Life in South Africa

The 346 Year Myth

The African National Congress (ANC) would have you believe that they have built more houses for black people in 5 years than the (oppressive) white governments did in 346 years. Unfortunately, the truth is a little more complicated.

For there to have been a 346 year period of white rule (domination, exploitation, whatever you like), it would mean that South Africa's first white coloniser Jan van Riebeeck would have had to set out on the day he arrived (6 April 1652) and immediately establish towns and cities all over a country he had never seen before, for a (white) population that didn't exist. In fact, it would be another 180 years (1830s) before white settlers crossed into the eastern and northern parts of the country. There was also no welfare state as we know it today -- it wasn't the government's duty to build houses. People built their own houses, schools, hospitals and churches.

I'm not going to deny that people were oppressed. That they suffered injustice and humiliation. That much is history. But to suggest that they were oppressed for four centuries is simply not true. For a large part of those four centuries most South Africans had never even seen a white man, let alone be oppressed by one.

The political reality is that Mandela and the ANC need the people to feel that they have been oppressed for four centuries so that the ANC can say that it rescued them from that oppression. In other words, Mandela wants black South Africans to hate white South Africans just so that his party can be re-elected. And that's just sick. More than sick, it's racist and genocidal. White South Africans are suffering a rash of attacks by people who kill them just because they're white. Everybody is a victim of crime in South Africa, but it is only when whites are robbed that the robbers load up their things and wait for them to come home so that they can kill them. I mean, if your only motive is robbery, surely you just load up and go?

It would appear Mandela believes that he cannot be a racist because he's black and smiles a lot. I don't agree. If we are to accept that people are truly equal, then we must also accept that black people can be just as racist and jingoistic and evil as white people can. The refusal to acknowledge this results in the sort of carnage and corruption which has been Africa's breakfast, lunch and supper for the past 30 years.

There is a rather odd twist to this story. You see, the people who the Dutch were supposed to have oppressed for the first 120 years (from 1652 to 1771, when they met the Xhosa) weren't black! They were Khoisan, the original inhabitants of South Africa, who were smaller in stature than the Bantu peoples and used many clicks in their language (the clicks in the Xhosa language are derived from the Khoisan whom they encoutered on the western fringes of their empire). The Khoisan were made up of the Khoikhoi, who were pastoralists, and the San, who were hunter-gatherers (remnants of the San people live parts of the Northern Cape province and in the Kalahari Desert).

Of course, the fact that they weren't black doesn't make their oppression any less real. Their story needs to be told as surely as any other. What is interesting is the ANC government's reaction to these people. While claiming to have been oppressed for 342 years, the ANC is oppressing these people by failing to grant their language official status! The most the South African Constitution provides for is a Pan South African Language Board which must "promote, and create conditions for the development and use of" them.

What does all this mean? There is a big void in the way the world sees South African history. Nobody can be said to know the history of another country as well as the inhabitants, but the ANC is trading on a history of South Africa which is simply not true! It is time that Mandela and his ANC told the true story about South Africa -- the one which involves the Bantu peoples colonising areas which had belonged to the Khoisan people.

Historical data sourced from Reader's Digest Illustrated History of South Africa: The Real Story (Dougie Oakes, ed., 1989 ISBN 0 947008 48 9)

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