Steve Hofmeyr, that asinine blonde amoeba, is using the
world’s most simplistic rhetoric device to avoid culpability for his bigotry:
he’s going ‘prove it’. It’s an old, hack trick that has its strength in the
idea of incommensurability. We don’t share a common set of agreements over what
constitutes prejudice, so in Stevevillefontein just about nothing is racist,
unless that exact same thing happens to a particular type of right wing white
person *, then it’s nuclear meltdown stage 9. How do they pull off being a
victim and oppressor at the same time? Being a dominatrix in AfriForum (Steve’s
official fan club) must be very confusing.
As you may or may not have heard, depending on whether you
care for the intellectual Jurassic Park that is Stevo’s twitter feed, Steve
believes that “Blacks were the architects of apartheid”. So then now, I know in
the common sense world the rest of us live in it’s patently obvious that this
is racist, but nope, not for The Steve and his merry band of morons. So now,
painfully, I will explain why it’s fuggen racist.
Just to be clear, I am not explaining this for Steve. His
head is too far up his own ass to hear us anyway. I am explaining this so fence
sitters will stop sitting. The discourse that Steve is spewing is part of a cultural
narrative that maintains the insane inequality we face today. When a white
bigot with huge public presence starts telling black people apartheid was their
fault it’s time for us to block his access to socially accepted public
platforms. With the minimum of publicity we need to tell his umlungustan that
they have a right to a racist mindset, but it’s gonna cost them. Kyknet, I will
be asking your CEO for an LNN interview about what side of this line you are
choosing. Neutrality on this is not neutral.
Is “Blacks were the architects of apartheid. Go figure.”
racist?
Firstly, what’s racism? Simply put, racism isn’t the
consciousness of race as much as it’s the prejudice against people based on
race. As every B grade quasi intellectual white conservative type likes to whine,
yes, in South Africa we obsess on race when the problem is often both class and
race, but that move has been well explored as a white-guy-avoids-the-race-issue
move. If this is confusing Andile Mngxitama lays it down here: http://mg.co.za/article/2014-09-26-class-theory-finally-decolonised
Next, what is apartheid? Apartheid was a system of laws that
did some wonderful things to black people, to name just a few:
It took away their land and wealth in the Land Act.
It totally deprived them of any effective vote – no
political rights.
It made black people live in ridiculously small rural
outbacks with no way to eek a living but to come hundreds of kilometers to work
on white owned mines, etc, for a pittance while their families scraped by in
poverty.
It gave black people substandard education for decades, and
even tried to force them to learn in Afrikaans, often a 3rd
language. How the F do you learn algebra in a 3rd language? Imagine
we made your kids learn in Shangaan Steve?
It blocked them from ever being able to advance in their
career. To this day 75% of SA CEOs are white. We also on average earn 6 times
more than black people, so our paranoia that we are under attacked is simply
untrue.
It bullied them into peripheral city outskirts where they
had to get back to by a certain time or face jail or deportation to homelands.
It made people carry evil little books called passbooks,
which if you didn’t have meant jail.
So, for the sake of common human decency, let’s agree at
least that apartheid was itself racist. So now, “Blacks were the architects of
apartheid”. Obviously they didn’t vote for apartheid themselves? And obviously
they didn’t send the trucks that dragged people screaming from their homes?
Yup, this is that wonderful dynamic sexist pricks do when they blame the victim
instead of the rapist. Basically Steve is telling us it’s black people’s fault
because they were asking for it, in their tight pants and short skirts. If you
are a Steve fan right now and you do not feel the deepest sense of shame then you
should seek help because your soul has been expropriated without compensation.
However, Steve tried to build some credibility around this
claptrap on his Facebook page. First, he said ‘go figure’ at the end, which he
thinks means it’s our fault that we didn’t see it like he sees it. If Juju said
“All whites must die. Go figure”, Steve’s little brain would have exploded all
over his Pick n Pay sponsored face, so no.
Steve then tried to explain that if nobody wants to play
with you, then it's probably your fault. Ja, Steve, I am going to shove that
logic so far down your throat you gonna have to sing through your privileged
behind.
Let’s go. Steve said: “If the world doesn’t buy into African systems, mentality and
reputation, it isn’t always their fault”. Let’s start with the awkward fact
that he stole his entire language from black people. Afrikaans was first
written in Arabic by an Iman translating the Koran. Salaam alaikum, Oom Steve.
If you want
more info: http://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2014-08-14-i-will-touch-you-on-your-language-rescuing-afrikaans-from-the-right-wing/
Second, cultural assimilation in our country happened at the
end of a gun, a historical truth Steve and his team just love to ignore.
Secondly Afrikaans boer culture, as it went through SeSotho and SiPedi lands
took on a variety of African cultural features to survive. Damn that must annoy
him. However, what we really need to unpack is the incredible bigotry underlying
the cultural superiority he’s invoking, white supremacist that he is.
Steve’s argument is older even than the language he’s saying
it in. Colonialists arrived here and needed to explain their place in the world
in terms of both their claimed decent Christian values (I know, hilarious),
their interaction with the newly discovered Darwinian science of evolution, and
their desire to exploit these ‘new’ lands to the absolute maximum. They saw
themselves as being at the peak of an evolutionary hierarchy: everyone else was
closer to being an animal. It’s much easier to brutally steal a country if the
people living there have been denigrated to animal status. Black people could
try and climb this hierarchy by adopting western cultural norms – we are just
so generous. We also did kindly stuff like force them to hut pay tax or go to
jail, so they had to involve themselves in our economy, an economy in which
they would never be given access or equal social status. Assimilation to
western norms was not a choice for black people. So saying that we didn’t assimilate
to African norms is both untrue, and severely assholish.
However, the XXX strength racism Steve’s using here is that
he still buys into the black-people-are-closer-to-animals rhetoric. His entire
discourse is one that suggests that black people are less evolved.
For e.g.: ‘If
women, toddlers and grannies complain about your contribution to the rape rate,
it isn’t always their fault’. Firstly, this statement is a bald faced
misrepresentation, as the people who work in gender rights can attest to. Secondly,
he is selling the old idea of black men’s sexual insatiability, which comes
directly from the animal-like narrative. Gender violence is a huge problem in
our country. Using it to serve a narrow right wing agenda is evil.
Regarding the
mythological cultural evolutionary hierarchy, apart from the fact that Africans
were building universities when Steve and my ancestors were still grunting
around in bear skins, western colonial domination and sciences were a result of
ideas they jacked from everywhere else and just being more vicious. If Steve
wants to apply his own logic to himself he will find that stuff like penicillin,
electricity, railways, etc, actually happened while his dudes were busy
voortrekking themselves so they could keep their slaves, so all they invented
really was biltong. Of course, I would never apply Steve’s bigoted logic, so I
completely reject that last sentence. Stop being such a self-hater, Steve.
I hope the
millions of awesome, warm, hard working white Afrikaans people, including the
likes of Max Du Preez, Zelda la Grange, Antjie Krog, Pieter-Dirk Uys, etc, can
take the incredible contributions their culture has brought to the world away
from this schmuck of a bigot.
So, yes, we
have proved, that “Blacks were the architects of apartheid” was supremely
racist. Pick n Pay will realize this eventually, because if Steve had said,
“Jews were the architects of the Holocaust” he would be out on his ass by now.
Finally Steve
said in his excuse of a FB update that “If folk did not want to share a country
with you, why is it always their fault?” We will remind him of these words as
we remove his sponsors from him one by one. No bakkie, no cry, eh, Steve? Go
figure.
