Anti-Afrikaner Hatred on News24

Georgia Guedes starts off her column You say 'potato', I say 'Tshwane' with the following statement: “Pretoria is a confounding place to me.” Quite. Judging by the rest of her puerile piece of far-left propaganda which would have made Goebbels proud, it is painfully obvious that many things confound Ms Guedes, especially South African history, and possibly facts in general.

Ms Guedes does her best (which, to be frank, is nowhere near good enough) to characterize Andries Pretorius, the hero of Blood River, as a mass murderer. In a pathetic attempt at sarcasm, she suggests that we keep all names “that celebrate the smearing of the blood of the original settlers of our country.” Let’s look at the facts of the battle of Blood River, as opposed to Ms Guedes’s propagandistic distortions masquerading as so-called journalism.

The Zulus who attacked the laager of wagons were not innocent victims of a massacre. On the contrary: although Guedes strangely (not to mention deliberately) neglects to mention this, they were most definitely hostile, heavily armed and outnumbered their opponents by a factor of at least ten and possibly twenty to one. Less than 500 Boers faced a force of ten to twenty thousand Zulus. Furthermore, one of the causes of the battle was the treacherous murder by a Zulu chief, Dingane, of another Voortrekker, Piet Retief. Perhaps Guedes wasn’t paying attention the day this particular piece of history was taught in primary school, but Retief and his entourage were lured into a trap, relieved of their firearms, and murdered in cold blood. The same fate would have awaited Pretorius's people, had they not defended themselves.

Like the fourth-rate tabloid journalist she apparently is, Guedes quotes Sarel Cilliers, presumably in some kind of feeble attempt to add some sensationalism to her column: “we left the Kafirs lying on the ground as thick almost as pumpkins upon the field that has borne a plentiful crop”. Her problem seems to be the use of the word “Kafir”. Once again Guedes’s utter ignorance of the historical context is embarrassingly apparent. The word “Kafir” (from the Arabic for “infidel”) was not a perjorative term at the time of the battle and was commonly used by the British authorities, amongst others. Parts of the Eastern Cape were known as Kaffraria, for example. Even the Nobel-prize winning novelist, J.M. Coetzee, refers in his novel Disgrace to the Eastern Cape as “old Kaffraria”.

Guedes is all in favour of the current regime eliminating Pretoria with a stroke of its bureaucratic pen. What is once again lost on her, is that the very same ANC regime she so admires, those who want to change Pretoria’s name, are themselves a fine collection of murderers, terrorists and cowards. They are the complete opposites of Andries Pretorius and his brave Voortrekkers. The ANC is simply the former terrorist rabble that has now turned to committing ethnic cleansing by the wholesale elimination of Afrikaner names from public life.

If Guedes really wants examples of the cowardly murder of innocent civilians, perhaps for a future column, I suggest she does some reading on the “brave” acts of the ANC regime, for example the Magoo’s Bar bombing. Its completely incompetent perpetrator – he bombed the wrong target - was rewarded with a job as chief of police, only to crash his official vehicle in a state of extreme inebriation and then threatening to murder fellow officials if they didn’t participate in his coverup. A prime example of the type of hero Guedes apparently worships, in other words. Perhaps Guedes would also do well to interview Mr Dirk van Eck, whose wife and two children, aged 2 and 8, died in yet another “heroic” act of the ANC, a landmine attack in 1985.

To extreme leftwing propagandists like Guedes, however, Robert McBride and the planters of the landmine are themselves victims and incapable of wrongdoing, by dint of the fact that they are black. In her strange and twisted little world, five hundred Boers defending themselves against twenty thousand opponents are somehow transformed into murderers.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised by this. The haters of Afrikaners like Guedes and her ilk have never been comfortable with accuracy and the facts.