And so I had almost forgotten that I had a copy of "The White Tribe of Africa" in my library, as well as "White Tribe Dreaming", one of the best books ever written on South Africa's history, both of which are now on my bedside table.
The author of "The White Tribe of Africa" also produced a prize-winning BBC television documentary of the same title as his book but there's no sign of it on YouTube. All I could find was the above "The White Laager".
Watching Sandra Laing's moving story in the movie "Skin" made me again reflect on South Africa's horrible apartheid regime and read more about it, even though I had lived there long enough to experience it first-hand - as an oppressor rather than as an oppressed but such regimes are hard on both groups (although perhaps not on the Afrikaners who were being told from the pulpit every Sunday that they were the "Chosen People").
I was the oppressor not by commission but by omission but how could I have done anything in as small a community as Lüderitz in South-West Africa where you either conformed or you left? I left before the system corrupted me as well, not only because I detested it but also because I felt that it would never change as long as the white man was in charge.
As the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in 1850, "Experience teaches that generally speaking the most perilous moment for a bad government is when it seeks to mend its ways. Only consummate statecraft can enable a king to save his throne when, after a long spell of oppressive rule, he sets out to improve the lot of his subjects. Patiently endured so long as it seemed beyond redress, a grievance comes to appear intolerable once the possibility of removing it crosses men's minds."
That the end of apartheid was achieved with 'consummate statecraft' is perhaps due to one man more than any other, Nelson Mandela, now rightly regarded as the "Father of the Nation" of the new South Africa.
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We tread many tracks in the sand dunes of life but in the morning the mighty wind has blown them away.
Everything is transitory except
Good morning. |
