Time To Open Pandora’s Apartheid Box

[Maritz]

Part 6 - Other Rationales For Apartheid

By Mike Smith

So far I have only scratched the surface and told the reader about the more common practices and customs of blacks that whites know about and find abominable such as, Lobola (buying wives with cows), the initiation rituals of boys and girls, witchcraft, superstition, muti-murders, raping babies to cure AIDS, etc. There are so many more rationales for Apartheid that one can actually write a book about them. And indeed someone has written a book about it, several books actually. His name is Credo Mutwa and the name of the book is "My People-The writings of a Zulu witch-doctor". (1969) ISBN 014003210X. The book is extremely rare and few people know about it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vusamazulu_Credo_Mutwa  It is a fascinating book, giving you insight into the various traditions of black South Africans of various tribes, their beliefs, their superstitions, their customs and their mindset.

Credo is the most respected Sangoma and Sunusi in the whole of South Africa. He is a traditional healer, a black historian and an authority on traditional customs and beliefs of the black tribes of Africa. If one has to compare him to Christianity, then Credo Mutwa would be the pope of traditional healers. He mentions several practices that is just too ghastly for the pious whites of South Africa to accept. One of the things he describes is the black law of infanticide when twins are born. This practice is still carried on today. Think about it, look around you, how many black twins have you seen in South Africa ?

"The law requires that if a woman gives birth to twins, one must be destroyed by having a round pebble pushed down its throat. But in the case of triplets, one must die and two must live" - "My People", Chapter 10, Pg. 218. So the few "twins" we see amongst blacks were actually triplets of which one was killed.

Blacks also killed their own wounded soldiers - "The wound would fester and sooner or later the patient would die. Even small gaping wounds spelt a write-off of the patient; large Panga slashes were regarded as fatal at the outset and warriors thus wounded were given a mercy death. Many battle axes were furnished with special 'dispatchers' for this purpose." - "My people" Chapter 11, pg. 234.

I will conclude with a topic that very few people wish to address and prefer to ignore, but if we are going to be honest about blacks and why we had Apartheid, then we need to mention the facts that blacks are untidy, and well, they smell funny. One just has to look at how blacks live. From ancient times until today, it does not matter where in the world one goes, a black area looks like a pig sty. I have seen this in Trinidad and Tobago, in Haiti, in Jamaica in the Bahamas and everywhere I went in Africa. I have seen this from black areas in European cities to ghettos in the USA. Blacks just cannot keep their environment clean and tidy. Everything is disorderly, chaotic and dirty, rubbish lying all over the place.

Another phenomenon that one sees in townships of South Africa, is that Blacks do not plant grass, flowers or trees amongst their tin shacks. This is amazingly odd. Firstly, because blacks work as gardeners or bricklayers for whites. So the ability to build is there, the ability to keep lawn and a garden is there. Why is it that blacks never do in their own areas what they do when they are working for whites ? Maybe their environments are reflections of how they keep their bodies orderly and tidy as well. This is how blacks are. They are actors. They can even mimic a White accent, white behaviour or intelligence and appear almost the same as whites. Many whites fall for this and indeed believe that blacks are the same as whites, but it is when one gets to know blacks up close and personal that one sees through this veil and behind the mask.

Blacks can bullsh!t a lot, especially when they work for whites. Then they know they have to put their best foot forward or lose the job. That is when they wash, dress respectably and behave almost white. In the workplace, blacks who are utterly incompetent will fake competence, bullsh!t their way through every day, steal other's work, all an act to hide their incompetence and when they are caught out, they just change jobs and repeat the process. That is when one realises that the so called intelligent words coming out of the mouths or pens of Martin Luther King or Barack Obama are all stolen. All non original thought and written by speech writers or whispered in their ears by advisors. But something blacks find extremely difficult to hide is their body odour. Blacks smell. Everyone knows this. You go to Poland, you go to Japan and you ask anybody about blacks, you will hear they say, "blacks smell". Maybe there is a biological reason for it, but I am not exactly keen on finding out. All I know is what my nose tells me and that is that Blacks smell really bad and that I cannot live with that.

But let me quote what Credo Mutwa says in his book, "My people", (1969) chapter ten - "Xhosa women also prepare mysterious potions to secure their husbands to them, so that they will not be forsaken. This potion is prepared as follows : The woman refrains from taking a bath for several days, and then rubs the body dirt off her skin in little rolls. To this she adds the hair she has shaved off her private parts. Then follows ground Bangalala root which, when mixed with milk, is a violent aphrodisiac. The recipe may also include the powdered dry petals of a sunflower, a little spittle, and a piece of sandlewood. The whole concoction is then heated in a bowl until red hot and thus reduced to ashes. These ashes are then stirred into the milk of a nanny goat which had a deformed kid, until a thick putty is formed. This is then rolled into little balls or pills, which are added one at a time to the husband's food." - "My People", Chapter ten, pg. 213.

It is clear that the religions, cultures, customs and the behaviour of blacks are just too different than that of white people. These cultures are worlds apart and totally incompatible with each other. Whites and blacks will never get along in South Africa. Anybody who believes such a pipe dream as a multicultural "Rainbow Nation", does not know black culture or white culture. Such a person would only be fooling himself through masturbating his own delusional, liberal, feel-good mindset. No, I am sorry to disappoint such people, but blacks and whites are NOT the same. The reality of South Africa is so that few options actually exists. Either one of the two, black or white, totally wipes out the other or they separate completely. Not partial separation as under Apartheid, total separation. The reasons for Apartheid are still as valid today as they were 100 years or 50 years ago. Whites can never apologise for Apartheid, because whites cannot help for the inferior cultures, customs and behaviour of blacks. Separation and separate development of all the tribes is and was the most humane and fairest solution for all the complex groups of South Africa.

[Maritz]

Part 7 – The Role Of A Government

By Mike Smith

When one asks most people, white or black, what the role of government is one will get various opinions depending on who one pose the question to, but in general most people believe that the role of government is to develop and maintain infrastructure, in other words build dams, roads, schools, etc. Their means of doing this (it is believed) is to tax the citizens. Most people also believe that the government (politicians and civil servants) steal some of this money out of the state coffers, and that is what we call corruption. They further believe that some governments steal more than others. Some build more schools and roads than others and a good government is the one who does not steal and who builds lots of "things" such as sport stadiums.

But in reality it basically works like this. Several political parties compete to rule the country to represent the people. The party that has the best sales pitch, that appears to be the most just will win, voted in by the majority population. Once in power the self-enrichment starts. The politicians do not care one bit about the people who have voted for them. Their sales pitches, lies, empty promises, bullshit and fraud is all just to get to the feeding trough and pocket the spoils, but open theft will soon end them into prison so they have to be sly about it. All governments spend more than they raise in taxes. Government officials borrow money from gigantic banks and other financial institutions to finance their building of roads, houses for the poor, etc. They then contract the jobs to companies that they themselves own, their families own, etc. This borrowed money ends up in the pockets of the politicians, but the loans needs to be paid back. This is where our taxes come in. Our taxes pay back to the banks what our governments have stolen.

The more liberal the government, the bigger the government structure will be and the bigger the theft, nepotism and corruption will be. Conservative and nationalist governments tends to be smaller and the corruption a lot less. The more uneducated the people of a country is, the least they will grasp this thieving principle and the fewer checks and balances will be kept on their thieving government. That is why liberal/socialist governments will introduce dumbed down education systems such as Outcomes Based Education and Training (OBET) to keep the people uneducated. In fact everything from sports to radio, newspapers and television will be changed to keep people ignorant of the theft going on behind the scenes. It is important to reiterate that theft and corruption happens in all governments to some extent. Some of them are mild when it comes to corruption, but most are aggressively greedy. The longer they stay in power, the longer they are in the front row of the feeding trough. That is why a government like the ANC in South Africa has one goal and that is to stay in power for ever. In order for us to understand the reasoning and rationale behind Apartheid it is necessary to briefly look at the role of Government. We as human beings want to live and survive. We want to pass on our genes into the future and in this short period of being here on earth, we want to be happy.

Part of being happy is to have a house, furniture, a television, or whatever makes us happy, basically to own property. This is called the right to life and the pursuit of happiness through the ownership of property. Problem comes in when someone wants to take your life away, take your property away or interfere in anyway with your pursuit of happiness. Such a person is then initiating force. He is stealing from us, physically attacking us, defrauding us, etc and therefore threatening our survival and our pursuit of happiness which are the most fundamental rights an individual can have. When you are a strong burly bloke, you can easily defend yourself against such a person and your retaliatory force will be just. You did not initiate the force, but protected your right to life and happiness. But what if the assailant has weapons, or there are more than one ? What if you are a child, a frail woman, an elderly person or mentally handicapped ? How do you then protect yourself against the initiation of force ? And that dear people is why we have a government. The only job of any government is to protect our individual rights. The role of any government is to protect our right to life and our pursuit of happiness from those who wants to take it away from us. The way government does it is to have an army to protect us from those outside of our country who are or might be attacking us and threaten our survival and pursuit of happiness and to have a police force to protect us from those inside our country who wants to take our individual rights away.

The government therefore needs to uphold the laws that the citizens feel are rightful and just to protect them from the initiation of force and what threatens their individual rights. First as a warning to those intending on taking away those individual rights and also to punish those who break these laws. One thing a government should never do is to initiate force against its citizens. This becomes a dicey topic, because extorting taxes is a form of initiation of force. A government can actually totally fund all its expenditures through other moral means such as setting up trust funds with all the money and property it owns, donations and people paying for services such as passports, toll roads, vehicle registration, etc. Companies who want to transport their goods through harbours, by rail or road, etc, should pay for using this infrastructure. Taxes therefore become obsolete. There is not a single government department that cannot fully pay for itself. Nevertheless, I am digressing. The National Party government in 1948 were faced with all these dilemmas when they came to power. Their primary task as a government was to protect all the citizens of South Africa. In the previous instalments of this series I tried to explain the background to this dilemma, considering the vast diversity of South Africa's people, their cultures, their religions, their languages and their histories. I explained how blacks from literally hundreds of smaller tribes were fighting against each other for hundreds of years before the whites came to South Africa, often wiping each other out completely.

Credo Mutwa writes in his book "My People" (1969), chapter eleven, page 244 :

"One of the High Laws of the Bantu is the law of revenge. The result of this law is that there are blood-feuds going on all over Africa which show no sign of dying out. Some of these have already been going on for generations. The Zulus have been feuding with the Basutus (Sothos), and also with the Shanganes of Portuguese East Africa (Mozambique), for more than a century. The feud between the Baluba and some of its neighbouring tribes has been going on for nearly six hundred years, while the feud between the Masai and the Wakambi in Kenya has now entered its tenth century. The Bahutu (Hutus) and the Wa-Tu-Tutsi (Tutsis) have been at each other's throats for as long, and as recently as 1963 the newspapers reported that this senseless feud had accounted for another 30,000 Wa-Tu-Tutsi lives".

Note how Credo Mutwa writes about the animosity between the Hutus and the Tutsis of Rwanda in 1969, referring to a relatively small massacre of 30,000 Tutsis in 1963. It culminated in full blown genocide of between 800,000 and 1,2 million Tutsis in 1994. This is exactly the chaos Apartheid tried to prevent. The South African situation was unique. It was a major challenge and it had to be solved fairly. The NP had to find a compromise that everyone could live with and be happy with. The White NP government intimately knew the blacks of South Africa and the blacks of Africa in general. They knew about Shaka's Defecane that was worse than the Rwanda genocide, they knew about all the inter cultural and inter tribal differences of the blacks of South Africa. They knew about the massacres of whites during the Xhosa wars, the massacre of whites at Bloukrans, the Battle of Blood River and countless more.

The only way to keep the peace, protect all the citizens of South Africa and to secure the individual rights of all the people of South Africa was to separate them, let them develop at their own pace, give them autonomy the right to rule themselves, draw up their own laws and enforce those laws with their own armies and police forces. The official government policy was called "Seperate Development". The Media called it, "Apartheid". Proposed in 1973 accepted and enforced in 1976, The United Nations General Assembly declared Apartheid a crime against humanity without offering an alternative to South Africa's situation. The question is thus open. Considering the background that I have sketched so far in this series, what would you have done if you were in charge of South Africa at the time, faced with the same challenges ? What would your solution have been ? The worst that Apartheid critics can dig up, the worst "Massacre" they can ever refer to, is the Sharpeville shootings in 1960 when 69 blacks died.

Compare that to Rwanda 1994; Rwanda is exactly what Apartheid tried to prevent. It does not matter what people says about Apartheid today, on the watch of the National Party, no Rwanda style massacre ever occurred on South African soil. More than 3000 white farmers were not killed by black savages under Apartheid, reported rapes of 50,000 per year never happened under Apartheid. Contrary to what most blacks and/or liberal whites would like to think about what whites supposedly did to blacks under Apartheid. There are no mass graves, there is not a single concentration camp, and there are certainly no gas chambers where whites tried to exterminate blacks. Quite the contrary. White South Africans built the biggest hospital in the world, Baragwanath (today called the Chris Hani Barragwanath hospital) for blacks with white expertise and white taxpayer's money - 3200 beds and 6760 staff members. For that, and many other altruistic and charitable endeavours, whites of South Africa were and still are made out as the evil skunks of the world.

[Maritz]

Part 8 – The Lies About The Homelands

By Mike Smith

A common myth or lie about Apartheid is that the whites stole the land from the blacks and shoved them on 13% of the land of South Africa in what was called Homelands. It is further believed that blacks barely scratched out a living in these homelands due to it being on barren soil or arid regions. It is further claimed that whites made sure there were no minerals on these lands before giving to the blacks. It is time to address these lies. Traditionally South Africa belongs to the whites who first permanently settled South Africa since 1652. Blacks entered South Africa at about the same time, but never permanently settled any area, because they were nomadic cattle and goat herders. Blacks only started settling areas permanently after about 1770.

Wherever the Boers or Voortrekkers went they bargained for land with local Blacks who settled certain areas before them. In fact there is hardly any part of South Africa that was conquered by whites from blacks. Piet Retief's treaty with the Zulu King, Dingaan still exist to this day. Blacks settled other areas than the whites and in those areas blacks have the right or claim on those areas. It is however difficult to determine their claims, because blacks had no written language, no maps and no legislation such as land title deeds. Despite this, whites researched the areas that Blacks traditionally settled and gave them full autonomy to rule themselves, with their own police forces and armies trained in South Africa with white taxpayer money. To create work, white business people were encouraged to open factories in these countries with huge tax concessions.

The ten homelands were as follows :

Transkei –Xhosa
Ciskei – Xhosa
Venda – Venda
Bophuthatswana – Tswana
Gazankulu – Tsonga/Shangaan
KaNgwane – Swazi
KwaNdebele – Ndebele
KwaZulu – Zulu
Lebowa – Pedi (Northern Sotho)
QwaQwa – Sotho

Note how some blacks got two or even three countries of their own. The Xhosas got both Ciskei and Transkei. The Tswanas who have their own country called Botswana, also got Bophuthatswana. The Sothos who already had Lesotho as their own country also got Lebowa and QwaQwa. The Swazis who already had their own country Swaziland got KaNgwane. After South Africa became a union in 1910, the territories (British protectorates) of Bechuanaland (Botswana), Basutuland (Lesotho) and Swaziland was excluded from the union, but the plan was to incorporate them later. The successive South African governments always tried to enclude them, but the British played delay tactics and after South Africa withdrew from the commonwealth in 1961 it ended any prospect of incorporation of these territories into South Africa. Botswana got its independence from Britain in 1966, Lesotho in 1966 and Swaziland in 1968.

If one considers that these countries are actually part of the original South Africa, then the territories under Black rule and autonomy including the other homelands makes up 50% of the total land and not 13%. One further has to remember that about 70% of the current South Africa is uninhabitable simply because it is too mountainous or it is half desert in the Western part. Only about 10% is under normal climate conditions economically viable farmland. When one considers the rainfall map of South Africa and the areas settled by Blacks, then one sees that Blacks settled in above average rainfall areas. The soil of these homelands was some of the most fertile soil of South Africa. Today the black ANC government is taking white owned farms away and handing them over to blacks to be totally ruined in a few months. Something else a lot of people do not know is that the White NP government also forced whites off their land by paying them out undervalued sums for their farms so that they could hand it over to blacks in the establishment of the homelands. I personally know people who lost their successful dairy farm in those days to make way for the Ciskei.

About 48% of all the viable agricultural land was in these Black homelands. Today the Blacks want to say that these lands are barren. As I have mentioned it is totally false, but on the other hand, these were the areas the blacks chose out for themselves to settle on about 200 years ago. The cannot blame the whites for it today. It is often said that whites first made sure that there were no minerals in these homelands before they gave it to the Blacks. This is also false. In the homeland of Bophuhatswana, the Tswana homeland in addition to having their own country Botswana, we can find the largest Platinum deposits in the entire subcontinent. Gold are also mined as a byproduct in these platinum mines.

In the "Book Verrat an Südafrika" Klaus Vaque mentions an article in the German Magazine "Deutschland-Magazin" Nr. 3/83 where a Lebowa chief was asked if it was true that blacks have been pushed onto worthless desolate areas. I freely translate, the chief answered : "No, it is not true. We have here all the raw materials except diamonds and crude oil. We have all other minerals. As far as agriculture is concerned, we have some of the richest parts of South Africa. We have good rainfall and good soil. I think our livestock are some of the best and our wheat and maize potential is fairly high. The people who say that we have been pushed onto dry and desolate areas do not know what they are talking about. I think they are talking about others."

The question has to be asked : "What is so bad about giving all the major Black tribes of South Africa their own country where they could rule themselves on territory they historically settled and where they could be ethnically homogenous, where they could speak their own language, practice their own culture and religion and where they could be totally free ? What is the crime in that ?

[Maritz]

Part 9 – The Lies About The Townships

By Mike Smith

It is today not un-common to find White people who lived through Apartheid in South Africa who have never set foot in a black or coloured township. Most whites never lost anything in a township and never saw the need to go to there. Besides it was dangerous, and the further they could stay away from blacks the better. People commute from Somerset-West, Strand or Gordon's Bay along the N2 highway to Cape Town for years every day, but they never ever turns off into the townships south of Cape Town International Airport (D.F. Malan Airport) to have a look. All they see are the slums of Cross-Roads, Langa and Nyanga and it scares them away. Most whites do not even know the coloured township of Mitchel's Plain. They do not know the bad areas such as Tafelsig, Lentegeur or the posh areas such as Woodlands or Strandfontein. If they could see the millionaires houses of Athlone, they would fall on their backs. The image that most whites of South Africa have about a township is what they have seen on television, in papers or magazines. I myself was about 19 years old and a conscript when I first set foot in Gugulethu, Cape Town. I can remember how surprised I was at how good the houses looked in certain parts, all the sports facilities and other amenities were not what I have seen on TV. We were only shown the worst parts, the Squatter Camps.

Actually the word "Township" is today confused with the word "Squatter Camp", but we are not allowed to use the un-PC term of "Squatter Camp" anymore, it is now called, "Informal Settlements. Nevertheless, a black township in South Africa has different sections just like any other town around the world. It has rich areas where educated blacks and black businessmen live in millionaires villas, it has the middle class areas and it has, well, the squatter camps. The problem is that the media always only show us the poor, squatter camp areas. Whites of South Africa and the world are kept ignorant by the media. We are not allowed to see that there are literally millions of extremely well-off blacks in South Africa who live in fairly good areas, on par with whites or well-off coloureds. The lies about the townships are numerous, but the most common one is that blacks were forced to live there under extreme poverty conditions and were denied the same amenities as whites had. Well, in the previous section of this series I pointed out that all the black tribes were given their own countries to live in where they traditionally settled. Nobody forced them to come to white cities. But blacks streamed in their thousand towards the white cities and set up squatter camps around the outskirts of these white areas, because they knew that whites were giving them work, but also, because they knew whites were very charitable and always gave them free clothes, food, etc.

This is quite ironic, because on the one hand the whites are painted as evil racists and blacks selectively believe this when they want to, but when blacks are truly honest with themselves, they will realise that whites always gave them lots of stuff, for free. It has always been like that in South Africa and will probably be like that for a long time to come, because South African whites are compassionate, charitable and good people. Nevertheless when these squatter camps became too large and/or a health risk due to the unhygienic practices of blacks, whites would build them proper houses with proper sewage systems, health clinics, schools, churches, roads with electric illumination, sports facilities and many more. This is how the townships came about. Basically built by white taxpayer money. Now I know there will be some people not convinced that these townships were actually quite well kitted out. So let us take an example; let us take the most well known township of South Africa, called Soweto, but the same can be said of just about any black township in South Africa. At the hight of Apartheid in 1978 Soweto had 115 Football fields, 3 Rugby fields, 4 athletic tracks, 11 Cricket fields, 2 Golf courses, 47 Tennis courts, 7 swimming pools built to Olympic standards, 5 Bowling alleys, 81 Netball fields, 39 children play parks, and countless civic halls, movie houses and clubhouses. In addition to this, Soweto had 300 churches, 365 schools, 2 Technical Colleges, 8 clinics, 63 child day care centres, 11 Post Offices, and its own fruit and vegetable market.

There were 2300 registered companies that belonged to black businessmen, about 1000 private taxi companies. 3% of the 50,000 vehicle owners in 1978 were Mercedes Benz owners. Soweto alone had more cars, taxis, schools, churches and sport facilities than most independent countries in Africa. The Blacks of South Africa had more private vehicles than the entire white population of the USSR at the time. Today Soweto has modern shopping malls like, Dobsonville Shopping Centre. In 2005 the Protea Gardens Mall opened. This was followed by the Baramall Shopping Centre and the Jabulani Shopping complex and the Maponya Mall. Experts say that Soweto has as much as 25% oversupply of retail space. The Canadian Medical Doctor, Dr Kenneth Walker wrote about Soweto, (I freely translate from "Verrat an Südafrika", Klaus Vaque, 1987,pg 41) "In Soweto I saw many homes that costs about $100,000 (1978) and that had a BMW in the driveway. All houses are single storey. Many are recently painted. Many had flowerpots in the windows and lawn in the front. Only 2% were shacks. If I had the choice to live in Soweto or in the apartment dwellings or "Projects" of New York, Chicago, or Detroit where there is so much crime, then I would not hesitate for one moment and choose Soweto."

The biggest hospital in the world, Baragwanath with 3200 beds and at its peak almost 8000 staff had 23 operation theatres fitted out with the most modern medical equipment that existed in the world. Blacks were treated here, operated on at full state costs to the white-taxpayers for unlimited periods. The budget of this hospital was and is higher than the yearly budget of most small member states of the United Nations. Next door to Baragwanath is the St. John's Eye Clinic. The clinic is world famous for the treatment of Glaucoma, Cataracts, traumatic eye injuries and rare tropical diseases. All built and maintained by white taxpayer's money. Baragwanath in 1978 employed 450 medical doctors in full-time service. It treated 112 000 in-patients and 1.62 million out-patients per year. The children and infant death rate with 34.8 per 1000 was lower than Harlem in New York. In 1982 alone, this hospital performed 898 heart operations of world quality. Ironically, 90% of the blood donors for this hospital were whites, who donated blood free of charge, totally voluntarily to save black lives. (Quoted from The Citizen, 2 April 1987). In my time at school and as a student, the Red Cross or St Johns Ambulance would come to our white schools, universities, colleges and even our workplaces to solicit for blood donations. All we got was a cup of tea and some biscuits. Regular blood donors would get a lapel pin and would wear it proudly at work or university.

Today the blacks want the whites to apologise for "the evils" of Apartheid. They want compensation. They have been compensated R30,000 each after the TRC , but it is not enough; they want more, they want blood, but we have already given them our blood. We already saved millions of black lives with our blood donations during Apartheid. How do you put a price on our blood that we donated ? How do you put a price on black lives saved by white blood ? As you can see dear reader, the blacks of South Africa are eternally indebted to us whites, not the other way around. We owe them nothing, they owe us big time.

[Rev.Cambeul]

The description perfectly fits what we see on Australian TV when they talk about the Black South African townships. And like many, we didn't ask any questions and accepted that all Black South Africans lived in the same squalid conditions. The reason for this is our own comparisons with the Australian Abo (and I expect the Americans have the same opinions from their own natives and media sources). Just like in South Africa, Whites are charitable and they donate and build everything the Abos will ever need; but then in no time at all the Abos destroy everything they have been given and in the blink of an eye they have returned to the squalor of the South African townships squatter camps. Makes the Blacks in South Africa seem almost human by comparison.

They call it a "housing shortage" but it's all about them being unfit for civilised conditions. Still, I say give them sovereignty, give them all the short term funding and assistance they need, close the borders and then leave them sink or swim.

Delenda est Abo.

@Cailen.

[Maritz]

Part 10 – District Six - A Case Study In Forced Removals

By Mike Smith

When one today thinks about Apartheid forced removals, immediately Sophia Town in Johannesburg (blacks) and District Six in Cape Town (coloureds) springs to mind. We will take District Six as a case study. Today one is up against a mind set of people who wants to believe that District Six was a Multicultural paradise where, mostly coloureds, some Indians, some whites and also a few blacks all lived in harmony and perpetual bliss. They believe that the evil white government destroyed a happy go lucky community and forced them onto the Cape Flats, mainly where Mitchels Plain is today. To tell the truth about District Six today will be a revolutionary act. Firstly a bit of history. Where is or was District Six ? Well if you stand with your two legs in the water of Table Bay and you look towards Table Mountain, District Six would be on your left side at the slope of Table Mountain, just above "The Castle". Today the Cape University of Technology (Zonnebloem campus) stands on part of the area.

The origins of District Six is like this. Many moons ago during the Dutch and later British rule, it uses to be a farm called Zonnebloem. After the abolishment of slavery throughout the British Empire (1833) coloured people started squatting on the outskirts of Cape Town against the foot of Table Mountain, because they still wanted to work for the whites, but when they were slaves they were housed by whites, but as free people they now had to find their own houses. Two areas of freed slaves developed in Cape Town in what is called, "The Bo-Kaap" and "District Six". The Bo-Kaap was mainly a higher classed Muslim area and District Six, although also having a lot of Muslims, was made up from other coloureds of lower social standing. Now it has to be remembered that the Cape Colony only introduced official building regulations in 1861. By that time, 28 years of indiscriminate building by coloureds, resulted in a slum area developing in Cape Town's District Six that was getting worse with every day passing. There was no proper sewage or running water infrastructure in those days. In no time, District Six became an overcrowded slum, with narrow alleyways between jumbled together structures.

Here one has to consider that building rules are largely there for safety and health reasons. Windows need to be of a certain size to allow fresh air and natural light in. Rooms need to be a certain height. Every human being needs a certain amount of breathing space to prevent diseases such as Typhoid, Tuberculosis, etc from breaking out (as is the case in overcrowded concentration camps). Streets need to be a certain width so that ambulances and fire trucks can reach emergency situations. The coloured people from District Six knew nothing of such "trivialities". They just kept on adding more structures made from wood and corrugated iron sheets. This phenomenon can still be observed when one visit coloured areas today. No sooner have they received a house from the government for free, or they start building a "hok" (shack) in the backyard. Some have even multiple shacks or what is called "Wendy Houses", low quality wooden dwellings. These shacks and Wendy Houses are rented out and provide the owner with an income. Some even set up shebeens (illegal, informal drinking bars) in their backyard.

In the case of District Six it was exactly like that. Some of these people had several such shack dwellings that they would rent out and became what is referred to as the "Slumlords" of District Six. Most houses were small, some consisting of only one room housing as many as 20 people. The toilet was in the back yard and washing comprised turns in the bath tub in the kitchen or washing oneself in a "kom", a plastic bowl filled with some hot water. Once a week was enough. Further, In District Six started what is today referred to as the "Skolly gangs", coloured hooligans, who preferred a life of crime, drinking and drugs over honest hard work. By the 1930's District Six was a rat infested hellhole full of shebeens, "smokkelhuise" (smuggling houses) and brothels, where, alcohol and drugs flowed freely and sparked more and more social ills. The government realised that something had to be done about District Six before an epidemic of bubonic plague or cholera could break out that would have killed thousands. The government knew the history of the three smallpox epidemics of 1713, 1755 and 1767. The smallpox epidemic of 1713 killed about 90% of the KhoiKhoi (Hottentots) and about 25% of the whites of Cape Town.

The University of Cape Town has all the archives in their library. It is called The Denis Verschoyle Papers. Denis Verschoyle, an Irish immigrant, was a City Engineer and Town Planner in Cape Town. From 1961 to 1972, he lectured on the history of town planning in the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of Cape Town. He died in 1997. The information is today freely available to anyone who wants to know the truth about Cape Town planning and in particular, District Six. Basically Mr. W.S.Lunn who was city engineer in the 1930's had a plan. He wanted to transform District Six. He wanted to build proper houses with proper infrastructure and so, started building houses by the beginning of the Second World War, a total of 1127 homes had been built. But the coloureds did not want to move into the new houses. They claimed the rent was too high, but the rent was actually subsidised by the government (i.e.) White taxpayer money and very affordable. This a coloured culture for you. They always seem to have money for drugs and alcohol, but never for rent or utilities. Why pay rent and electricity when you can live for free in a shack and burn candles and have more money for alcohol ?

Eventually some did move into these houses, but as usual the backyards started being filled with illegally erected structures. Today the coloureds that lived in District Six have very fond memories of a period when alcohol flowed freely, Dagga was smoked and every second person could play a musical instrument. Their memories of District Six are basically, party every night. I do not dispute that they were very happy there. Like I said, in reality the place was a nest of social ills, it was dirty and it was a health risk, a ticking time bomb in actual fact. But how does one convince a pig that wallowing around in crap all day is bad for him, when he is so happy at doing it ? When one takes the pig away from his crap puddle, washes him off and let him live in a clean orderly place, he will be most distraught and upset with you. He will forever have fond memories of his crap puddle, where he was happy. No amount of explaining will ever convince him of anything else. So how did these memories of such a harmless and convivial District Six take root in the minds of coloureds over the years ?

Basically the newspaper called "The Cape Times", in an attempt to save District Six, ran some articles in the 1950's focussing on the music and culture of the people, painting everything rosy and saying nothing about the social ills, the gangs, the brothels, the alcohol and drug abuse or the rats. In 1966 the National Party declared District Six to be a 'White Group Area' so enabling them to destroy all buildings, except religious ones, on the grounds of 'slum clearance'. The government moved about 60,000 people from District Six to the Cape Flats at a cost of 30 million Rand including compensation. In 1970, the government renamed the area Zonnebloem after the original Dutch farm. They offered the land to investors to rebuild it, but no investors showed interest to rebuild the area, so the Government built the Cape Technikon Zonnebloem campus there. In District Six, there is a museum today that documents this period in an extremely biased and subjective way. It says that about 60,000 coloureds were forcibly removed from District Six to the Cape Flats because of the colour of their skin. It fails to mention that the coloureds of the Bo-Kaap are still living there and so are the ones from Observatory. If the government wanted to remove the coloureds from District Six, because of the colour of their skin or to take their "prime" land, why did they not also move the Bo-Kaap coloureds ? The Bo-Kaap is situated in the centre of Cape Town on prime property and worth billions. Why did the government not build millionaires villas in District Six, but instead chose to build a learning institution ? The simple truth is that District Six was everything from an eyesore, to a filthy slum, to a gang and rat infested hellhole.

The government in those days employed highly qualified health inspectors. One of them who were involved with the destruction of District Six told me how they went in there, saw rats the size of cats and millions of cockroaches half a foot long, how they had to board up these building structures first, fumigate them before they could destroy them, because they feared the plague would spread to the rest of Cape Town. Today the ex residents of "District Six" are a dime a dozen. Although only 60,000 were moved today the "survivors" are probably double that if not more. The "victim mentality" has fully taken hold of these "ex residents of District Six", but what they forget is about 40,000 whites were also forcibly removed from their land to make place for the Black Homelands. These whites have never been properly compensated for losing their farms that they had to sell way below market value to the government at the time, but they simply got on with life and made a living somewhere else. District Six was a case study in this issue, but the same can be said for places like Sophia Town where Blacks were also removed. Large concentrations of people from whatever race, who overcrowd and indiscriminately build with no planning, will always, pose a health risk not only to themselves, but also to their neighbouring communities.

Today they complain about forcibly being removed, but what was the alternative - Death by epidemic proportions ? They should be thankful that they are still alive today to yarn swap about their times in District Six, because if they carried on the way they did, disease would have wiped them out for sure. The irony is that they cannot see the truth. They see the NP government as a bunch of racists who wanted to exterminate them, but if that was the goal of the NP, they could simply have done nothing and waited for the bomb of disease to explode. No, the NP did everything in their power to avoid it. They actually saved thousands of coloured lives and entire future generations, along with their music and culture in District Six with their removal to the Cape Flats. Today it is easy to reminisce about the banjo playing, alcohol and dagga clouded times of District Six, but when you are a professional government with a job to do, to protect all your citizens, the picture is rather different.