The folly of Bantu Education

South Africa's matriculation results were released today. Predictably, the best (read "white") schools did better, but the rest of the schools fared worse than in previous years. The failures can largely be ascribed to the politically driven implementation of a piece of left-wing folly, Outcomes-based Education (OBE). The usual suspects have already been trundled out and blamed for the disastrous results in some schools. "It was apartheid. The legacy of Bantu Education is to blame."

"Bantu" is the collective name for black Africans. It literally means "people." In apartheid South Africa, Bantu Education was the name for the educational system to which black people were subjected, from more or less 1953 onwards.

Everybody obviously "knows" Bantu Education was an "injustice / crime against humanity / evil", don't they? The loony left becomes apoplectic by just thinking about those dastardly whites subjecting those poor people to an inferior educational system, segregated schools and even segregated universities. How could those evil whites perpetrate such a diabolical scheme?

(Isn't the deliberate phrase "segregated universities" interesting? Listen to the left-wing bilge spewing forth from the PC brigade these days, you'd have thought no black could go to university in the old days. The facts and reality are different. Nelson Mandela became a lawyer in apartheid South Africa. He went to university, in other words. He was allowed to practice law in Johannesburg.)

Bantu Education was just plain wrong, wasn't it?

I agree with the last statement. Bantu Education was wrong, but not in the sense that the politically correct brigade perceives it to be.

If somebody wants to maintain Bantu Education was inferior, I am going to ask the obvious question, that the PC brigade is too afraid to ask: inferior compared to what? To the advanced, enlightened educational system to be found in Sub-Saharan Africa before Arabic or European colonizers arrived? You know – the same one that brought forth literary giants such as, ahem…. Or wait: weren't there those brilliant black scientists, schooled in the idyllic and sophisticated educational system that was in existence in what is now the Transkei or Kwazulu-Natal in, say, 1700? What were their names? Strangely I can't remember right now…

Of course I'm being facetious above. In all of recorded history, prior to Arabic or European settlement, there was no tradition of the written word, no science in the Arabic or Western sense of the word, and therefore no notion of anything even approaching, say, Plato's Academy, except for an Islamic (i.e. Arab-inspired) university in Timbuktu, far to the north of South Africa.

All the black tribes, every single one of them, encountered by South Africa's European colonizers, were in a pre-civilized, pre-literate, pre-technological state. There were no schools as Westerners would understand them.

I ask again: is anybody still maintaining Bantu Education was inferior when compared to a complete lack of education?

Yet Bantu Education was wrong. It was lunacy. It was stupid. It was unsustainable. South Africa's whites, the Afrikaners, did an almost insanely stupid thing by even implementing such a system in the first place. By doing so we (I am an Afrikaner) assumed responsibility for the education of millions of denizens of other nations – Zulus, Xhosas, Vendas and Tswanas – the different black nations that inhabited the Southern African subcontinent.

Consider this for a moment. Whites have never been a majority in South Africa, but our ancestors took it upon ourselves to educate millions of others, who at present outnumber us by at least 10 to 1 in South Africa, and by 150 to 1 in the rest of Africa.  It was the equivalent of the white population of, say, the United States, taking it upon themselves to educate everybody in Central and South America. Think of the language barrier. Think of the logistics.

Think of the obvious question: why should the education of millions of South Americans become white Americans' problem? Why would Americans agree to such a thing?

It would be lunacy. And it was. Bantu Education was lunacy. White South Africans ignored the example set by the monumentally callous British colonizers, whose indifference to their colonial subjects in Africa and India was breathtaking. Whites took it upon themselves to educate millions of people from other nations, an endeavour funded by white tax money.

We made other people's and nations' problems, our problem. This was an almost unbelievable act of generosity, although it was sadly misguided. Why could Koreans, whose country was poorer than Zambia in 1960, educate themselves out of poverty within 30 years? What's wrong with Africans if Koreans could do it for and by themselves? The left keeps telling us how all people are supposedly equal. Why then point fingers at whites for trying to educate blacks, by endlessly harping on about the so-called inferiority of Bantu Education?

Sure, Bantu Education had its problems. Compared to the alternative – no education at all – it was however an astounding though foolhardy piece of generosity on the part of white South Africans.

Time to admit to South Africa's educational failure

South Africa's matriculation (grade 12 or university entrance exams in other countries) are about to be released. This will be the first group of matriculants who wrote matric using the new Outcomes Based Education (OBE) curriculum.

(OBE is a disastrous exercise in political correctness, implemented in great haste by the ANC regime. Like almost all left-wing ideas, it is a complete shambles, although that is not the topic of this column.)

According to Umalusi, the body in charge of supervising matric results, the pass rate is very similar to last year's pass rate, in exams written under the old curriculum.

I personally find the above outcome (pardon the pun) a bit difficult to believe. The entire curriculum has changed. Subjects like mathematics have changed completely. Call me cynical, but something is fishy, should the results be that similar. How is it possible that the pass rate is almost exactly the same, given the comprehensive changes that have occurred? Some Stalinist manipulation has obviously occurred, if you ask me.

Furthermore, South Africa's school leavers fare dismally when compared to their international peers. Although approximately 70% of matriculants "pass" annually (many of them with marks like Julius Malema's - an H symbol in mathematics), they compare very poorly to their international equivalents. South African school leavers and school pupils routinely come last in international tests, especially in mathematics. This points to the fact that, although South African pupils pass matric, they cannot actually read and write properly. They are especially poor at numeracy - adding 10 and 12 together may present a challenge to many school leavers.

Approximately 500,000 "learners" (an abhorrent, left-wing word for students or pupils) "pass" matric every year. It is a fact only that a small proportion of these, probably less than 10%, is of an international standard. They do especially poorly in mathematics. Of the 400,000 black matriculants who pass annually, fewer than 1 in 100 pass mathematics on the higher grade. This is usually ascribed to "apartheid" or "poverty", even though no black pupil currently in school has ever experienced apartheid education, and the fact that there are millions of rich blacks in South Africa. Nobody would ever dare to whisper the dreaded "g-word" - genetics - as a possible explanation.

Those that do not pass mathematics often tend to take subjects like Biblical Studies and History, which are perceived as "easy", but which hardly prepare them for real careers.

I often wonder whether the problem is not that there are too many candidates for matric in South African schools. Candidates who, for whatever reason, are ill-prepared and unsuitable for university entrance, and should not be there in the first place.

Would it not be better to produce 100,000 well-educated, literate and numerate matrics every year, than 480,000 ill-prepared, illiterate and functionally innumerate matrics that graduate with useless certificates?

Of course the above is a pipe dream; it would mean that the ANC regime admits to yet another failure, to be added to its long list of utter incompetence. However, South Africa will keep falling further and further behind due to the complete and abject failure of the ANC's education system.

Mandela is the problem, not the solution, Breyten

An enormous controversy has predictably arisen following Breyten Breytenbach's letter to Nelson Mandela. The letter in question is a rambling, incoherent piece of writing, proving once and for all that Breytenbach has finally lost the plot.

 

It rambles from a hagiography and ode to Breyten's demi-god, Mandela, interspersed with bitter complaints about crime, but then in almost the same breath expresses sympathy for the perpetrators of violent crime, such as the poor, "thin like praying mantises" (sic) savages of  between 9 and 15 years old who stoned to death a girl aged 11, ostensibly because she was HIV+. One wonders why Breytenbach doesn't have the same sympathy for the Skierlik shooter, Johan Nel?

 

Breytenbach clearly views Mandela as a demi-god, a kind of elderly holy man, who can do no wrong and who, according to Breytenbach, almost single-handedly halted a possible revolution. The former is of course complete hogwash; the monumentally incompetent Mkhonto we Sizwe, the ANC's so-called military wing (primary targets: defenseless civilians) couldn't defeat a girls' soccer team, let alone liberate one square inch of South African territory when faced with the then mightiest army on the continent.

 

Breytenbach idolizes Mandela as a victim of circumstances and of nefarious businessmen who are exploiting his name, as well as corrupt, criminal politicians who, according to Breytenbach, are destroying Mandela's legacy.

 

What seems to be totally lost on the seemingly increasingly befuddled Breytenbach is that Mandela, far from being a Gandhi-like figure who eschewed violence, was in fact a violent revolutionary who planned a Communist-inspired revolution in South Africa. This is in fact why he was jailed on Robben Island. Far from being Buddha, Mandela continued preaching violence even after his release from prison. Read here how Mandela and Mbeki seemed to approve of the chant "Kill the Boer" at a funeral, and view this video to see and hear Mandela chanting violent anti-white hate songs.

 

Far from being a saint, Breytenbach's demi-god, Mandela, is one of those directly and personally responsible for the increasing crime, mayhem and violence in South Africa. Far from being out of control and disloyal to Mandela, the ANC regime, one of the most corrupt kleptocracies on earth, is a monster in whose creation Mandela played a pivotal role.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tito Mboweni - pig at the trough and hypocrite

In its quarterly bulletin the South African Reserve Bank has called on wage and salary earners to moderate their wage demands, seeing that high demands for wages could have an inflationary effect. Mention is made of wage increase demands of between 12 and 15%

This is extremely rich (pardon the pun), coming from whom it does: the former trade unionist and current governor of the Reserve Bank, Comrade Tito Mboweni. Comrade Tito earlier on this year received a whopping 28% salary adjustment, making him one of the most highly paid central bank governors in the world, in spite of South Africa being nowhere near the largest economy on earth. The hypocrisy in the Reserve Bank's bulletin, in telling Joe the plumber to moderate his demand for a wage increase, is therefore nothing short of breathtaking.

Perhaps we should not be surprised at Comrade Tito's pig-like snuffling at the trough. The ANC, of which he is a member, is after all nothing more than a criminal bunch of former terrorists bent on plundering the nation's wealth.

Why are most black-on-white murders not seen as racist attacks?

The Beeld newspaper, an Afrikaans-language newspaper in South Africa, reports that five black youths are part of a gang that murdered an 81-year old white person in the suburb of Primrose in Gauteng. The elderly white man was killed for drug money, according to the police.

A few years ago, 4 white school boys known as the Waterkloof 4, assaulted a black vagrant in a park in Pretoria. He died as a result. It is unclear whether the thugs intended to kill the man, because according to them he was still alive when they left the scene. The liberal media however went to town on this incident, wasting no time whatsoever in screaming that the murder was a racist murder (as opposed to common thuggery.)

I am prepared to bet a large amount of money, however, that the media will not call the 5 black youngsters who murdered a white senior citizen the "Primrose 5." The murder will not be called a racist murder, but will instead be ascribed to ordinary crime. The press will go out of its way not to report on the race of the black perpetrators. If anything, they will start gushing sympathy for these murderous animals, and ascribe their behaviour to apartheid or colonialism.

There is something very, very wrong here, people. If a white kills a black, it is almost per definition a racist murder. If a gang of black thugs murders a white person, it is suddenly reduced to "ordinary crime", swept under the carpet and dismissed. This cannot be right. If crime across racist boundaries is automatically seen as racism, then it cannot only work against whites.

If crimes of whites against blacks are racist, then blacks murdering whites is violent racism too.

Predictable, Kgalema

President Kgalema Motlanthe, after only a few months in office, yesterday fired suspended prosecutions chief Vusi Pikoli. It didn't take all that long for Motlanthe to show his true colours as a mere stooge of more powerful interests within the ANC, who will think nothing of abandoning principle in favour of narrow party or personal interests.

 

Those interests are nothing more than those of a corrupt polygamist (at the last count he had 5 wives and God knows how many other concubines and children) called Jacob Zuma, an idiot with a 4th grade education who thinks that showering after porking an HIV+ person will prevent AIDS.

 

The real reason behind firing Pikoli was not that he "wasn't sensitive to national security", the ridiculous confabulation that the puppet Motlanthe gave. The real reason was that Pikoli was too independently-minded, and would be sure to prosecute the likes of Zuma and his cronies who form part of the fundamentally corrupt gang of criminal scum known as the ANC.

 

Zuma is as guilty as sin of gross corruption and theft. A corrupt Indian businessman, Schabir Shaik, has been jailed for 15 years for bribing Zuma. Zuma, that shining example of moral rectitude, will now be rewarded with the presidency in 2009 for his troubles.

 

With so-called leaders like the odious individual Zuma, is it any wonder that Africa will forever be the continent of losers?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Democracy won't solve Zimbabwe's ills

The end for Robert Mugabe seems to be in sight. There are increasing signs that Zimbabwe is on the brink of collapse. Let's assume the process happens peacefully, and the MDC becomes the official government in Zimbabwe. Democracy has been restored.

 

Will this in and of itself mean that Zimbabwe's problems have been solved?

 

I doubt that very much. Let us rewind back to the 1960's and 1970's. Black Rhodesians did not have the vote. However, they weren't starving either. Quite the contrary. Their country was known as the bread basket of Africa. Then came the 1980's and the heady days of Zimbabwe's uhuru. And the 1990's, and the 2000's. The wheels came off. Badly. People are dying of hunger. Millions have fled the country. During all this time, black Zimbabweans had the vote and a black government. Democracy was in place, in other words.

 

Zimbabweans are starving today, a generation after liberation. They have the vote, but you can't eat democracy. They were "liberated" to experience hunger, a collapsing economy and cholera. Why are they hungry? Because most white expertise, especially in agriculture, was chased out of the country in an orgy of ethnic cleansing. Farms were invaded by so-called "war veterans", many of them far too young to have ever been in the war.

 

The problem in Zimbabwe is not a lack of democracy or the inability to vote. The problem is the absence of whites.

 

 

The Nigerian Scourge

For the past few months, residents of an area north of Pretoria called Kameeldrift have been terrorized. Kameeldrift is an area of smallholdings and therefore a soft target, similar to South Africa's farms, on which more than 2000 white farmers have been murdered to date. Multiple robberies and murders have taken place in recent months in Kameeldrift. It is being reported that a syndicate has been arrested in a luxury townhouse complex. They are suspected of being involved in the Kameeldrift murders and robberies.

Although South African papers will as a rule not report on the race of criminals, unless they are white, in which case the left-wing press will waste no time in loudly screaming "racism", the Beeld newspaper hints that the suspects are Nigerians. Nigerian currency was found in the suspects' possession. Nigeria is notorious for the corrupt nature of its society and its huge number of criminals. So much so, that a common advance-fee fraud is known by its Nigerian penal code designation, the so-called 419 scam.

The suburb of Hillbrow in Johannesburg, formerly a cosmopolitan area similar to Tribeca or Soho in Manhattan, is these days one of the most dangerous places on the planet. It is a hotbed of vice including drugs and prostitution. It is a well-known fact that Hillbrow's drug trade is controlled by the Nigerians which infest and contaminate the area.

Why are Nigerians being allowed into South Africa at all, given their enormously high rates of participation in crime? It would not be an exaggeration to say that a huge dent would be made in South Africa's crime problem if a) Nigerians were declared persona non grata, and b) all Nigerians rounded up and deported back to their hell-hole of a country.

Why must the innocent citizens of South Africa be exposed to the scourge of Nigerians?

Accountability: Africa's biggest problem

The civil rights group Afriforum is about to sue the South African government over crime. According to Afriforum, the government has failed to come up with any cogent strategy to combat the scourge of crime (no kidding - which African government has ever shown itself able to strategize?) Twenty thousand people are murdered annually but the fat cat politicians of the world's biggest kleptocracy, the terminally corrupt ANC regime, seem more concerned with their blue light convoys and plundering the economy.

During a radio interview, Kallie Kriel, the head of Afriforum, made a very interesting observation. In spite of the rampant crime in the country, not one minister has resigned. The corrupt Chief of Police, Jackie Selebi, had to be fired and would never have considered leaving office voluntarily.

Contrast this with India, where top government officials have resigned after the Mumbai attacks. Such a step would be unthinkable for any African government minister, regardless of his or her criminality or gross incompetence.

The epitome of competence and accountability. Or not.

It is called accountability. Taking responsibility. Something which is totally foreign to African leaders, and seemingly also a concept the idiot voters who continue voting for useless, corrupt, incompetent leaders, seem unable to grasp.

People deserve the government they get. As long as Africans are unable or unwilling to embrace accountability, it will remain the most wretched continent on earth.

The city Johannesburg's - South Africa's largest city - municipal accounts have been chaotic for a number of years now. Ratepayers would receive either no account at all for month, or a sudden, unexpected account for R200,000, which they'd have to pay immediately.


Calling the call centre to resolve billing issues, is reputedly an exercise in frustration. You will be put on hold until 2015, put through to the wrong people or cut off because the operator is going on lunch after holding on for 3 hours.


All the above happened for a well-known reason: the ANC's Afro-fascist commitment to the purging all whites from all levels of government and business, and replacing them with blacks. Competence, ability and qualifications mostly don't matter. This black-on-white racism is known by the euphemism "transformation".

The word sounds very positive, but in reality transformation is akin to the process whereby the Nazis transformed German society to one free of Jews. The parallels are disturbing: whites, especially Afrikaners, are a minority in South Africa. Just like the Nazis, a hostile regime, the former band of terrorists known as the ANC, is actively purging whites from South African society.


For many years before the current kleptocracy took over the billing department worked pretty well, admittedly with occasional glitches, but since the pernicious effects of transformation took hold, it's been downhill all the way. Today's billing is chaotic, and this is a direct result of transformation. This is repeated across the country, in all the transformed municipalities. No-one is surprised: the municipal manager, the most senior appointment in a city council, is often a political appointee, with no financial knowledge whatsoever. Incredibly, fewer than 1 in 5 city councilmen actually understand the relationship between rates and taxes and their city's budget.


In the latest bizarre twist, VAT (Value Added or Sales tax in some countries) is being calculated at wildly fluctuating rates on ratepayers' electricity accounts. The transformed billing department has seemingly lost the ability to multiply an amount by 1.14 to correctly calculate the 14% VAT due on any amount. Instead, VAT is being calculated on electricity bills at anything between 15 and 50%.

Is that DIVIDE by 1.14?

The anti-apartheid activist, Allan Boesak, was jailed for fraud after embezzling Danish donor funds meant for the poor, to fund his lavish lifestyle. He referred to his behaviour as "Struggle Accounting." Are we now seeing the first signs of "Struggle Billing?"

Yet another compelling argument in favour of church unity

The former "white" churches in the Dutch Reformed family, such as the NGK (Dutch Reformed), Gereformeerde Kerk and Hervormde Kerk are under huge pressure from the left to merge with the formerly "coloured" church, also known as the "VGK" (Uniting Reformed Church.)

The head of the VGK, until very recently, was the convicted swindler and adulterer, Rev Allan Boesak, a prime example of New South African criminality. Boesak has been at the forefront of pushing a loathsome piece of anti-white political propaganda, the Confession of Belhar, down the throat of white churchgoers. This document has met with deserved resistance from white quarters.

This article provides yet another compelling reason for the churches to merge. A minister in the VGK (presumably properly ordained), one Billy Rayners, stabbed one of his elders in the head in South Africa's Western Cape province.

Are we to assume that other disagreements in the church, once it merges with the others, for example about gay rights, will be settled in a similar fashion? I can see how a synod will disintegrate into a gunfight about whether gay marriages should be allowed, truly an elevating prospect.

Cheeky Watson wins the Kurt Gödel prize for 2008

Kurt Gödel is widely seen as the most significant logician of the 20th century.

 

In the proud tradition of Gödel, we have our own master logician, one Cheeky Watson. Cheeky Watson, a veteran anti-apartheid campaigner and a legend in his own mind, has just been appointed the president of the dismal Eastern Province Rugby Union. The EPRU has never won the Currie Cup and looks highly unlikely to do so in future. Could this be due to its successful transformation programme?

 

The Eastern Cape, in addition to generally sucking at rugby, is also the home of the powerful Xhosa faction of the ANC, such as Thabo Mbeki and Nelson Mandela, so it is no surprise that Watson would win the presidency there. In addition to being a logician of note as well as a loose forward who would have done any under 11-C team proud, Watson is also a prime exponent of the art of ass-kissing when it comes to the ANC.

 

In his opening address, and in a masterful display of his genius at the art of logic, Watson called for more blacks in top positions in SA Rugby. As many of the replies to this article have pointed out, the fact that Watson himself is a pale male, seems to have been totally lost on this wonderful logician. Lesser mortals like us would have expected that the logical thing for Watson to have done would be to step down in favour of a black president, but clearly Watson's advanced thinking is on a different level and he clearly has his reasons for not doing so. Either that, or perhaps he doesn't own a mirror and doesn't know he's a mhlungu.

 

I therefore have no hesitation in awarding the Kurt Gödel prize (honoris causa) to Cheeky Watson, South African rugby's greatest logician.

 

 

 

Time for Toughlove in Africa?

Toughlove is an approach for the parents of troubled teenagers who are often struggling with a drug problem. Instead of taking a softly-softly approach, Toughlove focuses on discipline and parents' rights, instead of bowing to the demands of unruly children.

 

After World War 2, Germany was in ruins. Cities like Stuttgart were practically flattened. In some city blocks, only one or two houses remained standing. Millions of German men had died in the war. The Allies instituted a massive aid programme, called the Marshall Plan, to revive the German and European economy. Within 30 years Germany's was again the largest economy in Europe. If you drive through Stuttgart today, you can hardly believe that it was in ruins 65 years ago.

 

Since 1960, Africa has swallowed up no fewer than the equivalent of 6 Marshall Plans' worth of foreign aid, with no tangible results. Africa today, 50 or more years after the end of colonialism, is a sorry tale of civil wars, poverty, disease and corruption. As Dr Anthony Turton, the suspended CSIR scientist, has pointed out, it takes approximately 10 years for the colonial infrastructure to start crumbling due to neglect, criminal behaviour and incompetence. One only needs to think about Eskom and the coming water crisis to realize that he has a point. From that point it is all downhill to dire poverty.

 

The West's solution is limited to massive infusions of cash, which promptly gets stolen by a corrupt kleptocracy, as well as vague demands for Western-style democracy. Surely it must be obvious by now that democracy simply does not work in Africa. The reasons for this are not clear, and may include cultural differences. Those who lose elections often simply refuse to leave office - Kenia and Zimbabwe are obvious recent examples. However, democracy in a skills and integrity vacuum which is a feature of African society, is meaningless and a mere Western delusion.

 

Mass starvation is only a few months away in Zimbabwe, due to the above problems. As the comments to this article have pointed out, drastic action - Toughlove - is called for. That is unless the West abandons Africa as a perennial lost cause and allows the Chinese to re-colonize the continent.

 

By Toughlove I mean forceful measures that are coupled to foreign aid. If Africa's leaders continue to behave like unruly children, they should be treated as such. Measures can include, for example, steps to ensure that another Mugabe can never take over the reins of power in Zimbabwe, and to remove him from power if he refuses to leave of his own accord.

 

This could include military intervention as an option. It will take one cruise missile strike to remove Mugabe and his henchmen from power on a permanent basis. Perhaps such an intervention will make other miscreant leaders, like Kenia's, also think twice. Interestingly, this was a real threat issued against the previous government in South Africa. An American-funded airport was built in Botswana, for example, which was a clear threat of military intervention against the then white ruling party.

 

The above may seem draconian, but measured against the lives of millions of Zimbabweans, it's a no-brainer.