Gedig uit "Die Nomadiese Oomblik"
Charl-Pierre Naude
Pyn is nie nodig of onnodig nie
maar mooi en hoef dus nie te bestaan nie.
Die tande is self 'n blom wat in die skaam
of teer oomblik bloei, skitterend uit die dode
opstaan en pryk soos alle blomme. Pyn, O Heer
is heer-lik, vandaar ook U Bestaan. U Hande
se ongelyke skaal. Pyn styg uit rotswande
van die gees soos 'n dampkring wat die weer
bepaal - kunsstorm wat die kloutjie perlemoer
van angs loswikkel, die sirokko van geloof
en liefde uit hul gate jaag - , styg bo die vloer
van die Niks en syg dan neer om weer op die stoof
van die aarde te verdamp. Die bot, steurende
halfbegrip van Pyn : skoonheid detonerende!
Ou Frikkie, as jy nou vir ons moet herdenk, moet dit
asseblief nie doen met verkeerd-gespelde Engelse
woorde nie. ( Hoe spel 'n mens "foreign," ou Frikkie?)
En moet asseblief nie 'n Engelse oorlogsgedig steel
wat gaan oor mense wat op see sneuwel, en dit dan
gebruik vir ons wat in die bosse gesneuwel het nie.
Kan jy nie ook die website in Afrikaans gemaak het
nie.
NOTE: This message was sent thru a mail2news gateway.
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NOTE: This message was sent thru a mail2news gateway.
No effort was made to verify the identity of the sender.
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NOTE: This message was sent thru a mail2news gateway.
No effort was made to verify the identity of the sender.
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Drie seuntjies spog by die skool oor hulle pappas. Die eerste een
se: "My pa skryf 'n paar woorde op 'n stuk papier, en noem dit 'n
gedig en dan gee hulle hom sommer R500."
Die tweede een se: "Dis nog niks nie. My pa skryf 'n paar dinge op 'n
stuk papier, en hy noem dit 'n lied, en dan gee hulle hom R1000."
Die derde seuntjie se: "My pa is nog beter. Hy skryf 'n paar woorde
op'n stuk papier en noem dit 'n preek. En dan vat dit agt manne om al
die geld bymekaar te maak!"
The President of the USA
The White House
Fax: 091 202 456 2883
WASHINGTON, DC
Mr President
In South African newspapers you are reported to have said in a speech
at the White House that the present South African President, Nelson
Mandela, had taught you not to hate your political enemies. Mandela is
said to have told you that he harboured no grudge against his enemies
who "cast him into jail". And you, in the speech concerned, said that
your (present) crisis could be compared to Mandela's suffering in
jail.
You seem to be under some misapprehension about the circumstances of
Mandela's incarceration and the crimes for which he was sentenced to
imprisonment, otherwise you may not be desirous to identify with him.
And you evidently have been given a distorted idea of how the African
National Congress (ANC) under direction of its leader, Nelson Mandela,
is vengeantly acting against their political enemies and opponents.
Your remark about Mandela's having been "cast into jail" creates a
wrong impression. Mr President, he was not "cast into jail": he was
charged for acts of sabotage and sentenced to life imprisonment by the
Judge President of the then Transvaal Division of the South African
Supreme Court after a protacted hearing in which he had had
representation and every opportunity to defend himself. He, however,
refused to take the oath and testify, and could consequently not be
taken under cross-examination. Finding him guilty, the Judge said that
he had been wrongly charged for acts of sabotage instead of for
treason, in which case the sentence would not have been imprisonment
but the death penalty. The trial was attended by journalists, jurists
and others from all over the world. None could find fault with the
proceedings and the findings of the Court.
Even The Rand Daily Mail, the most outspoken liberal newspaper at the
time in South Africa, and in many ways a supporter of Mandela and the
ANC, wrote about the sentences passed by the judge, "The sentences
pronounced by Judge De Wet at the close of the Rivonia trial are both
wise and just. The law is best served when there is firmness tinged
with mercy, and this was the case yesterday. The sentences could not
have been less severe than those imposed. The men found guilty had
planned sabotage on a wide scale and had conspired for armed
revolution. As the judge pointed out yesterday, the crime of which
they were found guilty was really high treason. The death penalty
would have been justified ".
These are the facts of history. Sentencing Mandela to imprisonment
instead of letting him be hanged was an act of mercy on the part of
his political enemies. Mandela has, therefore, every reason to be
grateful and not the least reason to harbour a grudge against them. He
owes his life to them. You will agree that this puts a completely
different complexion on your statement that "he was cast into jail".
This is by no means all of which Mandela should be grateful for. In
the time of PW Botha's prime ministership in the 'eighties Mandela was
moved from the Robben Island prison to the Pollsmoor prison near Cape
Town, where he received VIP treatment. PW Botha was in this way making
the first instalments in Mandela's release on the pretext that he
would not wish "an old man to die in prison".
From Pollsmoor prison Mandela was moved to the residence of a senior
officer on the staff of the Prisons Department in the town of Paarl in
the Western Cape. There he had every convenience at his disposal to
play a political rôle, including the use of a fax machine. And he was
attended to day and night by a white policeman.
After a carefully orchestrated campaign inside and outside South
Africa he was released by the FW de Klerk government to a
stage-managed reception in Cape Town, receiving prime coverage from
the South African Broadcasting Corporation and providing him with a
launching pad for political initiatives. Thereafter the De Klerk
government in a treasonable series of acts started peace negotiations
with the ANC and moved on to draw up a new constitution on the basis
of one man, one vote in an undivided South Africa, which in essence
meant surrendering to the ANC and enabling Mandela to become the
president of South Africa.
The essence of this political move was spelt out by Paul Johnson,
well-known British intellectual, in The Spectator in April 1994.
"South Africa under F W de Klerk", he said, "Made a suicidal leap to
universal suffrage". He predicted that within ten years the country
could be the theatre of Africa's endless civil wars. "In any case it
would become an industrial rubble heap, beastly, bloody and bankrupt
(...) There is not the slightest hope that it (South Africa) will
continue to exist on a system of universal suffrage - it is one of the
most divided societies on earth: racially, ethnically, linguistically,
as well as economically".
This is De Klerk's achievement. You may recall that you at one stage
telephoned him and told him that you "marvelled" at what he was
achieving in pushing South Africa along this disastrous course.
Some ten months later (February 1995) The Spectator published another
article on South Africa in which its readers were told, "A country
ravaged by crime and corruption, with plummeting standards and a
people condemned to a sordid and brutal life". The article describes
the ANC government as "corrupt and incompetent". This is Nelson
Mandela's government.
What is revealing is that while De Klerk was treacherously steering
the country towards this national misery, newspapers reported:
"Britain fights fervently for FW in UN debate". And later: "Brits full
of praise for FW as architect of peaceful change". And eventually:
"Brits bear De Klerk, their hero, on their hands". Only an Afrikaner
who is a traitor to his own people would be regarded by Brits as their
hero. And De Klerk became the hero of Brits by letting loose the man
who, according to Judge De Wet, should have been hanged for high
treason.
You may sense the degree of loathing on the part of Afrikaners like
myself, who had a father who fought, was wounded and kept a
prisoner-of-war on St Helena Island by the British for more than two
years while they devastated the country and caused the death of over
22 000 children under the age of 16 years and who, a few generations
thereafter sees De Klerk being treated as a hero by Brits for having
"irreversibly" destroyed White South Africa (as in foolish vanity he
said his aim was).
As Mr Tony Blair, Prime Minister of Britain, said in January 1998 that
the British "never forget the past even when addressing the future",
so we naturally also do not forget the past - also the recent past
when the ANC and the South African Communist Party (SACP) had their
headquarters in London from where with British moral and other support
they conducted their terrorism against South Africa.
In the period September 1984 to August 1989 no fewer than 1770 schools
were destroyed or extensively damaged, as were 7187 private homes of
Blacks, 10318 buses, 152 trains, 12188 private vehicles, 1265 shops
and factories, 60 post offices, 47 churches and 30 health clinics.
And, what is even worse, there were 300 cold-blooded murders by the
barbarous necklace method and 372 deaths of people trapped in homes
set alight by terrorist gangs.
These were the means employed in "the struggle" to bring to power,
under Mandela, a Communist-controlled organisation, which Peter
Younghusband, in the London Daily Mail in November 1994, described as
follows, "The ANC never was worth much as a liberation movement - and
apart from a few random urban terrorist acts, its military wing,
Umkhonto we Sizwe, was equally worth little as a fighting force (...)
the ANC very conveniently sat in exile waiting for the world to bring
the White regime to its knees". And, he said, Mandela is unable to run
the country, and he and the ANC is steadily reducing South Africa to
yet another Third World plodder.
It is one thing to say that Mandela bears his political enemies no
grudge, but it is another thing to judge him by what he does, by what
he allows, and by what he neglects to do.
To consider this one must see it in its historical perspective. When
Mandela and his Communist cohorts at their Rivonia hide-out were
planning bloody revolution in the early 'sixties, the Afrikaner
Nationalist Government (ANG) was under the leadership of Dr HF
Verwoerd. And it was under the direction of Dr Verwoerd that this
Communist conspiracy to violently overthrow the South African
government was stamped out, Mandela and his collaborators landing in
jail and the organisation of the Communist Party of South Africa being
destroyed shortly thereafter through the efficient action of the
security police in infiltrating the Communist cells.
Verwoerd frustrated and humiliatingly defeated Mandela's plans. And
for Mandela there is consequently one political enemy not to be
forgiven for saving South Africa from a bloody Communist revolution.
That is Hendrik Verwoerd. He and his ghost are haunting those who are
destroying the results of his unequalled successful statecraft.
Verwoerd was not only the man under whose direction a Communist-led
revolution was prevented. He also became the towering South African
statesman of this century, and he was equal, if not superior, to any
of his contemporaries in the Western World, a statement that may be
evaluated on the ground of his achievements in the face of
international enmity from the Anglo-American block, the Communist
block and the Afro-Asian block.
He not only secured South Africa's survival against this many-sided
onslaught: he, more-over lifted the country to a level of stability,
well-being and prosperity seldom, if ever equalled in history anywhere
under similar circumstances.
To support this remark let me call opponents and enemies of Verwoerd
to testify in this regard. Jan Botha, an outspoken liberal, in his
book, Verwoerd is dead, refers to "the threats from the United Nations
and the arms boycott by the United States and Britain". Then he
writes:
"By the time he died, Dr Verwoerd had built his own monument which was
there for all to see: the Republic of South Africa. The White people
had been forged together in unity, the country was militarily strong
and resilient, the police and security forces were effectively dealing
with all attempts at subversion and infiltration, the country's
economy was dynamic, expanding and had become largely self-sufficient.
"... in the history of South Africa his name will live for ever as the
leader who, when his country was threatened with internal disorders
and with economic sanctions, boycotts and open aggression from
overseas, stood as a symbol of defiance, and the will and
determination to survive".
He not only frustrated the objectives of the great power blocks, but
he also defeated the ANC's plans to create internal disorder.
That Jan Botha's was not a lone voice, can be shown by quotations from
other sources. Paul Barrow in The Statist shortly before Verwoerd was
assassinated on 6 September 1966 by the Communist Tsafendas wrote, "At
the rate at which South Africa is now expanding, the term 'miracle' is
likely to be appropriate to its development in the next few years".
And on 31 July 1966 the unofficial mouthpiece of the South African
liberal establishment The Rand Daily Mail, wrote:
"At the age of nearly 65 Dr Verwoerd has reached the peak of a
remarkable career. No other South African prime minister has ever been
in such a powerful position in the country. He is at the head of a
massive majority after a resounding victory at the polls. The nation
is suffering from a surfeit of prosperity and he can command almost
unlimited funds for all that he needs at present in the way of
military defence. He can claim that South Africa is a shining example
of peace in a troubled continent, if only because overwhelming
domestic power can always command peace. Finally, as if that were not
enough, he can face the session with the knowledge that, short of an
unthinkable show of force by people whom South Africans are rapidly
being taught to regard as their enemies, he can snap his fingers at
the United Nations. Thanks to the recent judgment of the Hague Court
he can afford to condescend to the world body, graciously remaining a
member as long as it suits him".
These are the achievements of the man against whose memory a vendetta
is being conducted under the direction of Mandela and his comrades.
His name was ordered to be removed from the Verwoerd Building, the
Verwoerd Dam, the Verwoerd Hospital, and under Mandela's leadership
his statue at the Free State provincial headquarters was pulled down
in an act bristling with hatred and vengeance.
Of course, Verwoerd as leader of the Afrikaners being a symbol of his
people, the attacks on him have been indirect attacks on the
Afrikaners themselves, so that Mandela's followers - never rebuked -
felt free to shout: "Kill a farmer, kill a Boer", instigating the
killing of hundreds of Afrikaner farmers and their families, 431 in
1997 and 104 from 1 January to 31 August 1998 in 590 attacks. In the
Mau-Mau uprising in Kenya in the 'sixties only 39 White farmers were
killed and in the terrorist war against Rhodesia only 300 were killed
in the course of 14 years. Among those who have had as their battle
cry "Kill a farmer, Kill a Boer" is Peter Mokaba, promoted by Mandela
to Deputy Minister. Other appointments of identified Communists as
Ministers and Deputy Ministers tell the same story, highlighted by the
appointment of the Communist Mboweni as President of the SA Reserve
Bank in a move to further impoverish Afrikaners in the name of
"affirmative action". These are ways in which Mandela has been
allowing his grudge against the Afrikaners, as his political enemies,
to be exploited, while he goes around pretending that he has no
grievance against his enemies.
Even more unmistakable are his appointments to the so-called Truth and
Reconciliation Commission and the way in which this commission has
conducted its business. It was packed by him with enemies and
opponents of the former government. The two Afrikaners, De Jager and
Malan, who were included among the 15 other, were in different ways
opponents of the previous government. However, De Jager resigned in
disappointment, if not disgust, and Malan eventually showed his
dissension from the majority by writing a minority report on the
Commission's findings.
This commission appointed by Mandela has little to do with truth and
nothing with reconciliation. It is a hybridization between the
Nuremberg trials of German war leaders and Stalin's Moscow Show Trials
of the nineteen thirties. Its prime objective was to place Afrikaners
on the bench of the accused to be prosecuted, tried and convicted by
their enemies, and to treat the ANC terrorists on a completely
different basis, which resulted in some amazing events.
In flagrant violation of the provisions of the relevant act it, for
example, granted amnesty to a bunch of 37 top level ANC leaders for
crimes associated with political motives, without specifying the
various acts, which is in conflict with the requirements of the law.
In this group there are among others, Thabo Mbeki, Leader of the ANC,
Minister of Foreign Affairs Nzo, Minister of Justice Omar and Minister
of Defence Modise. Although this decision has been nullified by a
judicial verdict, nothing has been done to rectify the situation.
In such cases, the Commission's concern was not seeking and revealing
the truth, but suppressing and stifling it - a procedure that would
not have been countenanced when it concerned Afrikaners of the
Security services who fought against the terrorists. They were paraded
as criminals who individually under severe pressure had to confess in
detail for whatever amnesty was asked for.
In these various ways Mandela created outlets for his grudges against
the Afrikaners -- the very people whose representatives saved him from
the gallows and later gave him all the help to become the President of
South Africa.
Against this background it is dismaying to read that this man has
every reason to hate his enemies, yet does not think of retribution!
And while allowing a vendetta to be conducted against the Afrikaners,
he is presiding over the decay of this country, which the Afrikaners
wrestled from the wilderness, fought wars for against imperial powers
and, under Dr Verwoerd, was developing into the industrial giant of
Africa.
Where under Verwoerd, "the nation was suffering from a surfeit of
prosperity", and South Africa "was a shining example of peace on a
troubled continent", under Mandela the nation is suffering from a
surfeit of poverty and the country has become the crime capital of the
world - 137 reported rapes, 63 murders, 73 attempted murders, 176
robberies, 670 housebreakings and 35 highjackings on an average every
day of the year. It is common cause that a government that cannot
secure the lives and properties of its civilians is unfit to rule.
"South Africa", read a newspaper report on 29 November 1998, "occupies
the first or second spot in all forms of crime on the world list for
crime, and it is the young people and the homeless who pay the price".
Of the thousands who passed the matric examinations in 1998 less than
one in 10 will get a job in the formal sector. In the four years of
ANC government the national debt more than doubled - from R194 billion
($34 billion) In 1994 to over R400 billion ($70 billion) presently,
the interest on which accounts for 21 per cent of the budget.
In the same period the South African rand lost 80 per cent of its
value. And in the first ten months of 1998 more than 2,8 million
man-days were lost to a wave of industrial strikes.
This is a picture of the country which under Verwoerd had the second
highest economic growth rate in the world (7,9% per year), an average
inflation rate of 2 per cent, was accommodating new labour in the
formal sector at 73,6 per cent per year, and enabled the living
standards of Blacks in the industrial sector to rise at 5,3 per cent
per year as against those of Whites at 3,9 per cent per year. The
Financial Mail published a special survey entitled "The fabulous
years: 1961-66". And as the previously mentioned Jan Botha wrote,
Verwoerd "had launched the greatest programme of socio-economic
upliftment for the non-Whites that South Africa had ever seen".
This, Verwoerd achieved in the face of fierce diplomatic and economic
opposition from the United States, Britain, Soviet Russia and others.
Mandela, on the other hand, has the blessing and support of these
powers, yet under his hand the country is disintegrating and has sunk
to a state of lawlessness, joblessness and futurelessness
unprecedented in South African history. Yet, Mandela is not struggling
to emulate Verwoerd, but to denigrate him and his people.
Perhaps you will reconsider your emotional identification with Mandela
in the light of historical truth.
"Wat sal ons verlos van 'n terugkeer na die steenbed?
'n Droom, selfs 'n hersenskim, sal die mensdom red.
Op die duur. Maar môre weer, kap ek aan die wit
van 'n klipharde volkshart; my oë swem verward
daaroor; al's mes-skerp, dan satynsag, altyd hard.
'n lyn wasgoed wat wit-fossiel in die klip vassit
spring onder my pik los. In die geheue se agterplaas.
Vandag verlang ek na haar, soos die eerste mens...
'n Vreemde deernis laat die skerp eilandklip soggens
en saans fletser skyn in die dynserige waas"
Wagte roteer op die knap omtrek soos diakens
op hul skyfie skrik. In die middel, die Prisonier.
Die aarde word sag in sy oë wat tuur:
daardie klip, daardie klip, toegedraai in lakens.
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