I am the editor/publisher of The Potjie Pot magazine and would love to publish your articles that I found in your blog. Please advise if we may do so and if we can give the credit to you or your website. Thanks

And let’s stop the nonsense about the white South Africans who in 1994 voted to end Apartheid. It’s a very self-congratulatory argument inasmuch as during the actual years of Apartheid white South Africans supported the National Party at rates of over 80%. In fact, the only serious challenge to the NP came after the attempts to implement the Tricameral Parliament in 1984. Where did those votes go? Not to the Progressives, but rather to the Conseravtive Party, which became the official opposition and which was to the right of the Nats on the issue of race (The Nats still maintained 79% support even as PW Botha and the Securocrats unleashed their Total Strategy). It’s all well and good that white South Africans could see the writing on the wall in 1994. Would that they had pushed for change before then. Instead they did not, and yet want to get credit for their verligte views after benefitting from a verkrampte mindset for more than forty years. I call nonsense on that ahistorical view of the world and I encourage my readers to do the same.

Finally, on the issue of crime, I do not believe that I have ever posed a monocaual answer to this question. So you could, for the sake of intellectual integrity, cease arguing with straw men. But no serious person, and certainly no pwerson I am inclined to take seriously, can deny that poverty plays a role in criminality. And a long legacy of Apartheid does not help. There is little evidence that many of your other assertions are true in terms of “crime for the sake of crime.” This is a complex issue that does not warrant the facile answers that you, not I, seem to embrace.

Despite my criticisms, I thank you for reading and hope that you continue to do so.

Cheers –
dc

First of all many settlements in South Africa have different names in different languages, for example Cape Town is Kaapstad in Afrikaans and iKapa in Xhosa and I see nothing wrong with this, it is only natural. However what is being done is not to give official recognition also to Black African names, but to try and erase Afrikaans names. There is a big difference. The process seen to be targetted at Afrikaans place names in particular, rather than English ones.

Naturally such an issue is emotive when people feel their identity, language, history and culture are under attack. If names of ‘European’ origin are unacceptable and have to be eliminated, then South Africans of a ‘European’ cultural background (not necessarily white) are entitled to wonder whether they are wanted anymore in South Africa.

It should be remembered that apartheid ended after white South Africans voted by two to one to reject it and accept majority rule. Too often this is forgotten and it is imagined that they are a uniformly unreconstructed group of apartheid racists. It was accepted that there would have to be major changes after such an unjust system. On the other hand white South Africans were to be accepted as still part of South Africa rather than simply foreign ’settlers’. After all, they had been in the country for more than 300 years and the Afrikaans language and nation had come into being here.

The extreme ‘Africanists’ and other Black nationalists did not accept this and only considered Black Africans to be ‘true’ Africans. They did not want equality, they wanted the country fot themselves alone and the whites out. This is seen to be the spirit of the renaming campaign in opposition to inclusion or reconciliation.

If one goes to more ‘enlightened’ parts of the world it is usual to find that minority languages and cultures are respected. You see for example that Basque place names appear next to the Spanish ones in the Basque country, Welsh and English are used in Wales etc. This is what South Africa should aim for, rather than a policy of obliteration.

As for crime I believe it is simplistic and facile to say that crime is a function of poverty, bordering on the apologetic. South Africa is far from the poorest country in the world, yet it is one of the worst plagued by violent crime. Similarly, though poverty is being reduced (though not fast enough), crime still increases. We read also that while five or ten years ago most juvenile criminals were arrested for aquisitive crime, the majority today are guilty of assault, murder and rape.

We are not talking simply about crime which poverty stricken people resort to in order to survive, the crime that most traumatises South Africans is violence for the sake of violence, sadistic crime, murder, torture and rape. We have the awful situation where a very large percentage of South African women (and mainly Black women) are raped, in which rape has become endemic. Where children and even babies are raped. Where people are murdered seemingly for no reason at all, or for the most trivial reasons. Where people are tortured, for example with electric irons. There is a culture of a minority of the population that places no value in human life. It should also be noted that Black people are the main victims of these crimes and they too are angry about them, though the foreign media pays more attention to white victims either because they tend to be more articulate or the foreign media identifies with them more.