h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

And I'm not just saying it because I am South African, but all the statements about us are made by people who have probably never been to South Africa before 1994! Just to let you know, that everybody is now worse off than before the 1994 democratic elections.

Other coloured groups was not treated right, I must admit, but they had jobs, food, free education and medical sevices. Today most people are poor, hungy, uneducated and dying of disease, because of a lack of medical services.

Do you still want to criticise white South Africans. Remember, we are not the only rasists in the world. Others just like to keep it quite.

Certainly, I've met plenty of nice South Africans.

But none of them thought that everyone is worse off post apartheid. From my own travels and reading, I certainly don't believe that too be true.

For the majority of the country, being able to vote, to have access to decent housing, to not have their movement restricted, to not be thrown into jail because of the colour of their skin, to be able to sit at the front of the bus or use local facilities means that things are better than under white majority rule.

Not perfect, but better. Of course there are racists in other places too, but Apartheid South Africa was racism taken to its furthest conclusion and implemented in every angle of life and interaction with the state. That is why people boycotted SA before democracy, and that is why the song that this entry is about was written.

sprout

Yes they are. This song is disgusting, it's racist against the two white south africans I know who I consider close friends.
How about one now about Robert Mugabe's regime (which is probably more murderous than the Apartheid one). I've never met a nice Zimbabwean? I doubt it though, it would be stereotyping and racist wouldn't it now.

Different racial groups all over Africa have discriminated against each other (Amin discriminated against ethnic Indians in Africa) but because it was White Africans oppressing Black Africans it came to light.

Besides it's a little ironic isn't it, considering all of the huge British companies who invested (and thus economically propped up)in Apartheid South Africa. Oh yes and the very little fact THAT IT WAS A BRITISH COLONIAL GOVERNMENT WHO PUT THE APARTHEID POLICY INTO PLACE!!!!! It wasn't the Afrikaner people, after all South Africa wasn't independent of British rule until 1961 and Apartheid was implemenned in 1948.

Oh yes and in a survey done in 1992, to see how all White South Africans felt about F.W. DeKlerk's 'Reform Process' English- speaking Whites and not the supposed oppressors, the Afrikaners, were more in favour of keeping Apartheid than their Afrikaans- speaking compatriates.

Besides the crime rate was so much lower under Apartheid, the seperation stopped HIV/ AIDS from spreading from community to community.

The minority rights Mandela promised Afrikaner Volksfront Chairmen Dr. Ferdi Hartzenberg and Constand Viljeon in return for a preaceful transition from Apartheid to 'democracy' were never delivered.

Not just the conservative Whites, such as the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (Afrikaner Resistance Movement) and the virtually de- militarized Afrikaner Volksfront (Afrikaner People's Party) were involved in the hundreds of bombings during the reform process. The National Party was involved in bombings, as was the African National Congress.

No European countries have boycotted post- 1994 South Africa over the government's evident 'let it be' attitude over Boer genocide (i.e. the 1,800 Boers murdered by Black mobs in what's becoming a Zimbabwe- style situation). Their excuse is probably it's not government organised violence, well when nominal rule was given to the black homeland's in the early 1970s most violence perpetrated against blacks in South Africa was by non- government right- wingers, such as the Afrikaner Resistance Movement, yet they continued to boycott Apartheid South Africa.

In short there's a blatent double standard when it comes to 'oppression'.

I think part of the joke of the song was to use the same, sweeping generalisations to white south africans that they had used against the blacks.
If it seems offensive, it's because it was meant to be offensive, belligerent, sweeping and, quite frankly, racist!

Britain gave self-self rule to the Afrikaner majority at the creation of Union on 31 May 1910. A small number of laws that had to be passed by the Westminster parliament in London remained on the legislature but every one of them was wiped clear when the Statute of Westminster of 1931 removed all legal impediments to South Africans governing themselves precisely and fully as they saw fit, not needing any approval or consent any more from London on anything.

The only link to London was the SA parliament's decision to retain the English monarch as a titular and symbolic/ceremonial head of state -- just as how she remains to this day in Canada, Australia, Jamaica, New Zealand and a few other countries. Declaration of a republic in 1961 merely removed than thin ceremonial role, but it did not change one iota of South Africans' sovereign rights to pass any laws they wanted to. After all, all the key segregationist apartheid laws were passed in the 1950s, a full decade before the Republic of SA came into being.

I've known many white South Africans, and there's always an undercurrent of assumed superiority lurking there. A pervasive sense of entitlement, and expectation that they really do deserve to have at least a *few* servants, and if they don't actually have any, then they'll treat other people as though they were there to do their bidding.

Not to mention a certain blindness to their own privilege, and a tendency to blame their racist, fascist history on "some other people who are all gone now," and even paint themselves as misunderstood, or even a bit of a victim themselves.

They'll be nice to your face, but they're still a mean bunch.