise from first-time candidate to the highest political office. Most prognosticators first said he would not run, and then believed he could not win. But at every turn he upended expectations and conventional wisdom, and proved more resilient than his rivals judged.

Trump also proved to be an effective conduit for his core message: a populist, nationalist appeal that featured harsh anti-immigrant, anti-trade rhetoric — beginning with the speech that launched his candidacy in which he characterized undocumented Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and pledged to “renegotiate our foreign trade deals.” Those themes drew a historic share of white working-class voters to Trump, swelling turnout in rural areas as Clinton’s coalition of college-educated voters and minorities underperformed.

“Donald Trump rewrote the map of the United States,” said Rep. Pete King, a New York Republican who backed the nominee. “The political world will never be the same again.”

On the campaign trail, Trump had recently taken to calling himself “Mr. Brexit,” a nod to the surprising vote earlier this year by Britons to withdraw from the European Union. That groundswell also caught politics watchers unaware, and was propelled by the same political sentiments that elevated Trump.

His victory Tuesday bore striking similarities to that event, not only in the forces driving it but in the complexion of Trump’s supporters, who were on the whole less educated than Clinton’s and more likely to live in exurban or rural areas.

“I hate to compare this too much to Brexit, but it’s kind of a Brexit effect,” said Matt Oczkowski of Cambridge Analytica, a data firm used by the Trump campaign. “Rural turnout was crazy.”

“It turned out this disenfranchised Trump voter that we’ve been talking about, it’s really true,” Oczkowski added.

The strategy was the brainchild in particular of Trump Campaign Chairman Steve Bannon, who had no prior campaign experience when he signed on to work for Trump from Breitbart News, an outlet that served as Trump’s mouthpiece during the election. Beginning in mid-September, Bannon directed that the campaign redouble efforts in Michigan, New Hampshire and Maine, states that were not on most radar screens. And he pored over the demographics that he thought would respond to Trump’s message.

Bannon “has got a real interest in the middle America, Midwest electorate and reclaiming the working class for the Republican Party,” said one Trump campaign aide, “so you saw him doing a lot more to focus on states like Michigan.”

But, as with Brexit, Trump’s ascension to the presidency will now feature a great deal of uncertainty likely to wreak havoc, at least initially, on financial markets and the international community. Futures trading was halted late Tuesday as investors panicked at early signs of Trump’s victory.

Gerard Araud, French ambassador to the United States, tweeted: “A world is collapsing before our eyes. Dizziness."

“They said the same thing when Ronald Reagan got elected — all the foreign countries got upset,” King assured reporters at Trump’s victory party. “They’ll get used to it, too.”

Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom Trump praised throughout the election, sent the victor a message of congratulation early Wednesday, the Associated Press reported.

The result early Wednesday, while a shock to the United States and the world, unquestionably traces its roots to the presidential election four years ago. On the morning after Mitt Romney lost, Trump took to Twitter, writing for the first time: “We have to make America great again!”

In the aftermath, the Republican Party had one answer to Romney’s defeat: to temper its harshest rhetoric and seek to expand its reach to minorities and women.

Trump had another solution.

The celebrity businessman ultimately adopted a populist message that had more in common with Rick Santorum’s approach during the 2012 Republican primary than with Romney’s — coupling severe protectionist rhetoric with his unique image as a Washington outsider free from personal debts to special interests or party powerbrokers.

Those elements appealed to a deeply disaffected electorate, even as the nation’s economy has improved overall and added jobs.

“The American people aren’t happy. The American people have the right not to be happy,” said Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, a prominent Trump supporter who also advised the campaign. “Some people think this is just some mindless anger out there. That is not correct.”

“People underestimated the discontent that average Americans felt,” echoed Joe Borelli, a New York City councilman and a visible Trump supporter on cable news throughout the election. “It was palpable to everyone who travelled the country, but the media and pundits were blind to it.”

The voters who elevated Trump to victory chose to overlook his historically low favorability ratings, which rank him among the most unpopular presidential candidates ever, and concerns about his temperament and qualifications. Clinton, in her campaign, sought to depict Trump as fundamentally unfit for the office of the presidency.

Trump also overcame multiple major setbacks and controversies, including an audio recording released in the final stretch of the campaign in which Trump bragged that his celebrity enabled him to kiss women without consent and “grab them by the pussy.”

But Trump notably became more disciplined in the final phase of his campaign, when he brought on Bannon and promoted Kellyanne Conway, a pollster with particular experience in campaign messaging. As Trump’s mouthpiece, Conway worked with the Republican nominee to soften his tone and urged him to stay on message, entreaties he mostly followed.

Now, Trump will face a climb not only to unite Americans around him, but also to govern with lawmakers, Republican and Democratic, who view him skeptically or reject him entirely. Bringing together Republicans will likely be the first order of business, and Trump praised Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus on Wednesday as “a superstar.”

King said he had no doubts the president-elect will succeed at governing. “He’s overcome every obstacle up to now, and this is the final obstacle he’ll overcome,” he said. “Let’s face it: Donald Trump likes to make things work. He wants to get it done.”

The War on Afrikaans :The fight about language is really a fight about race.

The War on Afrikaans





Two months ago, student demonstrators burned two buildings at the all-black Mafikeng campus of South Africa’s North West University. One was the main administration building, which housed all university records. The administration was forced to close the campus indefinitely. Ironically, the black students immediately asked if they could then be housed at the university’s majority-white Potchefstroom campus, where heavy security was put in place to stop any would-be arsonists.

At about the same time, the University of Pretoria was closed for at least two weeks after clashes between white and black students over what was euphemistically termed its “language policy.” Trouble started in late 2015, when examinations had to be postponed by one week.

Conflict of this kind is a sharp departure from the tradition of South African universities. The University of Pretoria is not like Europe’s left-wing universities with their graffiti-covered walls. Its manicured lawns and pristine buildings testify to a seriousness and austerity that barely tolerates student politics.

One would have to go back many years to find a political disturbance even remotely like the kind we see today. In 1919, an Afrikaner-nationalist student, W.J. Erlank, burned a British flag at the University of Pretoria and was expelled for it. He later became a famous Afrikaans poet under the pen name of “Eitemal,” but not even that incident disturbed the rigid succession of semesters and examinations.


“Eitemal” in a marble frieze of the Voortrekker Monument.

The growing presence of black students has clearly changed our campuses. Black hostility towards the Afrikaans language derives from a variety of causes, but it is often claimed that Afrikaans is “associated with Afrikaner rule and with apartheid.” However, underneath the surface there are various other reasons why blacks and leftists resent Afrikaans. Whether blacks study in English or in Afrikaans, they get lower grades and have higher dropout rates. This leads to resentment of university administrations and of whites generally.

On the English-language campuses black failure is normally ascribed either to white racism or the lingering effects of their parents’ or grandparents’ “deficient education.” But on the Afrikaans campuses, where most blacks can also take classes in English, there is a theory that “whites do better because they are studying in their mother tongue.” Since 1976, South African blacks have explicitly rejected any form of mother-tongue education because of its association with “Bantu education,” or the form of segregated black education that had evolved during the 20th century under white governments.

Blacks saw English as a kind of magic ticket to American-style consumerism. Under the administration of President Jimmy Carter, there was an American “information campaign” in Soweto to get local blacks to adopt the US discourse of civil rights which, of course, was all in English. If they spoke global English, all black children would grow up to become politicians, bankers, or businessmen, and not carpenters, plumbers, or auto mechanics communicating only with their lowly brothers in the so-called townships of South Africa.

Prestige and social status play a huge role in Africa. Presidents in Mercedes-Benz S-class vehicles escorted with flashing lights have perhaps become the symbol of postcolonial Africa and South Africa is no exception. What goes for cars, goes for languages, and global English is seen as the Mercedes of languages. Many aspiring middle-class South African blacks are actually ditching their own languages to speak English to their children.

So anti-Afrikaans hostility is at best a paradox. On the one hand, blacks tend to see Afrikaans as “just another local language,” which of course it isn’t. Although standardized in South Africa in the 19th century, it is a European language sharing 95 percent of its vocabulary with modern Dutch. However absurd this may sound outside (and even within) South Africa, Afrikaans is seen by blacks as a kind of “upstart white language” and bearer of “white privilege.” According to many blacks, Afrikaans students perform better because they enjoy a “better rapport with lecturers.” Blacks and leftists also claim that Afrikaans culture is inherently “racist” and leads to segregation.

In my view, these are mere rationalizations for a deep racial resentment against whites. The real reason blacks want to “abolish Afrikaans” at universities is that it would be a way of hurting Afrikaners by taking away something they obviously value. In the background, there are white liberals and leftists whose own power has always depended on inciting black racial narcissism and resentment. As in the United States, white liberals relish the sight of black mobs causing mayhem which they may blame on white racism and “exclusion.” Such whites find Afrikaans an expedient target and they have used it with success to focus black rage on their enemies: those “racist” or “right-wing” whites who still cling to some kind of Western or European identity.

Apart from demanding no annual increase in college fees, or no fees at all under the slogan “Fees must fall,” blacks have issued a new ultimatum: “Afrikaans must fall.” Before the ANC came to power, the University of Pretoria, for example, was an all-Afrikaans university, but mindful of government pressure, it now offers lectures in both Afrikaans and English.



A dual language policy is not enough, however, for black radical groups on campus. One such group is the youth branch of Julius Malema’s Afro-Marxist Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF). It styles itself as a kind of urban guerilla movement. Its members wear red shirts and military-style berets, and call themselves the EFF “Student Command.” Together with other groups such as PASMA (Pan-African Students Movement of Azania) and UPrising, it claims that Afrikaner students are “advantaged” by being able to study or write exams in their own language while blacks must contend with English. Naturally, every white or even Indian English-speaker is equally “advantaged” by being educated in his home language, but somehow that does not count.

Another argument for “abolishing Afrikaans” is that since African languages are not developed enough to be used at university level, Afrikaans should not be “privileged” in this way either. This is like saying that because there is no Inuit-language university in Canada, no courses should be taught in French. Also, blacks say they do not feel welcome in places where they hear Afrikaans, especially in university dormitories where “Afrikaner culture is forced upon them.”

The sense of black entitlement in South Africa has come to resemble that of the blacks at Princeton who recently invaded the office of president Christopher Eisgruber, where they shouted, “We own this place, it is ours!” Most blacks consider South Africa’s universities to be “theirs.” The whites who founded and developed them are passing tenants who should soon be issued eviction orders. So it is often claimed that white Afrikaners (who pay far more taxes on average than blacks) are “wasting our money on maintaining their language.” In addition, most whites pay their own way to study at university, while blacks get scholarships or government loans–which few ever repay.

The assault on Afrikaner heritage can be violent. At the Pretoria campus, white male students blocked off menacing blacks and kept damage to a minimum, but not so at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein and the University of Cape Town, where black mobs have attacked statues and torn paintings from walls and burned them.

One statue destroyed was that of Charles Robberts Swart, who replaced the British monarch as titular head of state when South Africa became a republic in 1961. The Commonwealth threatened to impose black rule even then, prompting prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd to withdraw from that body. C.R. Swart was a lawyer and farmer who founded the Voortrekkers, the Afrikaner equivalent of the Boy Scouts. He offended no one and eventually retired to his farm “De Aap” (Dutch for “The Ape”) in his beloved Free State. However, his statue on the Bloemfontein campus was attacked by a black mob armed with metal bars who toppled it from its plinth and lit a bonfire around it. I doubt anyone in the mob had actually researched Swart or even knew who he was. He was simply a symbol of South Africa’s white past and therefore anathema.

C.R. Swart’s statue was vandalized more or less with the acquiescence of the university’s president, the coloured (mixed-race in South African parlance) Jonathan Jansen who self-identifies as “black,” and his vice president, a white Argentinian left-wing lesbian by the name of Lis Lange.



One would think that the Spanish-speaking Lange would have some tolerance for a non-English language such as Afrikaans, but no. She has been in the forefront of attempts to ban Afrikaans from lecture halls at the University of the Free State. Because of a kind of university executive decree, barring a court ruling to the contrary, from 2017 there will be no more Afrikaans instruction at the University of the Free State. The Free State is arguably the most Afrikaans-speaking province in South Africa; even the Sotho-speaking blacks speak it among themselves as a lingua franca. But such is the racial and cultural poison that has now taken possession of South Africa.

Hostility has reached the point that even the leader of the South African Communist Party and Minister of Higher Education, Dr. Blade Nzimande, has warned against “the danger of racial conflict” that could come from “anti-white chauvinism.” He was referring specifically to the slogan, “Kill all whites,” worn on T-shirts by black students at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, but he also reaffirmed the ANC regime’s stance of not being officially hostile to Afrikaans. As he explained in an interview:


We are not fighting Afrikaans. Afrikaans is one of our official languages. But what we are against is for Afrikaans to be used to exclude students who do not actually speak the language, at a university level. That is what is a problem.

Of course, all languages “exclude” others. The Russians, the French, the Japanese, the Italians, the Poles, for example, have universities in their own languages, and produce books and films that “exclude” anyone who can’t speak those languages. But in South Africa, the argument is that any institution that does not bend over backwards to accommodate black students in their preferred language–usually English–“excludes” them.

In the United States, we can imagine Hispanic students demanding that the University of Texas offer all courses in Spanish as well as English so as not to “exclude” them. If that demand were met, white students would still get better grades, so the next step would be to demand that English be abolished and that all courses be taught in Spanish. That would “level the playing field” and “bring diversity to the student body.”

For black students in South Africa, Afrikaans is a target because it is a language few of them speak. But the larger target is whites. Blacks vandalized the statue of the English-speaking imperialist and statesman Cecil Rhodes at the University of Cape Town with the same anti-white ardor as the bronze image of C.R. Swart. As I wrote a year ago on the first wave of violent protest against white symbols:


The actual removal by truck and crane (of Rhodes’s statue) was a considerable victory for the anti-white side, as it was broadcast on national television, with pictures in all the newspapers. Excited young blacks climbed onto the statue as it was being lifted, throwing paint on the old imperialist, as if vicariously attacking the entire white population and everything it has done for four centuries.

The reason South African blacks are so “besotted with English,” as I have put it, has nothing to do with it being the language of England and America, and therefore a repository of Western culture. They see it instead as an instrument of power and status. English goes with an S-class Mercedes, a Rolex watch, or a pair of Gucci shoes.

At Johannesburg’s biggest shopping centre, the 1,380,000 square-feet Sandton City complex, there is a whole corridor devoted to luxury European brands: Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Armani, Prada, Dolce & Gabanna, Cartier, etc. One hardly ever sees white people at these temples of luxury; the store assistants are black and the customers are black, except for a few Asian tourists perhaps staying in the nearby five-star hotels. The world of that kind of status is already black. Increasingly, I am beginning to understand why stoicism became a popular philosophy among patrician Romans during the days of Empire.

Africans are very aware of status and rank. Joseph Mobutu, the long-time dictator of Zaire, officially changed his name to Mobutu Sese Seko Nkuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga, which means, roughly, “The all-powerful warrior who, because of his endurance and inflexible will to win, will go from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake.” He also bestowed titles on himself, such as “Father of the Nation,” “Messiah,” and “Savior of the People.”


Fourteen whites bow before Idi Amin in 1975 and pledge to fight for Uganda.

Idi Amin Dada’s full title, as announced by Radio Uganda in 1977, was “His Excellency President for Life, Field Marshal Alhaji Dr. Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, CBE.” The last abbreviation stood for “Conqueror of the British Empire.”

If one digs a little deeper into the racial conflicts on South African campuses, one finds a constant interplay between superiority and inferiority. Just as Amin felt that he had “conquered” Britain, South African blacks interpret F.W. de Klerk’s haphazard surrender in 1994 to the ANC and South African Communist Party as a “grand victory” after years of “heroic struggle.” There is about as little factual evidence for this as of Amin’s conquest of the United Kingdom, yet this delusion is recited every day in the media. Mr. de Klerk thought he was negotiating a settlement, but according to the black version, or the white-liberal one–which amounts to essentially the same thing–he was negotiating the terms of white surrender.

And yet one arrives at a paradox: The son or daughter of a Mercedes-driving, Gucci-wearing, English-speaking black person, displaying all the accouterments of Western status and success, would still have a sense of “inferiority” when encountering a group of middle-class white kids engaging in some minor Afrikaner student ritual at one of the university residences. Either he would feel “excluded” from it, or if he participated, he would feel that it was being “imposed” on him.

Another argument frequently heard about statues and names of lecture halls, is that they remind blacks–and their white-liberal lackeys–of a “painful past” or of “white-supremacist history.” Likewise, the Afrikaans language itself is often called, even in the American and British media, “the language of apartheid.” Given that white-run South Africa was an officially bilingual country, like Canada or Belgium, English was also “a language of apartheid,” but somehow that does not count. For blacks, Afrikaans is the linguistic enemy, whereas they praise English as a “global” or “international” language.

The mainstream media of South Africa never refer to it, but there is an additional source of frustration on campus: black failure. In order to get a matric or a high-school diploma these days, one needs a 30 percent score in three subjects and 40 percent in another three. It is almost impossible to fail, yet many blacks still manage to. Those who do get the matric arrive all starry-eyed at some university where they are completely overwhelmed by the complexity of the material, and almost invariably drop out within the first six months. Then they have a government-sponsored loan to repay or they might even owe money to the university. They become ready recruits for the army of “activists” or “protesters” in and around the universities. They agitate against statues and Afrikaans or in favor of being given a second chance at passing their first year.

Although the universities maintain a blanket of silence over pass rates for the different races, here and there it is admitted that the black dropout rate is substantially higher than the white rate. A whole panoply of reasons is advanced for this, including “being disadvantaged by substandard schools,” a “lack of resources and encouragement at home,” “the legacy of apartheid and segregation,” and not being able to study in their own African languages.

If anyone announced to blacks that from tomorrow on they were to study in their home language they would surely burn the campus down. In fact, the famous black school riots of 1976 were against having African languages in the classroom, “mother-tongue education” being one of the ideas of the old white government’s educationists. Recognizing early on that relatively few blacks benefited from a strictly academic education, so-called “Bantu Education” used elements of German-style vocational training in order to give blacks marketable skills. It was also thought that blacks could evolve their own educational systems in their own languages, with schools and universities in black languages such as Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho, Tswana, Pedi, Venda, and Tsonga.


Scene from the 1976 protests.

Speak to any Québecois, and he will extol the virtues of education in his native French. Suggest the same thing to a South African black and he will accuse you of racism and trying to deprive him of global English, that magical language.

And yet, this lack of home-language instruction is often cited to explain the achievement gap. This then leads to the notion that, at least at the universities where Afrikaans is still used, Afrikaners enjoy an advantage over blacks by getting instruction in their home language. Afrikaans should therefore be “abolished” in the name of “equality.” Prof. J.C. or “Jaap” Steyn, who is an absolute fount of knowledge about South Africa’s tortured linguistic history, called this the quest for “an equality of misery.”

At least until recently, white students who spoke English as their mother tongue benefited from predominantly Afrikaans universities because they offered a serious, Western education, as opposed to the decidedly left-wing instruction of the former English universities: Natal, Rhodes (in Grahamstown), Cape Town, and Wits (the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg). Many conservative, English-speaking parents preferred to send their children to an Afrikaans university, rather than turn them into Marxists, feminists, or drug addicts–South Africa was still coping with the aftermath of the hippie era.

Afrikaans universities have therefore always been very tolerant and helpful towards non-Afrikaans speakers. Even before black rule, at some Afrikaans universities up to 20 percent of the students were English-speakers. They would attend lectures in Afrikaans, but use English textbooks and often write exams in English.

Unlike in Canada or Belgium, which are divided by language, English and Afrikaans whites generally get along very well and are bilingual to varying degrees. Only a small, virulently liberal elite eschews Afrikaans completely and hates the language for being associated with “white supremacy,” “patriarchy,” “heteronormativity,” and all the other clichés. So the initial influx of English-speakers at Stellenbosch caused no real problem.

At all-English universities, change was rapid after blacks took over. The University of Natal (now Kwazulu-Natal) was one of the first to be “Africanized,” and quickly slipped out of the top 500 universities world-wide. A liberal academic, R. W. Johnson, has described the reign of its fundamentalist black principal, Malegapuru Makgoba, who once claimed that blacks had surpassed whites on the evolutionary scale. Prof. Johnson says Africanization under Makgoba has been “calamitous.”

The result was white flight on a massive scale. The mostly English-speaking population of Natal province started sending their children to the University of Stellenbosch, which then changed from 100 percent Afrikaans to moderately bilingual Afrikaans-English. Only a few years ago, the government and liberal media complained bitterly that 94 percent of “Maties” (pronounced “maaties”) as the students are colloquially known, were still white.

I once had an online conversation with an English-speaking student from Natal province at Stellenbosch who said she enjoyed learning Afrikaans and interacting with Afrikaner students. Growing up in Natal, it was easy to get the impression that South Africa was an English-speaking country, but Stellenbosch had shown her how widespread Afrikaans culture was in most other provinces.


Black students campaign for an end to Afrikaans instruction at Stellenbosch.

There was similar “white flight” in Johannesburg, though it was the Afrikaans-speaking university that succumbed first. There used to be two universities in Johannesburg, one English and one Afrikaans, within walking distance of each another. The Rand Afrikaans University (RAU) was long vilified by liberal academics from the English University of the Witwatersrand for being reactionary and even racist because it had few, if any black students. Its beautiful, modern campus, built during the 1970s, was even described as “fascist architecture.”

As soon as the ANC came to power, then-Minister of Education, Kader Asmal, merged RAU with two low-grade black institutions, ensuring a large black student body. Within a few years the campus went from white and Afrikaans to black and English. Some white students left to attend the rural University of Potchefstroom and some to the University of Pretoria. RAU is now called the University of Johannesburg.

Liberal, English “Wits” continued unscathed for a while, until its student body started to change, too. Towards the end of last year it bore the brunt of the student riots during the so-called “Fees must fall” agitation, with its principal, Adam Habib, being more or less held hostage by black students in the main administration building, where he was forced to “listen to their demands.” Most English-speaking whites in Johannesburg have now deserted Wits in favor of the University of Pretoria, which also used to be exclusively Afrikaans-speaking.



So we see that white students are now clustered in a handful of universities: Pretoria, Stellenbosch, Potchefstroom, and the Free State, all four of which were previously Afrikaans-only. There are also the University of Cape Town and the small Rhodes campus in Grahamstown, both exclusively English, which have also managed to maintain a student body that is more or less half white. Except for Rhodes, which does not make much national news, all the others have become “theaters of racial and cultural conflict”–because of fights over statues, paintings, names of buildings, the Afrikaans language, or other signs of white history.

The parallels with the United States are obvious; the only difference is that South Africa is further down the road to “the great replacement,” as French author Renaud Camus calls it. Eventually, all whites could be replaced by other races and their institutions changed or “transformed,” to use the politically correct South African cliché, into places where even the memory of the founders is “offensive” to the new owners.

At the same time, there is a sense among blacks that whites must be prevented from getting degrees. In the face of draconian affirmative-action laws and de facto discrimination against whites at all levels, a white child’s only hope is to get a sought-after degree that will enable him to get a job, regardless of racial quotas. Not surprisingly, one of the complaints against white students by blacks is that “they do not protest,” and that they complain when black threats or rioting bring the university to a standstill. For blacks, just wanting to study is an aberration.

The media are also to blame for the almost constant upheavals on campuses. As one liberal academic, Robert Morrell of the University of Cape Town, recently put it:


Campus violence has up to now occurred with virtually no action taken against perpetrators. They have operated with impunity. I cannot speculate about the reasons for the lack of consequence that has attended the perpetration of violence but the widespread sympathy of the media has contributed to the view that students are “right” and that their actions are therefore justified. In this sense, the media are complicit with the perpetration of campus violence because they contribute to a climate that legitimizes it.

Some whites are starting to fight back. On February 22, during a rugby game between the University of the Free State and another university from Port Elizabeth on the East Coast, a group of black student protesters forced their way onto the pitch, where they sang and danced. Normally, because of the climate of tolerance toward black violence and protest, such an incident would have passed without consequences. However, perhaps because one young black man hit a white woman over the head on his way to the pitch, some of the white student spectators and their rugby-keen fathers stormed onto the field and started beating up the protesters. A video of the battle showing blacks running away from the white spectators soon went viral in South Africa.

The rugby match went ahead as planned, and the UFS team won. The moral of the story is that whites will have to learn to resist the relentless drive for a kind of territorial domination that seems to characterize much of the conflict at South African universities. Only when whites stand their ground and fight back, be it an intellectual contest or a physical brawl, will there be any hope for the future.

Much of what happens in South Africa is so absurd that it sounds like an April Fools’ joke. But given the demographic possibility of an African planet, Europe and the United States could eventually find themselves in the same predicament. As Africa exports its burgeoning population, we can imagine masses of penniless Africans who want to study at Europe’s most prestigious universities. They will “demand”–that is the operative word–scholarships, loans, and admission to the Universities of Bologna, Heidelberg, Utrecht, Karolinska Institute in Sweden, Charles University in Prague, etc. Universities will not only accommodate them, but reduce and finally abolish instruction in Italian, German, Dutch, Swedish, and Czech in favor of English, French and Arabic, the three main educational languages of Africa. Statues of whites at those universities, as well as Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard and Princeton, will be vandalized and eventually removed, since they would remind blacks of a “painful past” of colonialism and white supremacy.

Apart from Islam, antiracism is the most powerful religion in the world today. If not countered, it has the power eventually to dissolve the cultures of the West. The attack on Afrikaans is just a foretaste of what could come if we do not fight back.

The End of Afrikaans?

The end of Afrikaans? by Melanie Verwoerd (republished with permission )

Melanie Verwoerd is a former ANC MP and South African Ambassador to Ireland.

Last week the Universities of Pretoria and Stellenbosch decided to change their language policies. Both will be switching to English as the main medium of instruction, with Stellenbosch retaining Afrikaans if requested by enough students.

Predictably, there is great unhappiness amongst some (and I want to emphasise some) Afrikaners about this move. In Rapport this week, one of the six Council members who walked out in protest gave a lengthy interview to Hanlie Retief. John Theron declared that he has now become an activist for Afrikaans - a “language terrorist”. I'm not sure what that means and I find it rather troubling, especially coming from a lawyer who is trained to measure his language. There are many other things I found deeply unsettling about that interview, but what really got my blood boiling was his reference to “my people” - referring to Afrikaners.

I love Afrikaans

For the record, let me make it clear: I am Afrikaans and I love Afrikaans. It is the language of my heart and of my dreams. I grew up in a typical Afrikaner household during apartheid, where my beloved grandmother could find nothing good to say about English, or those who spoke it. “The only good thing the English ever did was bring hot water bottles and tea to South Africa,” was her favourite saying - and she meant it. My father deducted pocket money if we used an Anglicism, and the works of Louis Leipoldt would be our bedtime stories. Despite living in Ireland for 14 years, I raised my children in Afrikaans, and we speak only Afrikaans at home.

But let me be equally clear: I don't want to be included as part of “my people” when Afrikaners say that. For me, "my people" embrace all the amazing people of all races and cultures I have come across over many years, some of whom became my closest friends. Despite language, race and cultural differences, I have a lot more in common with them than I have with the majority of Afrikaners.

I am also a graduate of the University of Stellenbosch. I did my bachelors, honours and masters degrees there. I was on campus from the mid-80s to early-90s, during which time Stellenbosch was unashamedly the cradle of Afrikaner nationalism, providing the intellectual and theological underpinning for apartheid.

After a short break abroad I returned to the university in the early 90s. Little had changed, apart from a small, very vocal group of left-wing students who fought passionately against the university authorities on many issues.

An unwelcoming and unhappy place


In the pre-1994 era of white panic, the university moved swiftly to orchestrate the passing of The University of Stellenbosch (Private Act) 1992 through the last white Parliament. Section 18 of that Act entrenched Afrikaans as the medium of instruction. Many marches and other protest actions were held. It seemed clear as daylight that this was more than an attempt to keep Afrikaans safe: it was also an attempt to entrench whiteness by keeping black students out. The authorities argued lamely that it was not a race issue and that Coloured and Indian parents would like to see their children studying in Afrikaans – a point still argued today. The obvious rebuttal was that in practice the majority of students in this country would still be excluded.

Stellenbosch is thankfully not the place it used to be – at least not in its statutes and governance. But 21 years later, as we saw from the Luister documentary, Stellenbosch is still an unwelcoming and unhappy place for many students who are not Afrikaans.

The point is that language isn’t just a way of communicating. With it come cultural practices, history, and even sometimes political ideology. As one of the Rhodes-must-fall students told me: “My first week at Stellenbosch, the social in the residence was a ‘sokkie’ (a dance popular with Afrikaners). The next week it was a ‘sokkie’ and the third week and so it went on. I don’t mind ‘sokkie’ but could they not have mixed it up a bit? As African students we were never able to integrate into social life”.

The message of the (mainly) black students at Stellenbosch and the other historically white campuses around South Africa is that they feel alienated with no sense of belonging. They do not feel heard or even seen and are tired of being “accommodated” rather than being legitimately and integrally part of the student body.

Then there is also the overt racism that exists. The shocking fact is that many of the white “born frees” of this country are as racist as those who were on campus in the pre-1994 years.

Equal the playing field

Of course racism is not unique to university campuses. It is endemic in our society. But it appears to be a far too big a problem at the historically white universities and together with the sense of alienation felt by so many black students it is creating a very explosive and dangerous environment. It is equally true that the language policy change per se will not deal with the racism. But it will take away the sense of “we were here first” and “we are kindly accommodating you non-Afrikaans speaking people”.

It will equal the playing field a bit more and it will bring down some of the barriers of otherness. At a recent workshop on redefining Afrikaner culture at Wits, I asked one of the Rhodes must fall students from UP, whether it would not be better to have multi-lingual policy – so bring in more of the African languages. “No, that will only create more barriers, between Sotho’s, Xhosa, Zulu’s etc. We are not against Afrikaans. We want inclusivity and equality. And the only way we can see that happen, is to have English for all of us,” she said.

In the Rapport interview, Johan Theron argues that “many Afrikaner young people are so ashamed about the history, so punch drunk because of all the accusations and insults and comments that they don’t want to get a degree in a country where they are not ensured of work. They therefore go for the easy way out. And that is English”.

From my perspective there is a lot that we should be ashamed of in our history and frankly from what I can see on social media the Afrikaner young people are often the ones doing the punching and insulting.

Faith in my language

However, there are many young Afrikaners, who have a strong sense of where they come from, with a healthy recognition of the sins of their fathers and thus their responsibility to make things right in the future. They accept that it includes changes to hurtful policies such the universities’ language policies. They are modern, global citizens who love South Africa and believe that they have a future here. And they still love Afrikaans and want to raise their children in their mother tongue.

Those young people are part of who I call “my people”, because ultimately they understand that our country requires far more complex thinking and a resistance to pulling lager and simple pro- and anti- positions.

I do not believe that the 22 June was the beginning of the end of Afrikaans as some prominent Afrikaners will have us believe. I have far more faith in my language. I saw with my children, who were educated in English, that if the language is spoken at home, the language will continue to thrive.

Post-Apartheid Afrikaans Culture : 10 things you probably didn't know

www.en.wikipedia.org

The emergence of Afrikaans as a language started as early as 1685. It was a version of Dutch being spoken in a new Dutch colony — South Africa. In 1905, Gustav Preller was determined to create Afrikaans as the “white man’s language” in South Africa. We know now that he didn’t succeed. Apartheid is the Afrikaans word for segregation. In 1925, Afrikaans was recognized as an official language and was closely tied to apartheid. So what happened to Afrikaans speakers when apartheid ended? Here are 10 things you didn’t know about post-apartheid Afrikaans culture.
1. Afrikaans was a major topic during apartheid-ending negotiations

When formal negotiations started around 1991 to end apartheid, the Afrikaner nationalists were committed to the constitutional equality of English and Afrikaans. The ANC wanted English to be the only official language of South Africa for political and economic reasons. If the ANC conceded to another official language besides English by accepting Afrikaans as an official language, they could not justify to their constituents why the other indigenous African languages were not included.
2. South Africa now has 11 national languages; Afrikaans is one of them

Afrikaans, like all 11 national languages of South Africa, is protected by the constitution. The South African Constitution of 1996 says one has the right to use the language of his or her choice and practice his or her own culture. The official languages must be treated equally. However, the national and provincial governments may use a particular language based on preference and needs of the population as a whole, but the national government and each provincial government must use at least two official languages.

3. Afrikaans speakers are on the rise in South Africa

According to the 2011 census study, there are 6.85-million first-language Afrikaans speakers in South Africa versus 5.98 million a decade earlier. Afrikaans speakers have a higher employment rate than non-Afrikaans speakers, so it pays to speak the language.
4. Afrikaans speakers are mostly coloured

Afrikaans is not a “white” language as some may argue. The majority of Afrikaans speakers in South Africa are what the country considers coloured. The term coloured is contentious. Coloureds are people of mixed lineage with origins from Europe, Asia, and various Khoisan and Bantu tribes of Southern Africa.
5. Afrikaans-only schools still exist

In 1976, high school students in Soweto protested Afrikaans instruction, associating Afrikaans with apartheid. Black South Africans wanted English instruction and many still do. The Soweto Uprising that resulted from the protest resulted in the death of 176 students. It is considered a catalyst of the movement to end apartheid and signifies South African resistance to oppression. Almost 40 years later, there are still Afrikaans-only schools in South Africa, although statistics show that many Afrikaans-instruction schools have been or are being transitioned to English-instruction schools. The South African School Act states that schools may determine the language of instruction subject to the constitution. There are still areas in South Africa where there are no English-instruction schools.
6. Some students still want to be taught in Afrikaans, but more prefer to be taught in English

The South African Bill of Rights mandates that everyone may receive an education in the official language of their choice. English is the preferred language of learning for 64 percent of pupils.




7. South Africa has a university that promotes Afrikaans instruction

The University of Stellenbosch in the wine region of Stellenbosch is committed to preserving and sustaining Afrikaans as an academic language. While the university is said to have a multicultural atmosphere, some classes are taught only in Afrikaans depending on the composition of the class. Although the university ranks in the world’s top 500 universities, language policy is considered by some to be evidence of the university’s reputation for excellence built on the oppressive apartheid system. Afrikaans instruction may still repel attendance by black South Africans for whom Afrikaans is not their language of choice.



8. Afrikaans music is alive, well and resurging

Post-apartheid South Africa saw dramatic growth in the popularity of Afrikaans-language music. Possible reasons include this: perhaps the end of apartheid meant the end of the privileged Afrikaans culture and therefore the Afrikaans-speaking community looked to music to represent pride in the Afrikaans linguistic and cultural heritage. Afrikaans music is currently one of the most popular and highest-selling genres on the South African music scene.



9. Afrikaans is an important advertising tool

The size of the Afrikaans-speaking community means TV and media must offer Afrikaans programming. The South African Broadcasting Corporation was restructured in 1996 for the new democracy and has been accused of favoring the ANC by cutting Afrikaans programs and broadcasting more in English. The Afrikaans-speaking community has criticized this.

10. Afrikaans is everywhere

There are an estimated 10 million Afrikaans-spears worldwide. Additionally, Afrikaans is taught around the world including Canada, U.S., Poland, the U.K. and Namibia.

The ANC Fight for Succession : Who will follow Zuma as President

The ruling party's most senior members have locked horns, promising a bloody presidential succession race




For provincial and national internal elections, a candidate who has eThekwini on their side has a huge advantage.

The ANC has had so many chaotic elective conferences, it is tempting to dismiss last weekend’s aborted eThekwini regional gathering as yet another episode in the long-running post-Polokwane soap opera.

But this would be a grave mistake. What happened last Saturday at Durban’s Greyville Racecourse has serious implications for the race to succeed President Jacob Zuma as ANC leader when he steps down in two years.

In case you missed it, here is a recap of events:

Earlier this year, eThekwini — the ANC’s biggest region in terms of membership figures — held an elective conference in which mayor James Nxumalo narrowly beat his rival, eThekwini councillor Zandile Gumede, to the post of regional chairman.

The elections were nullified by Luthuli House after Gumede’s supporters complained about one of the branches that had been allowed to vote although it did not meet the constitutional requirements for participating in the conference.

Last weekend, the conference was reconvened, with Nxumalo and Gumede still in the race. By all indications, the mayor — who also happens to be the SACP’s provincial chairman — was destined to win the vote again.

Then, a section of Gumede’s supporters apparently tried to sabotage the conference by initially staying away from the venue, in the hope that this would cause the gathering not to form a quorum.

When they realised that the strategy would not work — more than 260 of the 410 accredited delegates were already at the venue — the Gumede camp changed tactics and decided to attend.

Trouble ensued soon after the conference started.

A group of Gumede supporters disrupted KwaZulu-Natal premier and ANC provincial chairman Senzo Mchunu’s speech, protesting that one of the branches in their camp had been barred from attending the conference.

Not even the intervention of ANC national executive committee member Joe Phaahla, who tried to explain to the protesters why that branch’s five delegates had to be excluded, helped. The conference degenerated into chaos and party bosses eventually agreed that the branch be allowed to attend.

Immediately a problem emerged: the protesters now had a new demand. They wanted Mchunu and other members of the provincial executive committee as well as the ANC Youth League’s provincial task team to leave the conference. They did not trust them, they said, claiming they were involved in “rigging” the previous regional vote.

The conference collapsed. Nxumalo’s supporters believed this was the Gumede grouping’s objective all along because they had realised they would not win.

“Their numbers were low and they were hellbent on ending the conference,” said a provincial executive committee member sympathetic to the Nxumalo faction.

But why would the collapse of a conference in South Africa’s third-biggest metro have implications for those in the running to replace Zuma as the ANC’s next leader in 2017 and — if the ANC wins the 2019 elections, as expected — the next president?

With 75000 registered members, eThekwini remains the ANC’s largest and most influential region, despite having lost 25000 members since the party’s last national congress in 2012.

For both provincial and national internal party elections, therefore, a candidate who has eThekwini on their side has a huge advantage.

At provincial level, a Nxumalo victory is seen as something that would boost Mchunu’s chances of remaining KwaZulu-Natal premier and ANC chairman beyond 2019.

A Gumede victory would shift the balance of forces in favour of provincial party secretary Sihle Zikalala, who is said to be campaigning to replace Mchunu.

At national level, Zikalala is regarded as close to ANC treasurer-general Zweli Mkhize.

For months, Mkhize has been said to be campaigning quietly for the ANC deputy presidency on a ticket that would then have the current deputy president, Cyril Ramaphosa, as president.

The assumption was that Mkhize would run against current secretary-general Gwede Mantashe, a former unionist who has also served as the SACP’s national chairman.

Mantashe was seen as Nxumalo’s natural ally, given the association of the two candidates with the SACP. But a decision by Mantashe to nullify the first conference has left angry Nxumalo supporters accusing him of betrayal and making unsubstantiated claims that he had struck a deal with Mkhize that would see the two of them take over the ANC presidency in 2017.

“What is happening is that Mantashe and Mchunu fell out. Mantashe has now formed an alliance with No2 [Ramaphosa]. They have told him [Mantashe] that Ramaphosa will go back to business and Mantashe will be president and Zweli will be his deputy. Now he is doing all these things because of his presidential ambitions,” said an ANC-SACP leader closely linked to the Nxumalo campaign.

According to this theory, Mkhize would bring to the campaign KwaZulu-Natal’s huge support base and Mantashe would deliver the Eastern Cape, the party’s second-biggest province by numbers.

But Mantashe denied all this and said his detractors should not point fingers at him for the collapsed conference.

“Wait, you have presidential ambitions and you go use that at regional conferences? Not even provincial conferences?

“Don’t you think that’s an exaggeration of people who see themselves as very important? Where is the link? I want to be president? Then I am very ambitious. In other words, comrade Cyril is a wrong deputy ...

“It is rumours if they say this conference was collapsed by Gwede, who was not there, by the way. They disrupted it themselves,” Mantashe said.

Despite Mantashe’s denials, and clear evidence that the two attempts to have the conference were thwarted by the warring factions, perceptions of Luthuli House’s interference are now treated as fact by both sides to the conflict.

Whichever side eventually wins the conference would most likely align itself with whomever it believes had been on its side.

ANC members on the ground believe their top six leaders to be deeply divided over who should succeed Zuma. Party structures, at least in the largest region, operate on the basis that the presidential race will involve Ramaphosa, Mkhize, Mantashe and party national chairwoman and National Assembly Speaker Baleka Mbete — all of whom currently hold top-six ANC posts.

The only possible candidate outside of the top six would be African Union Commission chairwoman Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, who is said to have the backing of her former husband.

But it is the perception that four of the six top leaders are fighting over who should succeed Zuma that is causing damage to the ruling party, with every decision being perceived as being motivated by the need to advance their own careers.

As a result, these leaders are now unable to stop the kind of chaos witnessed at last weekend’s eThekwini conference.

After South Africa's withdrawal, how does the ICC stay relevant?

The Rainbow Nation's decision to withdraw from the International Criminal Court highlighted its increasingly shaky support from governments across the continent, but their reasons are more complex than headline-grabbing claims the court is racist.





View Caption

Shiraaz Mohamed/AP/File


PARIS — South Africa’s decision to leave the International Criminal Court (ICC) hardly spells the demise of the tribunal that tries the world’s worst crimes. But it is certainly a heavy blow to the young court.

“The existence of the court is not at stake,” says Luis Moreno Ocampo, the ICC’s first prosecutor. “But its relevance is a different matter.”

South Africa, whose justice minister announced last Friday that the government had launched the year-long process of withdrawal, is the first country to say it is leaving the ICC. But Burundi’s parliament voted last week to get out and a number of other African nations, from Kenya to Namibia, are making threatening noises.

Dewa Mavhinga, an Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch, warns of a “runaway train” on a continent that has always been central to the ICC’s raison d’etre.


In 2002, when the ICC was set up, Africa was the biggest backer of the court, which was set up to try cases of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes when national courts would not or could not hear them. Today, accusations abound that the ICC is racist, colonial and “anti-African.”
What has gone wrong?

Pretoria says it is leaving the ICC because the court does not allow diplomatic immunity for suspects it has indicted. South Africa last year welcomed Sudanese President Omar Bashir to an African Union summit on the grounds that local law offers immunity to sitting heads of state. The ICC indicted President Bashir in 2009 for allegedly directing atrocities in Darfur.

It has to be said that African leaders began turning against the court when they themselves and their peers began feeling its heat. After Bashir’s indictment, Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta and his vice president were indicted in 2013 for their reported role in stirring up severe electoral violence.

That year Ethiopian Foreign Minister Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus complained to an African Union (AU) summit that the ICC had “transformed itself into a political instrument targeting Africa and Africans.”

At first sight, that seems an easy case to make. All four men convicted, for crimes such as murder, rape, pillage, destroying cultural artifacts, and conscripting child soldiers, are Africans. All 32 men so far indicted are Africans. Nine of the ten investigations undertaken by the ICC prosecutor are in Africa.

But the reality is more complex.

Six of the nine situations under investigation in Africa were referred to the court by African governments themselves. The prosecutor was ordered to take up two others by the United Nations Security Council. In only one case, that of Kenya, did Mr. Moreno Ocampo lay charges on his own initiative.

“The prosecutor can’t be blamed for doing what states ask him to do, or what the UN Security Council directs him to do,” says Geoffrey Robertson, an international human rights lawyer who sat as an appeals judge on the Special UN tribunal for Sierra Leone.

The idea that the ICC unfairly picks on Africans mistakes the purpose of the court, says spokesman Fadi El Abdallah. “ICC intervention is not about targeting ten or fifteen suspects,” he says. “It is about protecting ten or fifteen thousand victims.”

And aside from that, El Abdallah points out, “there have been no referrals by the UN Security Council or by state parties [of the court] outside Africa,” except for one from Palestine last year.

In retrospect, some court observers wonder about the wisdom of indicting Bashir, a sitting head of state, in light of the resentment the move sparked among his fellow leaders.

“The message was incredibly important, that no one is above the law,” argues Laura Davis, a writer and consultant on matters of peace and justice. “Whether it was a smart thing to do is not so clear.”

It would have been more sensible, suggests Leslie Vinjamuri, head of the Centre on Conflict, Rights and Justice at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, “if the court had delayed looking at heads of state until after they had left office … and the conflicts they were involved in had been resolved.” That way, she argues, the ICC could avoid getting in the way of possible peace initiatives.
'Tearing down the traffic light'?

There is also a widespread feeling that the ICC should spread its wings more widely. “There needs to be more action outside Africa for this to be seen as a truly international court,” says Allan Ngari, an analyst at the Institute for Security Studies in Johannesburg.

The ICC has clearly got that message. Earlier this year prosecutor Fatou Bensouda opened a formal investigation into allegations of war crimes by both sides during the war between Russia and Georgia in 2008. It was the first time the court had begun investigating a situation outside Africa.

Ms. Bensouda has also ordered preliminary examinations of allegations concerning Ukraine, the Palestinian territories, and British army behavior in Iraq.

This is all very positive, says Dr. Davis, but there is no doubt that the court is operating today in a very different international atmosphere from the one that prevailed at its birth 14 years ago. Then, she recalls, the movement promoting international justice flourished in the optimism of the post-cold war 1990s, and the hope that a cooperative world order was within reach.

Today, Davis guesses, amidst the prevailing “fear and uncertainty,” diplomats would not be able to create something like the ICC.
Moreno Ocampo too blames a retreat “from collective effort … to tribalism, retaliation, enemies, and friends” for the assault on the court.

The ICC, he says, is like a stoplight. It is not always effective in preventing or punishing crimes against humanity; “sometimes the cars stop, and sometimes they don’t,” he acknowledges.

“South Africa is tearing down the traffic light,” says Moreno Ocampo. “My prediction is that there will be more accidents. The question is not whether the ICC needs Africa; it’s Africa that needs the ICC.”

DARLING! THE PIETER-DIRK UYS STORY

Pieter-Dirk Uys
After the show Foreign Aids in Berlin 2006.
Born	28 September 1945 (age 71) Cape Town, South Africa
Occupation	Satirist, performer, author, social activist

Pieter-Dirk Uys (/ˈeɪs/; born 28 September 1945) is a South African satirist, active as a performer, author, and social activist.

Background and early life

Uys was born in Cape Town on 28 September 1945, to Hannes Uys, a Calvinist Afrikaner father, and Helga Bassel, a Berlin-born Jewish mother. Hannes Uys, a fourth-generation South African of Dutch and Belgian Huguenot stock, was a musician and organist in his local church. Bassel was a German concert pianist whom the Nazis expelled from the Reichsmusikkammer in 1935 as part of their campaign to root out Jewish artists.^[3] She later escaped to South Africa and managed to take her grand piano with her, with which she taught her daughter, Tessa Uys (b. 1948), now a concert pianist based in London. Bassel spoke little about her Jewish past to her children. It was only after her suicide that they discovered she was fully Jewish. Uys and his sister had an NG Kerk upbringing and their mother encouraged them to embrace Afrikaner culture.

Career

He received a B.A. from the University of Cape Town where he began his dramatic career as an actor under the tutelage of Rosalie van der Gught, Mavis Taylor and Robert Mohr, among others. His performances at this time included roles in Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs, The Fantasticks and Once Upon a Mattress. He later studied at the London Film School in the early 1970s. It was in one of his student films, an advertisement for milk, that he performed in drag for the first time (as a milkmaid). He then began a period in his dramatic career as a serious playwright. Several of his plays were performed at the Space Theatre, Cape Town and his 1979 play Paradise is Closing Down was performed in London, at the Edinburgh Festival (co-produced by William Burdett-Coutts), and later produced for Granada Televisionin 1981. He switched to one-man revues at the height of the Apartheid era.

Uys is particularly well known for his character Evita Bezuidenhout (also known as Tannie Evita), a white Afrikaner socialite and self-proclaimed political activist. The character was inspired by Australian comedian Barry Humphries's character Dame Edna Everage. Evita is the former ambassadress of Bapetikosweti – a fictitious Bantustan or black homeland located outside her home in the affluent, formerly whites-only suburbs of Johannesburg. Evita Bezuidenhout is named in honour of Eva Perón. Under Apartheid, Uys used the medium of humour and comedy to criticise and expose the absurdity of the South African government's racial policies. Much of his work was not censored, indicating a closet approval of his views by many members of the ruling party, who were not so bold as to openly admit mistakes and criticise the policies themselves. For many years, Uys lampooned the South African regime and its leaders, as well as the sometimes hypocritical attitudes of white liberals. One of his characters, a kugel (social climbing Jewish woman) once said, "There are two things wrong with South Africa: one's apartheid and the other's black people". This was later erroneously attributed to Uys himself.

Following South Africa's first non-racial elections in 1994, Uys starred in a TV series, Funigalore, in which Evita interviewed Nelson Mandela and other prominent politicians of the day. In the theatre, Uys/Evita's performances include You ANC Nothing Yet. He and his character are known for their tireless work in the frontline of HIV/AIDS activism and education. He is currently involved in teaching AIDS awareness to children and education in the use of condoms, travelling to schools all over South Africa. Uys also serves on the board of directors for the Desmond Tutu HIV Foundation, a non-profit organisation founded to provide treatment for and conduct research relating to HIV.

Art and Craft market at Evita se Perron

Uys converted the old railway station of Darling, where he lives, into a cabaret venue called Evita se Perron (Perron is Afrikaans for station platform) and performs there regularly. He is openly gay. During 2004, Pieter-Dirk Uys took part in a Carte Blanche story, dealing with genetics and unlocking the mysteries of race and ethnicity, entitled "So, Where Do We Come From?". Uys discovered that he haskhoisan heritage from his mother's side. Uys received the Special Teddy Award 2011 at the Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale) for his commitment to AIDS education at South African schools and for his on-stage alter ego, Evita Bezuidenhout. An independent jury presents the Teddy Award to individuals for lifetime achievements for films with LGBT (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender) topics.

Awards and honours

• The 2011 TMSA Naledi Lifetime Achiever Award
• Special Teddy Award at the Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale) 2011
• Reconciliation Award in 2001
• Mrs Evita Bezuidenhout was awarded the Living Legacy 2000 Award in San Diego
• The lifetime achievement award from the Cape Tercentenary Foundation
• Doctor honoris causa from
  • Rhodes University: D.Litt. (Hon.), 1997
  • University of Cape Town: D.Litt for distinguished, socially-responsible creative work in 2003
  • University of the Western Cape: D.Ed. (Hon.), 2003

Books

• Farce about Uys : A Legal Assembly in Two Riotous Acts (1983) Jonathan Ball and Ad. Donker Publishers ISBN 0-86850-077-1
• Selle ou storie: A play (1983) Ad. Donker, Johannesburg ISBN 0-86852-027-6
• Paradise Is Closing Down and Other Plays (1989) Penguin Books Ltd ISBN 0-14-048228-8
• Funigalore: Evita's Real-Life Adventures in Wonderland (1995) The Penguin Group (SA) Pty Ltd ISBN 0-14-025313-0
• The Essential Evita Bezuidenhout (1997) David Philip Publishers, Cape Town ISBN 0-86486-349-7
• A Part Hate a Part Love: The Legend of Evita Bezuidenhout (1994) Hond, Groenkloof ISBN 1-874969-08-6
• No space on Long Street ; Marshrose : two plays (2000) ComPress, Cape Town ISBN 978-1-919-83310-1
• Trekking to Teema (2001) Compress, Cape Town ISBN 1-919833-10-2
• Elections & Erections: A Memoir of Fear and Fun (2003) Zebra Press, Cape Town ISBN 1-86872-665-7

Films and documentaries[edit source]

• Skating on thin Uys, a 1985 comedy lampooning P.W. Botha
• Darling! The Pieter–Dirk Uys Story, a 2007 documentary by Julian Shaw