(NEWS24 SA) Max du Preez
Are we all 'coloured'?
2011-03-09 12:40
[Max du Preez] We really need to find new terminology for the different population groups in South Africa, especially now that we’re moving back into a political culture of obsession with race.
Problem One: if “coloured” means people of mixed blood, then the vast majority of people born in South Africa are coloureds, myself included.
Studies in the 1980s have found that white Afrikaners have an average of seven percent “black” blood, mostly because of early relationships and marriages between white settlers and slaves or Khoisan. Some Afrikaners, like my family, have considerably more than seven percent black blood.
This is also true of black South Africans. Three quick examples: ANC veteran Walter Sisulu’s father was a white man; Winnie Mandela’s mother had light skin, blue eyes and long hair and her mother-in-law called her a mlungu; Nelson Mandela’s mitochondrial DNA was found to be pure Khoisan. There were many runaway slaves from the East Indies and European shipwreck survivors in the 16th, 17th and 18th century who became part of the Zulu and Xhosa peoples.
Problem Two: Probably a majority of people classified “coloured” during the apartheid years were descendants of the Khoikhoi and the San or Bushmen, with, of course, some white, slave and black blood. But when the ANC and other so-called Africanists refer to “Africans”, they exclude these people.
This is sheer madness: the descendants of the first peoples of southern Africa are excluded from the term African? The Khoisan were here thousands of years before the first black farming groups arrived from further north. They are the original Africans.
Problem Three: Most South Africans who love their country and are proud of our nation and our democracy declare themselves to be Africans. It is a term that has become associated with citizens who regard themselves as indigenous, as part of the whole nation, as part of the African continent.
So when the ANC and others refer to black South Africans as Africans, they exclude coloured, white and Indian South Africans from calling themselves Africans.
I have proclaimed for decades in columns and elsewhere that I see myself as an African, as indigenous to South Africa and Africa, and that I associate myself with the peoples, cultures and problems of the African continent.
If the ANC says I’m not African, then what does that make me? I’m certainly not a European.
Let me explain this problem by telling you of my daughter. Her father is a mixture of French Huguenot, German and Dutch settlers of the 17th century, slaves from Indonesia and Sri Lanka and at least one Khoi woman, Pietronella, daughter of Krotoa and materfamilias of the Saayman clan. I had my DNA tested at the National Health Laboratory. They tell me from my father’s side I’m in the E1b1b1c1 haplogroup – 23% of Ethiopians belong to this small genetic group.
My daughter’s mother is a mixture of early Chinese/Indian Mauritian immigrants to the Eastern Cape, Afrikaners and Scots from Kenya.
Do you really want me to tell my child she is European?
Problem Four: are coloureds and Indian South Africans not also black? So if we can’t call “black” black people black, what should we call them? I see Professor Jonathan Jansen is calling them “racial Africans”. Is that the way to go?
Decades ago ethnologists called “black” black people Bantu-speakers, because they all come from one language family who have spread all over sub-Saharan Africa. And then the apartheid racists started using the word Bantu in a derogatory way and now it is just unacceptable. Or should we rehabilitate the word?
Even better: let’s all try very hard to move away from this renewed obsession with race and we won’t need the terminology.
Send your comments to Max
Disclaimer: News24 encourages freedom of speech and the expression of diverse views. The views of columnists published on News24 are therefore their own and do not necessarily represent the views of News24.
- News24
Labels: APARTHEID, MAX DU PREEZ, RACISM
Read more...
(STICKY) (HERALD ZW) Zimbabwe: What Future White Viewpoint?
Friday, 17 May 2013 23:16
COMMENT - There have been several articles that are of interest and are mentioned in this article.
(ZIMBABWELAND) Difficult lessons from Zimbabwe that some South Africans just don’t want to hear, prof. Ian Scoones.
(IOL) We can learn from Zim’s flourishing farms
April 30 2013 at 09:22am
By Max du Preez
And Max Du Preez' follow-up article:
(IOL, THE MERCURY) What we CAN learn from Zim
May 14 2013 at 09:51am
By Max du Preez
(HERALD ZW) Zimbabwe: What Future White Viewpoint?
Friday, 17 May 2013 23:16
When a professor cannot read the day
We are headed for very interesting times I tell you. The MDCs do not want elections before or by June 29, which is when the life of Parliament extinguishes itself. Yet they harp on laws which need realignment with the new constitution when it comes into force, and all this before we go for elections.
This is increasingly sounding like a precondition. Those laws would have to be passed by Parliament, is that not so? Which means they have to be done and processed by June 29, right? And when they are done, what else remains in the way of elections?
Nothing! I happen to know that the Justice Ministry has been working tirelessly on all those laws that stand affected by the draft constitution as and when it ripens, which means what is being projected as an arduous task will be a one-day wonder, all parties willing.
Unless of course the MDCs decide to frustrate the legislative process, which they can do by the way, what with their stay-away model politics. I am not excited about a positive scenario where the MDCs play ball in relation to the legislative agenda. I am interested in that knotty situation which they provoke when they don’t. What happens next? Well, the country falls back on Presidential Powers by which the President can make laws, albeit for six months! Interesting times ahead of us, I tell you.
---------------When power-hunger is no emergency ------
A few days ago I engaged a high-ranking MDC-T official on why they now stomach an unconstitutional interregnum falling due after June 29. He berated me. “Don’t mislead the nation,” he fumed. “The Government in place remains in Office until the next President is sworn in.” Incorrect if both of us understand Government to comprise the three arms. If MDCs wish is granted, it means Zimbabwe will continue under the current Executive - not Government - for the next three or four months. It will be a short, bastardised epoch of an Executive and Judiciary, without the third leg, Parliament, which cannot extend its own term. It shall be a fraught period, one dominated by flying writs, most of them constitutional. I don’t know the disposition of the Bench on this one. Most probably it will do like it has done with MDC defectors who approached it for immediate by-elections, namely rule in favour of elections without further ado. If so, you wind up with a lonely, discredited Executive. You don’t need any exceptional skills to know that the extension envisioned and granted under the current constitution which has been retained in the present draft is meant for emergencies, or for an unavoidable short overspill beyond the life of Parliament. And power-hunger is not an emergency, although its consequences may very well create one.
-------------Dictatorship by opposition consent-------
But all that is not the exciting part. The real exciting part is the fact that the two MDCs are gradually driving the country towards a situation where everything else is speed-able, indeed gets speeded up except harmonized elections. It boggles the mind how anyone who can fast-track a sensitive document like the constitution, can plausibly drag on anything else. If you can sire a God in one month, why can’t you sire a mere mortal in much less? Or in slightly more time of its fornication? Through dilation, the MDCs are slowly making the prospect of turning the President into a sole lawmaker real. The same President whose powers they wanted drastically pared down in the run-up to the draft! Much worse, they want him to run a Government without Parliament. The same MDCs whose “democratic” argument was “to give Parliament its real teeth”! The MDCs are systematically repudiating those values around which they wove their claim to opposition, indeed on which they pitched their vision of a new Zimbabwe. What is going on? Whose values have they been espousing all along, values so vulnerable, so susceptible to their power-craving whims? Do they realize the absurdity of their current position, where they are poking a President they have all along termed an autocrat, towards real dictatorship, seemingly by oppositional consent? And if they consent to that, why then do they fear their impending defeat? Because in their lore it will be a Mugabe dictatorship which they do not seem to mind, as long as it is with their participation as ministers! Dictatorship is always a problem, until it gives you a place in the inclusive sun! What a peculiar New Zimbabwe.
--------Parroting Government Work Programme----------
Has anyone seen the MDC-T document over which they are congregating in the name of working out a vision for a new Government which they dream as theirs after elections they dread? You go through the policy documents of the Inclusive Government, themselves wholly derived from the Zanu (PF) era, and you immediately see the parentage of the MDC-T documents for their policy conference. And by the way, all ministries in Government recently came under real pressure from the about-to-be-defunct Prime Minister’s Office to give reports on their policies and activities, all in the name of a review of that stillbirth called GWP, Government Work Programme. Politically conscious ministries did not cooperate. Those which did today realize that they provided fodder for the MDC-T manifesto, an unacknowledged, thankless pilfering effort. So much about change, making remarkably true the age-long saying that the more they change is the more they stay the same. You don’t make a new Zimbabwe out of a blueprint for legendary dysfunction, which is what the Inclusive Government was all about. Why is there this mental atrophy in the MDC-T, which cannot come up with a simple manifesto? We need to peep into the state of white thought which launched them in the first place. Let us do so now.
-------------When a professor cannot read the day -------
Just before the recent referendum, Professor Tony Hawkins was invited to proffer his views on the event. He had this to say: “All the signs are that it will be something of a non-event because the three political parties who drafted the constitution have all supported it and there is no active campaign against its acceptance. There are certainly civil society organisations who have opposed it, but there is no organized campaign and it seems quite clear that it will go through with very little opposition, with probably very apathetic electorate and a very low turnout of less than 20 percent, if not less, of the voters.” But the referendum result would prove the intellectual clairvoyant woefully wrong. Well over 3,3 million Zimbabweans voted, the highest figure ever recorded so far in all elections this country has held so far. And of these, about 3,2 million supported the draft constitution, giving the document an above 94 percent approval rate, something of a history given the almost instinctive No stance in past referenda. Again confounding the good professor, the Nay vote garnered just over 179 000 votes, quite a far cry from Hawkins’ “no organized campaign” against the draft. This hefty misreading of national disposition by our seers got me thinking, this inability to read a cloudless day.
------------Swimming with the current? --------
A few days before our Independence Celebrations we had a surprising piece from the Commercial Farmers Union indicating this all-white farming body, or more accurately put, the scarecrow of it, was giving up its opposition to land reforms and would not “continue swimming against the current”. Said its vice-president, one Peter Steyl, “We have finally realized that the land reform is irreversible.... There has been a change of heart. We have realized that we cannot carry on like this. The overall concept is to empower agricultural stakeholders and investors, past and present, in an inclusive way that brings sustainable benefit to all sectors of the Zimbabwean economy.” This ringing statement amounted to a major climb-down by a body that historically has been the bedrock of white power and white politics in this country from colonisation and beyond. Except it is coming a good 13 years late, well into our land reforms, well after the deluge, well after the current and all is settled. Again, another clear day misread!
---------When Bloch takes back his words --------
Two weeks back I read through a piece by Eric Bloch which attempted to review a recent publication on land reforms co-authored by Joseph Hanlon, Jeanette Manjengwa and Theresa Smart. Its title, Zimbabwe Takes Back its Land, is militant and assertive, loudly marking a departure from the Mugabe-takes-white-land-and-ruins-commercial-agriculture-and-once-viable-economy intellectual mantra.
Eric Bloch benevolently differs with these writers stressing: “Although the authors undoubtedly formed their opinions and expressed them in good faith and they are well-intentioned, those opinions and conclusions are regrettably at pronounced variance with the realities.” His view is that so bad is the land reform that “its benefits are grossly exceeded by its negative consequences”.
It is a conclusion which will find favour with white farmers who lost land in these wide ranging reforms, but hardly in the Africans who feel they recovered their heritage, directly or vicariously, and are eke-ing a living out of it. I notice even the MDC formations, themselves a political expression of anti-land reform politics, today concede that land reforms area irreversible. Indeed one outcome of their so-called policy brainstorming retreat shall be to recognize the salutary impact of land reforms, while priggishly hiding behind the miasma of “land audits”.
-----------When even a Devil cries “Amen” ------
Hardly a week or so ago, a white Afrikaner senior journalist, one Max du Preez wrote an extensive admission that South Africa has to cast aside its pride and admit that Zimbabwe’s land reforms are not just working, but a veritable way out of rural poverty. “Zimbabwe’s radical land redistribution has worked and agricultural production is on levels comparable to the time before the process started. What is more meaningful is that the production levels were achieved by 245 000 black farmers on the land previously worked by some 6000 white farmers.... Mugabe cronies own less than 10 percent of the land. Many of the small farmers (a few hectares) make a profit of about R90 000 a year while some of the more commercial-sized farms have turnovers of more than R1 million.” And he gets to amazing conclusions: “The first is that most new black farmers can actually farm successfully and commercially if given enough time and help. There are far too many South Africans who believe the opposite. The second is that an ambitious land redistribution programme can play a large role in alleviating poverty and providing employment and dignity to large numbers of marginalized people.”
------------Dominant ideas, dominant class -------
Du Preez is an Afrikaner, part of the Volk enjoying a stranglehold on land in South Africa. This group traces its roots as far back as 1652. They contest their African roots, making it clear they know no Europe, no Holland, no Dutch language. The Afrikaners are wedded to the land and it takes far more humility than Bloch ever needs, to admit that indeed the land can be merited by any other race other than Afrikaners, let alone to acknowledge that land can be productively used by anyone else outside the Afrikaner Volk. Compare this with our Eric Bloch, our Freeth, our Bennett, our Buckle, our Hawkins and many others of the same ilk. It got me wondering: Is white opinion valid anymore in this country? Is there room for it anymore? Can it ever dominate once more?
Most of us recall that Zimbabwe from the eighties right up to Two Thousand was a paradise of white thought, opinion and sensibility. Collectively, we remained a colonized mind, whatever had happened at midnight on 18th April, 1980. And it got one really cynical. Was 1980 a mere rearrangement of 1890 ideationally? In the media, themselves mirrors of the national mind, white thought dominated, especially in the area of business. The authorized knowers were white. The viewpoint that mattered was white, with black mouths, black thoughts, only featuring in public relations puffery. We were a marginal thought, that speck of thought on the fringes.
A bit of advice from Karl Marx: “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, that is, the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.”
For those not familiar with the works of Marx and Engels, this piece is culled from The German Ideology, a must read for social analysts.
---------Into the castle of their skin ------
With the white man in charge of land, industry and commerce, it was little wonder that our farcical dominance of politics would soon give way to ideas founded and espoused by those in charge of the means of material production. Our marginalization ideationally thus mirrored our true and correct place and position in the post-colonial society, if post-colonial it ever was, concretely. That position has since changed, somewhat. The white man has been toppled from the pedestal that gave him a stranglehold over land. His citadel for hegemony over industry and commerce is being shaken, thanks to Indigenisation. He is now an outsider, while the outsider in history is slowly inching towards the centre. This massive change is showing in terms of mental production.
As for people like Hawkins it is much worse. Their hellfire vision in the wake of land reforms is slowly being challenged by the good things happening in the countryside. The rules of the game have changed and their thinking, all of it founded on a challenged orthodoxy, on a vanishing status quo, is now incongruous, a clear misfit. Made worse by the fact that their attempts to venture into political commentary or denial, runs into another formidable wall. They seek to read the mind and behaviour of an African who resides in Chitungwiza, Dotito and Buhera, grounds where no white angel dares tread. Remember Simon Chimbetu: “KuChitungwiza uko kwatinogara havawanikwe”? Beyond lost place, the white commentator faces a stiffer problem of a different habitat from those who now make, move and shake Zimbabwe. It is a complete disorientation, one likely to see many whites whine, wail and whimper. Or much worse, withdraw into the castle of their skins.
Icho!
-------------Postscript:-----------
“There are THREE very important topics when the MDC-T wins power:
1) Unemployment, Unemployment, Unemployment! Heeee!
2) Jobs, Jobs, Jobs! Heeee!
3) Economy, Economy, Economy! Heeee!
?) Corruption, Corruption, Corruption! Heeeeeeeee!
These are the THREE issues. Heeeeeeeeeeeeee!” Little, confused bird chirps: “So what is three? The issues, or the stress?” And the village cur barks back: “The issues, if your count is juicy!” Happy Conferencing Mister Prime Minister!
Icho once more again to the power of 3!
nathaniel.manheru@zimpapers.co.zw
Labels: ERIC BLOCH, JOSEPH HANLON, LAND REFORM, MAX DU PREEZ, NATHANIEL MANHERU, NEOCOLONIALISM, SOUTH AFRICA
Read more...
What we CAN learn from Zim
May 14 2013 at 09:51am
By Max du Preez
Lies, damn lies and statistics. Or should I rather say, so much heart, so little reason.
My recent column regarding possible lessons South Africa could learn from Zimbabwe’s violent land redistribution provoked an awful lot of emotion.
Literally thousands of people reacted to it on Facebook, Twitter and the websites of newspapers.
I was truly astonished at the blind anger and irrationality of many of the reactions, even from otherwise well-informed and balanced people.
It was as if I wrote that Jacob Zuma was a neo-liberal feminist – it is so far removed from people’s perceptions that they couldn’t get their minds to actually engage with the topic.
That's one of the effects of propaganda. - MrK
It was pretty obvious that few of those who reacted in anger actually read the whole column.
It appears that people couldn’t read beyond the first few paragraphs where it was stated that perhaps the land grabs in Zimbabwe had “worked” because almost a quarter of a million households were now on the land, producing almost as much as the 6 000 white farmers before them had 13 years ago.
People couldn’t get their heads around that. The belief is clearly deeply entrenched that redistributing land on such a scale where black farmers replaced white ones would inevitably lead to disaster.
Some of the reactions showed that many believe that few black people actually have it in them to farm commercially.
I got the strong impression that failing black farms, and there are indeed many in Zimbabwe and South Africa, have become many white people’s main argument against land reform. If there’s evidence that it need not be a failure, these people resort to anger and insults.
My column was triggered by a new book, Zimbabwe Takes Back its Land by Joseph Hanlon, Jeanette Manjengwa and Teresa Smart. They say that Zimbabwe’s radical land redistribution had worked and agricultural production was on levels comparable to the time before the process started.
This was the work of 245 000 new black farmers working the land previously farmed by only 6 000 white farmers, the authors say.
I haven’t come across Manjengwa and Smart before, but I have read several of Hanlon’s other books on southern Africa and found him balanced and very well informed.
The information in the book surprised me, but after more research I saw that another British academic, Professor Ian Scoones of Sussex University, had come to similar conclusions after his research in Zimbabwe.
Most of those who reacted with much anger to my column preferred not to read my remarks about the price Zimbabwe had paid for the violent land grabs – the human rights violations, the instability, the severe damage to the economy, the massive brain drain.
An MDC politician said angrily that even if the information in the Hanlon book were correct, it would still not justify the violent way white farmers had been evicted from the land. I agree.
The majority of people who reacted to my column declared that the Zimbabwe model could never be applied in South Africa.
In fact, the whole second half of my column was saying just that, warning that such an event could ruin our economy and stability, even trigger a low-intensity civil war. How did they miss that?
I was bombarded with tons of statistics from many different sources, some dubious in the extreme, that appear to contradict the information given by the authors. The one set of statistics that seems to be incontrovertible states that there is still considerable food insecurity in Zimbabwe. The production of tobacco and cotton and the recent drought could have contributed to this.
I did not do a scientific study of agriculture in Zimbabwe. I have no way of telling what the real figures are. But I would be very, very surprised if respected, experienced academics and researchers like Hanlon and Scoones would put their credibility at risk, simply thumb-suck production figures and perpetrate blatant lies.
I think we should accept that, at the very least, the impression we in South Africa had that agriculture in Zimbabwe was still in a state of utter collapse after the land redistribution is wrong.
We should accept that a substantial number of new Zimbabwean farmers, big and small, are actually commercially successful.
That is significant, especially if one considers that a great historic wrong has been addressed and that hundreds of thousands of Zimbabweans are now settled on the land of their ancestors.
It still doesn’t make the way the redistribution happened right. It still doesn’t make it a model for South Africa to copy.
It does mean we should make a mind shift around land reform. We should stop seeing it as a threat and start seeing it as a priority to redress past wrongs and further stability.
Land reform is about people, not merely about hectares and statistics.
The Mercury
Labels: LAND REFORM, MAX DU PREEZ, ZIMBABWE
Read more...
We can learn from Zim’s flourishing farms
April 30 2013 at 09:22am
By Max du Preez
File image - A woman gathers maize grain she harvested in Epworth, on the outskirts of Harare.
It is something many South Africans do not want to hear and would probably find hard to believe: Zimbabwe’s radical land redistribution has worked and agricultural production is on levels comparable to the time before the process started.
What is more meaningful is that the production levels were achieved by 245 000 black farmers on the land previously worked by some 6 000 white farmers.
I got this information from a new book, Zimbabwe Takes Back its Land by Joseph Hanlon, Jeanette Manjengwa and Teresa Smart.
Hanlon is a senior fellow at the London School of Economics and had written many books on southern Africa, especially Mozambique. Manjengwa is the deputy director of the London School of Economics and Smart is a visiting fellow at London University. The book’s findings came as a surprise to me. I was under the impression that most of the farms taken from white farmers were occupied by squatters or cronies of president Robert Mugabe and were largely lying fallow.
Not so, say the authors.
Mugabe cronies own less than 10 percent of the land. Many of the small farms (a few hectares) make a profit of about R90 000 a year while some of the more commercial-sized farms have turnovers of more than R1 million.
The authors also state that it is widely estimated that new farmers take a generation to reach full production, so the new farmers can be expected to raise their production significantly in the next decade.
All this information is relevant to us in South Africa. Land reform is just as emotive an issue and important to development here as it was in Zimbabwe.
But land redistribution has been painfully slow here, partly because of budgetary constraints and partly because of bureaucratic incompetence and corruption.
It would be a huge mistake to argue that, if forced, land redistribution without compensation has worked in Zimbabwe it should also be done here in South Africa.
Zimbabwe’s land processes seriously undermined stability and the economy for more than a decade. Millions of Zimbabweans fled the country and sought refuge in South Africa and other neighbouring states.
A similar undermining of our economy and stability could have a more serious impact on South Africa and could lead to great suffering and conflict, indeed to a fatal blow to our far more modern and sophisticated economy.
A radical disturbance of the equilibrium in South African commercial agriculture would have dire consequences for food security and could lead to dangerous social upheaval, even a low-level civil war.
There is another crucial difference. With few exceptions, white farmers were only established in Zimbabwe from the early 20th century onwards, most of them British and most of them arriving after the end of World War II. The man who led the white Rhodesian government after the Unilateral Declaration of Independence, Ian Smith, farmed land given to him by the colonial authorities after evicting the indigenous owners.
Most white South African farmers are Afrikaners whose forebears arrived in the coutry from France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany between 1652 and the early 1700s.
They lost all loyalty to a foreign “motherland” within a few generations and eventually came to regard themselves as indigenous people.
Many Afrikaner families even had a slave woman from the late 17th or early 18th century as materfamilias. In the Western Cape, it is not uncommon to find a family on the same farm their ancestors had occupied 300 years ago, and elsewhere in the country a century or more ago.
Most dispossessed white Zimbabweans emigrated to South Africa or the UK. That is not an option open to more than a handful of white South African farmers.
Another difference is that, unlike Zimbabwe, we have a constitution protecting private property ownership and the rule of law. Even if the government appropriates land, it still has to pay some compensation.
But this doesn’t mean we can’t learn lessons from the Zimbabwean experience.
The first is that most new black farmers can actually farm successfully and commercially if given enough time and help. There are far too many South Africans who believe the opposite.
The second is that an ambitious land redistribution programme can play a large role in alleviating poverty and providing employment and dignity to large numbers of marginalised people.
The conventional wisdom among most academics, economists and political analysts in South Africa is that urbanisation is the answer to poverty alleviation and the successful provision of education and skills training.
Too many leaders in agriculture agree with this view and declare that smallholder farmers simply undermine the potential of available agricultural land.
Zimbabwe and the experience of Ethiopia and other countries in the last two decades are proof that they’re dead wrong.
We urgently need to throw old, conventional thinking overboard and tackle our problem with more vigour.
The Mercury
Labels: LAND REFORM, MAX DU PREEZ, ZIMBABWE
Read more...
