Is the ANC losing ‘clever blacks’?

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Is the ANC losing ‘clever blacks’?

@City_Press 3 March 2013 10:01

A leading academic, Barney Pityana, tells President Jacob Zuma: resign.

An essayist and thinker, Njabulo Ndebele, writes three excoriating essays about the descent into lying and theft by the administration.

And a famed female doctor and philosopher Mamphela Ramphele goes it on her own – starting a platform with a clear mission to attract the black intelligentsia.

Is the ANC losing its stronghold as the home of black intellectuals, or “clever blacks” – as the president put it recently.

The ANC says the notion that it lacks intellectualism and treats criticism from academics and public intellectuals with hostility is unfair and exaggerated.

The party insists the role of intellectuals and academics has grown within the ANC and government.

It also says complex policy decisions are informed by engagements with intellectuals from all walks of life.

But Professor Shadrack Gutto, director of African Renaissance Studies at Unisa, says the ANC often “confuses” critical thought for an “oppositional” stance against the party.

“Such projection (by the ANC of intellectuals) leads to anti-intellectualism. Some politicians, who are drunk with power, think they are omniscient.”

Pityana wrote in the Sunday Independent last week that since President Jacob Zuma’s administration took over the balance within the party had shifted.

“The ANC has become less and less tolerant of divergent views and opinions. My sense is that though ‘thinking ANC members’ may well remain members of the organisation, there is a lot of disillusionment with the leadership.

“I know of some intellectuals who remain committed to the ANC and what it stands for today. There are many others, perhaps the majority, who are indifferent and maintain a neutral stance, and do not wish to get involved,” said Pityana this week.

ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe said many intellectuals, when analysing the ANC and government, were subjective in their commentary.

“When you talk of an alienation of intellectuals by the ANC, what do you mean? Are you talking about commentators or critics who have never been part of the ANC or worked with it? Those are not intelligentsia. Those are commentators expressing their opinions,” Mantashe said.

Mantashe said an audit of the educational qualifications of the ANC national executive committee (NEC) or Cabinet would show a high level of education.

“Because you see an ANC president with no formal education, you say there are no intellectuals in the ANC.”

The party, said Mantashe, developed complex policy because of resolutions that came from discussions within its structures.

“In 2007, we resolved to establish a National Planning Commission. We have done so. It was first a resolution at an ANC conference. When we come to decisions with far-reaching implications, that is intellectual enough for me.”

He said the ANC engaged with public intellectuals and accepted these people’s right to differ from party views.

ANC NEC member and Minister of Home Affairs Naledi Pandor echoed Mantashe’s sentiments.

She said it was “dishonest” to characterise the ANC as somehow separated from an intellectual core.

“The notion of a divide and a lack of contact between the ANC and intellectuals is an exaggerated one,” said Pandor.

“I do think there are areas of difference of opinion, but that is part of academic life about discourse, debate and different ideas. But the ANC should not be seen as separate from or not engaged with the intellectual core in our country.”

The ANC’s intellectual core had grown, Pandor insisted.

“If you trawled through all the committees engaged by ministers in government, you will find a rich intellectual presence in the structures we create.”

- Xolani Mbanjwa and Paddy Harper

Quotable

Our intelligence service is an important ingredient of the fight against crime but it is not up to standard.

Former police commissioner George Fivas, commenting on South Africa’s intelligence and police services

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Comments

Cesc

Not a single brain cell remain in an entire ANC NEC
http://www.facebook.com/siegfried.hannig1 Siegfried Hannig

Name just one intellectual who puts up with the ANC’s criminal destruction of what might have been the international model Tutu and Mandela dreamt of.
- http://twitter.com/louisth16 Sterling Ferguson
  
  If one look at most African governments the intellectuals aren’t welcome in these governments. If one take a look at the people that Obama brought into his administration, one will find that these people are from the best universities in the US. SA is following the Stalin model of keeping the intellectuals out of the government. A lot of jobs in the government are non- political and needs the best minds the country can offer to perform these jobs. In Brazil, Lula didn’t have a college education, but he brought in the best minds in Brazil to help him run the government.
  - MooiNooi
    
    Intelligent leaders are not challenged by other’s with intelligence. In fact they know the smartest thing to do is bring in those who “know better” than themselves.
    
    Zuma is trying to keep his uneducated head above water. He can not afford to bring in intelligent people. He wouldn’t understand them.
    
    Shame it is the uneducated majority that elected this idiot.
    
    Democracy is not for the feeble minded.
    - http://twitter.com/louisth16 Sterling Ferguson
      
      When I was in Brazil, I met many Africans from Angola that had college degrees and said that they would not go back to Angola as long as Santo was in office. This is the pattern all over Africa the educated people are all leaving Africa.
    - http://twitter.com/ZemZONDO ZEBLON ZONDO
      
      Idiot is your mom and dad because they gave birth to a foolest fool ;YOU
    - http://www.facebook.com/kwame.dubois.3 Kwame Du Bois
      
      Thus here we have an opinion offered by a 53 year old woman, who is so unknowledgable that she literally does not know that there is no cure for AIDS. I give up, MooiNooi. I’m pleased to announce you as the dumbest woman I’ve ever met in my entire life.
      - MooiNooi
        
        Well, I was not part of your birth, but trust me my children are quite pleased with the life they have I can only think you are remorseful that you are who you are and stuck only in your country. Now that is a shame you must live with – as you can not get out of your entrapment of being who you were born to be.
      - Guest
        
        I pray the western world STOPS all AIDS AntiVirul Medication to SA. Purge the land of the likes of you. You pride yourself on Black Culture and intelligence? Then live only by that Black Intelligence. Or die because of it. The world will be a better place either way.
      - http://www.facebook.com/kwame.dubois.3 Kwame Du Bois
        
        I have said all I needed to say to you. Period! I fear for your grandchildren and anybody born in your blood-line, considering how stupid, unread, ignorant and racist you are. I wonder how your Black American ‘friends’, must cope with you & if, at all, deep down inside, they consider you a ‘friend’ as well.
      - http://www.facebook.com/kwame.dubois.3 Kwame Du Bois
        
        Did I at any stage say you were ‘part of my birth’? What the hell does that mean anyway: being ‘part of someone’s birth’? Your language doesn’t make any sense – at all. Not only can you not spell, but you can’t even speak proper English (for a 53 year old successful business woman). I know of someone ‘giving birth’ to another, but being ‘part of [their] birth’ I have never heard of in any grammatical sense.
        
        I am not stuck in SA, I choose to be in SA come rain or shine. & I have no shame about that. You clearly are ashamed of yourself, because even to this day you have not identified your race which I know is not white.
        
        Considering how far intelligent I am than you, I would say you are ‘trapped’ in who you were born to be & the racist ideals espoused by that because at age 53, not only do you not know that there’s no cure for AIDS, but you can’t spell & speak bad English.
      - MooiNooi
        
        Kwame – you will have to blame your parents for who you are. As for AIDS cure – you obviously do not read much. And pray the west stops sending Anti-Viral medication to SA. Let the Sangoma’s kill a Rabbit for you.
      - http://www.facebook.com/kwame.dubois.3 Kwame Du Bois
        
        Fortunately, I actually thank them daily for who I am. I feel blessed to be who I am & would have it no other way. Let’s examine the problem with your post, in which you continue to try & sound intelligent &, yet again, fail. MooiNooi, intelligence is not your strong suit. You say the following:
        
        “As for AIDS cure – you obviously do not read much. And pray the west stops sending Anti-Viral medication to SA.”
        
        What’s wrong with that? Again, I repeat, THERE IS YET NO CURE FOR AIDS! let me repeat that, in case you are blind ‘THERE IS YET NO CURE FOR AIDS ANYWHERE, ONLY TREATMENT!’ There is no such thing as an ‘Anti-Viral medication’ for AIDS, it’s called ‘Anti-Retro-Viral Medication’. Which is abbreviated as A.R.V. In which ‘A’ stands for ‘Anti’, ‘R’ stands for ‘Retro’ and ‘V’ stands for viral. ARVs do not cure AIDS. Let me repeat that ‘ARVs DO NOT CURE AIDS’. They simply suppress the virus HIV from multiplying in one’s body & weakening their immune system for a number of years, with the key word being ‘suppress’ not ‘destroy’ because the virus continues to exist in people who take ARVs. But eventually, they become ineffective in suppressing other AIDS related diseases. Hence sometimes, you hear of someone dying of ‘AIDS related Pneumonia or something else’. If you did actually read (and knew how to spell), you’d know this. T
        
        Mooinooi, let’s make an experiment. Please, I beg you. How about you find yourself a lovely Indian gentleman with HIV/AIDS and go and have multiple episodes of unprotected sex with them & take ARVs and see if they cure you. Please do this for me. Your death would be so welcomed and appreciated. There world would be such a better without you in it, your children would be better off without a mother as ignorant & stupid as you are.
      - MooiNooi
        
        I would suggest you don’t breed, but I assume you are black and saying “don’t breed” you interpret as “don’t breath”. And you get paid for doing so.
      - http://www.facebook.com/kwame.dubois.3 Kwame Du Bois
        
        Wow. Again, I urge you to stop making posts on this page because with each & everyone of your posts, you continue to make a complete fool of yourself and embarrass your three children. Let’s examine what’s the problem with the above statement. You say the following, trying to sound intelligent [I am laughing my Black arse off]:
        
        “I would suggest you don’t breed, but I assume you are black and saying “don’t breed” you interpret as “don’t breath”"
        
        What’s wrong with that? A simple grammatical error (an error even a child attending Grade 2 can get right). You do not write ‘[d]on’t breath’. It’s actually spelled ‘breathe’. With an additional ‘e’ at the end. The words ‘breathe’ and ‘breath’ are utterly two different words with different meanings. How is it that a 53 year old retired business woman can’t even spell a simple word? You must have written really bad business reports in your lifetime. And then a person who can’t even spell to save her life or her children’s, accuses others of a dearth of intelligence? You’re a disgrace MooiNooi – to yourself & 3 children!
- http://www.facebook.com/kwame.dubois.3 Kwame Du Bois
  
  Could it be possible that this model is ‘international’ because it included whites in its schema? As I said earlier elsewhere in this page, to whites, blacks are only intelligent or (in this instance) propose ‘international models’ if the decisions that they make have vested white interests in them.
  - http://www.facebook.com/peterjohnjnb Peter-John de Kock
    
    Kwame, that’s a bit of a daft stance to take.
    
    I am so tired of people in this country grouping everyone into singular, modular vessels. Because SOME blacks display certain characteristics, it does not mean that they all do so. The same could be said for whites, Christians, gays, Muslims…..I mean really??????
    
    Now onto your statement. I absolutely agree with you that that is the case in certain cases. But, and I wager some ground here, isn’t it also true that “intelligence” is “intelligence?” In other words – if something is well thought out, researched and has clear ends, let’s say on policy and that policy then works….would it not be the same regardless of whether a black person or otherwise came to that conclusion?
    
    But yes, I do agree in that there is a bias in white middle class South Africa (in SOME cases) where policies that make sense to “us” tends to be recieved with that awful adage of “clearly he/she thinks like a white person” – but let’s not brand everyone with the same iron sir? #justsaying
Corrupt_comrade_JACOB

anc breeds idiots & losers and then employ them as cadres to ruin SA
JuneF

I have just read in the City Press of our minister of police, together with 3 police men removing her 2 year old “grand niece” from her maternal family. She says the child will be better off living with her in Pretoria. This is the action of someone who is drunk with their own power. I cannot begin to imagine the trauma suffered by this child. If she wanted to help the child, there are many more humane and kinder ways of doing this.
http://www.facebook.com/daniel.rossouw.311 Daniel Rossouw

the ANC like the uneducated ones so they can do what they want, this is the reason for collapse of education, keep them ignorant and you can rule
gumpy51

Clever blacks?
Considering the state of Africa today one could arrive at a conclusion on
this.
The ANC has never been a reservoir of ‘ clever ‘ but rather cabal of evil and
corruption. There have been thousands of instances of subversive behaviour
whereby members of the ANC have acted against the interests of the
Country and people.
Now that’s definetly not very clever.
- MooiNooi
  
  In Africa the words clever and black do not belong in the same sentence. Outside of Africa blacks do much better and many deserve to be called “clever”. If you do not believe me, simply look at the state of affairs in the Sub-Saharan African countries. If SA is the best, there is no hope for the continent.
  - http://www.facebook.com/kwame.dubois.3 Kwame Du Bois
    
    What could you possibly mean when you say “[i]n Africa the words clever and black do not belong in the same sentence”?
    
    Clever is a matter of opinion, especially where whites on blacks are concerned. As soon as a politician does something, anything, they regard as the anti-thesis to their interests – he is ‘not clever’ . And by the way, these are people whom if historical inference is to be made, not only have they been the worst thing to happen to most of the Third World, but we can also find that ‘human rights’, ‘clever’, ‘Africa’, & ‘white’, are words which we are incapable of bringing emotional relief in the same sentence. My post & response to you, in no sense is made to advocate for Zuma’s position in public office. Not even in the slightest. I do not like this man.
    
    The sad reality, indeed an irony which laments the absence of critical thinking amongst whites, is that when Thabo Mbeki was in public office, SA whites (or at least their representatives as Judge Edwin Cameron, Zackie Achmat) and the News24 white patriarchs (along with their Black acolytes as Mondli Makhanya, Justice Malala etc.) ran a huge campaign to characterize him as this ‘distant intellectual’.
    
    They had an ‘intellectual’ and they did not want him, because he would not decieve himself in any manner that the race dynamics that continue to characterize SA (as they did amid apartheid) had in no sense dimished. And of course, in this instance ‘distant’ was ever a euphimism, for the shameful reality that ‘we cannot follow your line of thinking nor the depth of reading/learning’.The situation was so bad that at one time, Xolelwa Mngacu, once referred to Mbeki in an article in some newspaper as being ‘[t]oo intellectual’. Mbeki fought touth & nail to ensure Zuma in no sense reaches public office, & his ultimate act would be the humiliation he suffered in Polokwane. Of course, he had to be removed, to ensure the largely superficial racial harmony that SA continues to harbour, even in its highest academic institutions in the land. The sad reality is that a significant deal of intellectuals in Africa (Mngxitama, Chinweizu, Suresh Roberts, Dr Motsoko Pheko, etc.), who daily write sincere articles & documents on the Black African condition are deliberately silenced by the white media in this country, again because their rhetoric is against their interests. To this day, I cannot even find Mngxitama’s book ‘Biko Lives’ in any bookstore.
    
    Some people, as yourself, are the last people to make comments on an alleged dearth of ‘Clever Blacks’ in Africa or anywhere.
    - MooiNooi
      
      We agree that Zuma should not be in office. But having lived a while outside of Africa and witnessed the success of blacks in other countries, I have come to the conclusion that left on their own, in isolation, blacks have not amounted to much. Not now and not in the past 1000 years. Only after coming into contact with those who left Africa and returned, or having left Africa themselves, have blacks been able to reach their fullness. Now why is that? The White-Man? If you think that, then you have never left Africa.
      - Liberal_Soul
        
        MooiNooi
        
        Have you heard of a person by the name of Richard Maponya? He has never been to Europe (or any other white country) as you suggest. Yet he owns a mall and car dealerships just to name a few of his businesses. Most of his businesses were build and run during your forefather’s Golden years of Apartheid. He was never financed by your forefathers. He was not educated by your forefathers. He is a self-taught man who believes in hard work and dedication.
        
        Now this analogy of yours to think that “clever” is word reserved for pink people is just load of bulldust. I have funny feeling that you are one of the residents of Oranje.
      - MooiNooi
        
        Firstly I myself am not white. I grew up during Apartheid but did not let that stop me. I graduated from University, started my own accounting firm and am now retired at the young age of 53, living the States. Mr Maponya’s success proves my point as he engaged with others outside of Africa who build his wealth. Keep in mind the automobile eluded Africa until it was brought in by foreigners. Now what else would you like to share?
      - http://www.facebook.com/kwame.dubois.3 Kwame Du Bois
        
        MooiNooi,
        
        Your post further proves my point – that YOU ARE UNREAD, IGNORANT & THE LAST PERSON TO MAKE COMMENT ON ANY DEARTH OF BLACK INTELLIGENSIA! You say:
        
        “But having lived a while outside of Africa and witnessed the success of
        blacks in other countries, I have come to the conclusion that left on
        their own, in isolation, blacks have not amounted to much. Not now and
        not in the past 1000 years.”
        
        You certainly think very highly of yourself (are you Indian?). Never mind the evident fact that you seem to hold the tenet that your own personal experience of ‘world travel’ (as if that has ever amounted to anything anywhere) would suffice to formulate an opinion (indeed, a solid opinion) on an entire race & the dynamics that inform it. Of course, in this formulation of a ‘solid opinion’, to hell with the Black accomplished scholars/academics who have been in the front-line of all these dynamics & have written documents/books/doctoral-dissertations/conference-papers in analysis of their situation (the problems thereof). But no, all that matters, is your ‘world travels’ which you have carried up ’til the age of 53 (as if being ’53′ years old is supposed to mean something special!). What repugnant racist narcissism!
        
        I recall some 13 years ago, when I was reading an article by a white European fellow criticizing a Book by quite a prominent Black academic who once lived in Trinidad. Apparently, according to him – the book was rubbish & the only blacks in Egypt were behind chains as slaves. It was mostly a book of Egyptology, in which the Academic had repeatedly expressed that the old Egyptian pharaohs who first constructed Egypt were in fact Black people who’d in fact lived in Sudan for a significant number of years. Now, just 2 years back, a ‘miraculous’ thing happened. Whilst white European scholars of Egyptology were digging the remains of a tomb somewhere on the edge of Egypt, about 1000s of feet underground, they found an entire ensemble of beautiful graphite statues of Black Africans in regal clothing representative of the earliest pharaohs known. That entire collection of statues were the descendants & all the children of Shabaka (a black African), who was descendant of Kashta (a Black African) who had ruled egypt during its most successful century – thousands of years even before Cleopatra was born. It was the ancient Greek philosopher, Strabo, who had said of Shabaka “He had raised & advanced Egypt to a level far beyond that of anything Europe had ever seen”. None of these things are taught in schools, and instead are deliberately covered-up by white academic in their quest for racial supremacy (just in the very same way they have managed to cover up the fact that African Independence from European colonialism was one big lie and a sham!). Rome, itself had 2 black emperors, Caracalla & his father before him, who were born & raised in West Africa – yet when one watches films on the Roman empire, none of this filters through.
        
        All that I have to say to you, on the last 1000 years of Blacks, you’ll find below in the post I’m sending to your white BFF gumpy54.
      - MooiNooi
        
        I simply wanted to put to rest your “funny feeling” that I was living in Oranje, and share with you a bit of my story so you might understand I speak from first hand experience both for myself and for those I’ve met who have been fortunately to leave Africa.
      - http://www.facebook.com/kwame.dubois.3 Kwame Du Bois
        
        MooiNooi,
        
        Well, personally Mrs/Ms MooiNooi, considering you earlier views on Blacks & that now you express that you have 3 ‘very successful children’, personally, I can only say I shudder to think of the values you & your husband (or father(s) of your children) must have taught your children to regard & esteem other individuals whom they know nothing about other than the color of their skin.
        
        Personally, I hold no grudges against whites & certainly would never encourage my children to do so. I do not resent white people – even those who’ve proven themselves as racists to me. I regard racism as a mental sickness bred by ignorance, a lack of reading/critical-thinking, and propaganda.& the fact that someone is a successful business person & 53 years old, means absolutely nothing to me. Colonialism throughout the entire world & the subjugation of members of other races as inferior were crimes committed by highly ‘intelligent’ & successful people.
      - MooiNooi
        
        My “opinion” does not apply across all blacks in all countries – only blacks who remain in Africa. In that regard my comment it not racial but political. Simply consider the fact that everything that adds value to the lives of black Africans did not originate in Africa – rather it was brought into Africa by those who returned, those of all colours. Stop using anything and everything brought into Africa by Whites or Asians and see what you have left? Start with your written language, then progress to the this very medium, the Internet, rid yourselves of baseball caps, Michael Jackson shirts, TV, Radio, Automobile, Airplanes…..the list continues. Don’t forget anti-viral medication for AIDS. Then tally up the values given to the world by Sub-Saharan Africa. Then and only then will you see my point. But I suspect it will be too difficult for you to accept.
      - http://www.facebook.com/kwame.dubois.3 Kwame Du Bois
        
        @ MooiNooi.
        
        I do not know anymore. Honestly. I think the better thing at this stage for you to do would be to stop making comments on this page because with each post, post after post, you reveal how ignorant, stupid, unread & intellectually retarded you are. It is an utter disgrace that you are actually the mother of 3 children!
        
        Firstly, before I embark on a response on this post & the ones you made later below, I believe it an act of human decency (indeed, simple courtesy), for you to answer my initial question: of what race are you, because you’ve clearly expressed yourself as non-white earlier. I have a fundamental right to know this, purely in the interest of debate because my detractor (i.e. yourself) appears to use racial identity to condemn people. Furthermore, I will give you a courtesy you’ve extended to me (of disclosing your age). I am 23 years old, unmarried, Black African, with a Bachelor’s degree in Engineering & have no children. Another thing that I do pride myself on, is that I regurlarly read and I read anything from anywhere that not only has to do with Black people, but that I can get my hands on.
        
        Now to your ignorant post.You say the following:
        
        “And don’t forget anti-viral medication for AIDS. AIDS may have started in Sub-Saharan Africa, but the cure came from outside. Next tally up the values given to the world by Sub-Saharan Africa. Compare the list and ponder. Excuses are not allowed”
        
        Firstly, your lack of reading & ignorance (shamefully, for a mother of 3 children & 53 years of age with ‘world travel’) has meant that you do not know that there is yet no cure for AIDS (how disgraceful!), and that the first known (officially) & recorded AIDS outbreak in the world, was not in Sub-Saharan Africa, but in Manhanttan, America, specificallty in 1979 during a treatment period of gay patients with hepatitis B. The interesting fact, as revealed elsewhere by an American doctor, namely one Dr Alan Cantwell, in his book The Secret AIDS Genocide Plot, is that AIDS (subsequently blamed on Black Africans & African apes by its racist ‘discoverer’ Dr Gallo), broke out in Africa only 4 years later (4 YEARS LATER!) following a campaign by the WHO (World Health Organisation) which was administering the very same ‘anti-viral vaccination’ you seem to laud on Black African patients with small pox. Such was the effect of vaccination which you seem to be so proud of. It was the brilliant American intellectual & novelist, Susan Sontag, in her timeless work ‘AIDS & Its Metaphors’, who expressed that it did not in the slightest suprise her that at some point, American politicians would seek to blame Africans for the introduction of AIDS in the international society. I have followed intently, the research & books of Dr Allan Cantwell, who expressed in one of his books that he had earlier also believed that AIDS originated from Africa until a curious well-established American Dr, a contemporary of his, who was quite vocal in the American origin of AIDS as a deliberate genocidal program against homosexuals in America. Cantwell, expressed that he finally managed to corner this particular doctor at a WHO AIDS conference in America (I keep forgetting this Dr.’s name, but for those interested I’m certain they can find an elaboration of this episode in the introduction of The Secret AIDS Genocide Plot). When Cantwell, asked him about the AIDS relation to Africa, the doctor said ‘That’s the simplest question anyone can ask. They [The American governemnt] put it there’. Dr Cantwell, a homosexual himself, expressed that following that brief encounter, he buried himself for 2 years conducting his own research & absolutely no part of Gallo’s African Origin of AIDS made sense.He has since published close to 8 books & numerous articles in the internet on his research. & at one time, was literally chased out of a vicinity the WHO was holding a conference at because of his research papers. Behind the history of the origin of AIDS, is racism, insensibility & a going against the very ethics that define the Western profession of ‘Science’ (i,e. lies). Dr Robert Gallo in the mid 80s, once interviewed by Playboy (note: a pornographic magazine), expressed that American whites had nothing to fear from AIDS, it was a disease that affected White American homosexuals & American Blacks & they [The White American homosexuals] probably got it from their fornication with Africans & the African’s overly-sexual nature (overly sexual, yet not a single empire of the porn industry as Hustler or Playboy) .Oddly, enough, African cultures are extremely conservative on matters of sex & sexuality to the extreme that some, as the Zulus you hate, hold annual traditional ceremonies to celebrate the diligance of women who have preserved their virginity & are not married.
        
        You continued in your ignorant post:
        
        “In that regard my comment it[sic] not racial but political. It is indeed sad to me that the only time I see racism is when I visit my home in SA. I do not see racism on that scale elsewhere in the world. And yes racism goes both ways. But lest you think me racists, let me simply speak about the indigenous people of Sub-Saharan Africa without mention of colour.”
        
        Firstly, how do you regard your earlier comment that Sub-Saharan Africans are a ‘worthless piece of human existance’? I find your complaints abouts being ‘sad’ at the sight of racism as pretentious at best (for an old fart!)! For, indeed, what human life is not of worth? You continue to claim (without proof – as indeed is the nature with ignorant people) that racism does not exist on the scale it does in SA anywhere else in the world. America remains, to this day, a largely racist society & your lack of observation of this, betrays not merely your ignorance but dearth of understanding of racism. Race politics continue to define America’s internal fabric, as was the senseless murder of the boy Trayvon Martin & the state of Texas with its death-row system & Black American males. Again, you are ignorant & unread. If you’d bothered to read books on the nature of American racism by accomplished Black scholars from there (Toni Morrison,Alice Walker, Frank Wilderson |||, Cornel West, Angela Davis etc.), you would know this. Stop believing that just because you are 53 years old, with 3 succesful kids you know all there is to know in this world!
        
        Now let us engage with additional ignorance in your post:
        
        ‘Consider the fact that nearly everything that adds value to the lives of Sub-Saharan Africans today did not originate in Sub-Saharan Africa – rather it was brought into Africa by those who returned including those whose ancestors were freed from the ignorance that traps those who remain Yet many in Sub-Saharan Africa are calling for the expulsion of everything that is not indigenous to the area. So I challenge you. Stop using anything brought into your country and see what you have left? Stop using a written language, the Internet, stop using your computer. Throw away your cell phone, rid yourselves of TV, Radio, automobile, airplanes, anything made with concrete (that was a Roman invention). Remove your glasses (including sunglasses), and all the western fashion that I’m certain your children enjoy.’
        
        There is a false prevailing notion amongst people steeped in Westernization & the attributes/individualist-life thereof (which they like terming ‘success’, one wonders in what exactly), that life outside of that is not merely unliveable but impossible. There was was an article on City Press titled ‘The True Rainbow Nation’ which very briefly (sadly) discussed the present trends of whites in SA, who move from the ‘cellphones, the internet, the computer, the sunglasses’ (which you mention) to join blacks in the rural areas who in fact live such life-styles. The local minister of that area expressed that there is indeed a rising pattern amongst SA whites to relinquish (all the ‘cellphones, computers etc’) & settle in huts/roundavels & assemble into village life throughout all of SA. You can find this article here ‘http://www.citypress.co.za/news/the-true-rainbow-nation/’ .In one passage, the white lady – who is said to live in a hut with with such sparse furnishings that they do not even use electricity, save cook from a fire outside, & wash dishes at the nearby riverbed, expressed that she moved there (amongst black villagers, the ‘warmest & kind people she had ever met’) with her husband because she finally got tired of the materialism, the mistrust bred in white SA surbabs where neighbours never even greet each other because of racial mistrust. & This was a white woman & her husband, whom are happy to refer to themselves as ‘Sub-Saharan Tribal Africans’.
        
        In tha article, I expressed the following:
        
        “It’s very pleasing to read articles like this…I think that one of the greatest failures of Westernization has been that it inevitably leads to the est. of central areas of national capital control – i.e. CBDs, cities – & its incessantly built on a schema that is predominantly capitalist in nature [and I am fast beginning to think, it cannot survive without one]. This has meant that it inherently relies on the existence of orders/hierarchies & (more
        importantly) the underdog: someone less paid, someone suffering more financially. The engineer needs an artisan (& by default someone whom the national education system has specifically/systematically prepared for a position that will ensure that they are less paid than others). We seriously need to examine the systems of living we are daily made to believe are the solution to our sufferings….”
      - http://twitter.com/louisth16 Sterling Ferguson
        
        England was nothing until the Romans came and brought them out of their isolation. The same can be said about all of Europe, the Greeks were the ones to bring Europe out of its isolation. The Greeks was near the middle East where the early development began so they were able to copy from them. You must remember that it took Europe over four hundred years to develop after the fall of the Roman Empire. As a matter of facts, Europe decended into chaos and there were a lot of wars.
        
        However, after having said that, I know what you are saying that African culture is what keeping them backward. Many African writer are saying the same thing that you are saying. Keith Richburg a black Washington Post reporter, that spent five years in Africa, talks about the African culture in his book. He claims that he was happy that a unnamed ancestor of his was put on the slave ship. He was criticized in the US for writing this book because it was justifying slavery.
      - MooiNooi
        
        Sterling – I ask the questions: Why didn’t Africans discover the Americas? Why didn’t Africans have a written language? Why does someone today need to create Zulu ords to describe concepts other cultures were already engaged with centuries before? Ultimately the question is what lasting value to humanity has come out of Sub-Saharan Africa? The only one that comes to mind is vaccination. Otherwise accomplishments of humanity as a whole including those who are Black, has come from outside of Africa. As for the comment of Keith Richburg, I have said the same to many of my African-American friends. They are as successful a mix as any race. I tell them in spite of evils of Slavery, their opportunity is so much more than had they remained in Africa.
      - http://www.facebook.com/kwame.dubois.3 Kwame Du Bois
        
        @ MooiNooi,
        
        Let me continue with your ignorance again:
        
        “Why didn’t Sub-Saharan Africans discover the Americas?”
        
        Dah. Are you stupid or something? Well, I believe they were not looking for lands to colonise or a particular race to humiliate & subjugate & murder through mass chicken pox infection as those ‘who discover[ed] the Americas’ did to the American Indians. when they removed them from their lands.
        
        Again, you continued with ignorance & further prove me right that you are unread:
        
        “Why didn’t Sub-Saharan Africans have a written language?”
        
        You idiotic old woman! Sub Saharan Africa was not homogenous in its experience of literatures (written or oral). Ethiopia well falls under Sub Saharan Africa, and they’ve had written literatures pre-dating the initial existance of those in Europe. The Book of Enoch, (which constitutes part of the Ethiopian Black African Christian Bible) was itself discovered in Ethiopia – Enoch was Noah’s great great grand father if you do not know (considering how ignorant you are). There were, in fact written languages in Sub Saharan Africa, including Hausa & Swahili in West & East Africa, some having existance long before the pagans of Europe ever encountered written literatures. This history of Sub Saharan Africa was so nicely summed up in a passage in one of my favourite books, Toward The Decolonisation of Africa, by Chinweizu et. al. Chinweizu expressed the following in their book:
        
        “There are both oral and written anticidents to the African novel, and they are comparable and in no way inferior to the European novel. It should be borne in mind (a) that written literature has a long tradition in parts of Africa; (b) that Africa was not totally unliterate when Europeans arrived there; and (c )that some parts of Africa had written literatures long before many parts of Western Europe. Long before Caesar led Roman legions to bring civilisation to barbarian Gaul, to Celtic Britain, and to the Druidic German tribes of Vercingetorix in the 1st century B.C., the African Nile Valley civilisations of Pharoahnic Egypt, Nubia, Kush, Meroe and Ethiopia had literate cultures – in territories where Sudan, Ethiopia & Egypt are today located. And long before [that] – England, France, Germany and all of non-Mediterranean Europe – were taught the literary arts, these same literate African cultures of the Nile Valley had taught writting to the Mediterranean cultures of Crete, Greece, and Judea, had given them their religions and gods, and schooled them in mathematics, astronomy, architecture and philosophy, and in the other arts and sciences. (By the way, for anyone unware of and startled by these facts, please read, among other works, Book Two of The Persian Wars by Herodotus, a Greek historian who visited Egypt in the 5th century, and who had no reason to flatter or disparage blacks and their achievements; and read the Old Testament Judaeic accounts of the arrival, 400-year sojourn, and exodus of the Israelites from ancient Egypt. Other works which the reader ought to consult are Cheik Anta Diop’s The African Origin of Civilisation; the appendix, pp. 199 – 208, to Diop’s The Cultural unity of Black Africa; Stolen Legacy, by George M. James; and The Destruction of Black Civilisation, by Chancellor Williams. There are [also] precolonial African extended narratives written in Amharic, Hausa and Swahili, among others’.
        
        You continued in you lame ignorance:
        
        “Why does someone today need to create Zulu words to describe concepts other cultures have engaged with for centuries?”
        
        Wow, your stupidity knows no limit old woman! SA has only been “liberated” (or has been under pseudo-liberation) for 19 years, and the bulk of what constituted the more than 100 years of colonial rule hardly count as years during which anything substantive in an institutional sense can be done. Whenever civilisations meet, (and this is not a concept unique to African experience as I’ll indicate below), there’s ever a transference of terminology & language (what you call ‘creat[ing] Zulu words to describe concepts other cultures have engaged with for centuries’) from one culture to another to explain concepts the other does not have (or rather put more appropriately, has had no need for for centuries). And you can take a simple example with the English language used today. English words,( even if you visit the Oxford Dictionary & take the diligent excercise to research the origin of each word) are not originally from the English civilisation itself. A bulk of the words in that language belong to the original Latin of the Roman Empire (a dead and dying language), which as Ferguson so brilliantly elaborated above had itself colonised much of Europe. Latin to the lands of the English in the past, was the equivalent of what the English language is to Africans today – used for commercial purposes & industrial communication. When the English began to revive their language as a form of cultural resistance from Rome through their literatures etc., they similarly could not help but change or (how do you say) “create [English] words to descrive concepts [Roman] culture [had] enaged with for centuries”. There is absolutely nothing shameful or novel in this. This is the characteristic pattern of human nature, for an old woman of 53 years of age who travelled the world, one would be mistaken if he’d hoped you would at least know this much (you & your three children!). Similarly, SA English itself has borowed terminology from Native tribes (I can only think of Sesotho & Zulu now) & these included in the English dictionary & these terms are completely legal (in a grammatical sense) to use in any serious academic document. Words like ‘Lekgotla or lekhotla or Imbizo or Ubuntu’.
        
        You continued:
        
        “Ultimately the question is what lasting value to humanity has come out of Sub-Saharan Africa?”
        
        Well. A great deal of value has come from Australia – but of course, we cannot in good sense attribute that to the aborigines there, because we all know that they were given the same lovely dose of genocidal medicine Europe administered to the American Indians. Or the great bulk of Arabia & Judaic lands – they’ve certainly contributed lovely religious systems of dogma that have rendered communities dangerous because at any moment a bomb might go off in the name of Allah. Or Europe/America, with the legacy of racialism, slavery mannufacturing AIDS, the nuclear bomb. Or India, with its religious doctrines that encourage such a remarkable levels of demi-god pretensions, egos, self-importance & narcissim, & such superficial intangiable concepts of ‘inner peace’ or ‘chakra’, yet it is India (as was reported on a 3rd degree documentary done on India) that houses the biggest child prostitution ring in the world with Indian men paying over R2m to bed 2 year old babies. There is absolutely everything that is right and wrong with all of humanity. For a person of 53 years of age & three children, one had hoped that old age would at least lent you that much wisdom.
        
        You continued:
        
        “As for the comment of Keith Richburg, I have said the same to many of my African-American friends. They are as successful a group as any race. I tell them in spite of evils of slavery, their opportunity as descendents of slaves is so much more enriching than had they remained in Africa. I do not believe this justifies slavery. It simply states fact.”
        
        I can only say I feel sorry for your African American ‘friends’. People who consult you for information (considering the level of ignorance you’ve displayed on this page) on anything are in for a hard haul & a bad day. Imagine, a Black person consulting a racist as yourself on an opinion on Blacks. That’s a bad cock-tail right there. Not only would you feed them the misinformation on the origins of ‘AIDS’, but you would continue to tell lies based on being ’53 years of age and rearing 3 succesful children’. Misinformation. Misinformation. How repulsive.
      - MooiNooi
        
        Your argument holds no weight as other cultures did everything I asked and more and brought it back to you.
      - http://www.facebook.com/kwame.dubois.3 Kwame Du Bois
        
        The only elephant I can identify in this room, is that you have failed – dismally – to answer each & everyone of my questions to you. Moreover, your continued failure to identify yourself racially suggests to me that there is something that your are ashamed of (racially) and fearful that I will use in writing a response to you. I think that, for a 53 year old woman (I suspect Indian), you are nothing more than a coward – & I say this as a 23 year old African young man who has engaged with every question you’ve asked me & I had the courtesy & decency to respond with facts. Something you’ve identified yourself as incapable of. So much for the education that made you a successful business woman.
      - http://twitter.com/louisth16 Sterling Ferguson
        
        What was actually said that the treatment of AIDS wasn’t developed in Africa. Why is the person race is important and not the person culture? This person could be biracial and don’t fit your stereo type.
      - http://www.facebook.com/kwame.dubois.3 Kwame Du Bois
        
        No, she said Cure. Her explicit words, which she continued above, was that a ‘cure’ for AIDS is available’. And that I do not read. You can go read her comments above if you want to. This person(MooiNooi, at age 53) literally thinks ARVs cure AIDS. Cure not treat! How dangerous! Let me quote for you her posts to me:
        
        “I would suggest you don’t breed, but I assume you are black and saying “don’t breed” you interpret as “don’t breath”. And you get paid for doing so…[a]s for AIDS cure – you obviously do not read much. And pray the west stops sending Anti-Viral medication to SA…As for AIDS – I pray no more aid to SA for AIDS. Let you all die from your sickness and ignorance. Cure? Do you not read?”
        
        She is detracting me based on my racial identity and to this moment, she has completely failed to identify herself. MooiNooi is essentially a racist, and the most frightening thing is that she is unaware of that, expressing her affection for African Americans (calling them ‘my African American friends’) as if that makes her immune from the charge of racism. It is unacceptable. I have a fundamental right, purely based on the ethics of debate, to know hers because she keeps invoking mine as if it was a matter of profound relevance – so we can see how well she fares if the questions she keeps asking me (about Africans) are inverted & asked her. Even culture is not sufficient to defame another – it is a person’s character that matters most.
      - MooiNooi
        
        Honestly I lost interest in the conversation. You do not have the intelligence nor the experience to discuss the issues. You are what you are. Nothing can change that but you. And so far, you demonstrate nothing of interest to me. Meanwhile I will travel abroad while you are stuck in SA.
      - MooiNooi
        
        Actually I lost interest in the conversation once I realized what I was communicating with.
      - http://twitter.com/louisth16 Sterling Ferguson
        
        Speaking of Ethiopia, over 85%of the rain for the Nile river come from this country and Ethiopia is building dams to control the flow of the rivers. Most of the countries are going to be at risk because of their dependence on this river.
      - http://twitter.com/louisth16 Sterling Ferguson
        
        When I first read Keith Richburg’s book “Out of America” I was angry as hell. I said how could a black American write a book like this. He says in his book that he stood on the bridge and watch bodies for hours flow down the river in Rwanda. The bodies of young babies with their heads cut off, old people that had been shot or hacked to death. He said to himself that if his ancestors hadn’t made it out of Africa, he could have been one of them. He didn’t realize that being black was not an advantage in black Africa, but a disadvantage.
        
        The major problem with Africa is the climate, it rains too much or it doesn’t rain enough. For years the Africans would follow the rain and this is why no towns were ever built in black Africa. In almost all of Africa the famine is right around the corner and this is place where millions of people starve to death every year. However, instead of focusing on producing food most of the governments are focusing on exploiting their natural resources.
      - MooiNooi
        
        I’ll leave this – a Black speaking of his own – as my final word. There is nothing the indigenous people of Africa can do to excuse their lack of initiative as members of the human race.
      - http://www.facebook.com/kwame.dubois.3 Kwame Du Bois
        
        @ Ferguson.
        
        As it actually happens, I personally read Richburg’s book/memoir during his time with the Washingtong Post (I’m not sure if he’s still employed by this paper). I believe the name of the book was Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa. & If memory serves me correctly, Richburg wrote that book following an expedition he’d done with some staff members of the Washington Post, & he’d travelled from North to South Africa reporting for the Washington Post.
        
        Firstly, let me say the following: Keith Richburg is a classic case of an American equivalent of the South African Justice Malalas & Mondli Makhanyas of SA, in particular insofar as the white owned media is concerned. It was under the editorship of Mondli Makhanya that a racist & insulting opinion piece by a SA based British Journalist that sparked national outrage was published on a local SA newspaper, and Makhanya was asked by Jordan Pallo, who was the then cultural minister to fire Bullard – he never did so of his own accord. Where is Makhanya? The last time I checked, he was employed in a position far higher than the one he held in SA’s Sunday Times. Such are the fruits of their labour in service to white racist propaganda. And you are misleading people by alledging that Richburg has a problem with Africans only, Richburg has a problem with Africans and African Americans resident in America themselves. I believe in the closing chapter of that book, he even expressed elsewhere that he “wouldn’t even set foot there [in their ghettos in harlem etc.]“. He expressed, even in the same chapter, that American Blacks humiliate ‘Advanced Blacks’ (Of course, he labels himself as ‘Advanced’) who have to work with whites by commiting crimes & gang bangs in America’s poorest Black neighbourhoods. Keith Richburg is such a pathetic excuse for a Black Man! If I had any doubts about him as a person reading his memoir, they were ultimately revealed in the last chapter, where he continued to explain that when he is at the beach, he feels hurt & sad inside when whites mock him that his hair does not blow in the wind as theirs (WHO THE BLOODY HELL CARES! THEY HAVE FLAT ARSES & THEIR SKIN IS PRONE TO BEING SUN-BURNT AT THE BEACH HENCE THE MOUNTAINS OF SCREAM CREAMS & SUNBLOCKS OF WHICH A BLACK PERSON HAS NO NEED FOR). He continued also in the same chapter that when he is at an ATM queue with whites, he regularly has to reveal his ATM Bank cards & his wallet and flash them in front of whites so they will know he is not there to rob them! HOW RIDICULOUS & PATHETIC! THE CONSISTENT NEED & SLAVE MENTALITY TO SEEK WHITE APPROVAL & VALIDATION FOR ONE’S OWN EXISTANCE! Where is Richburg now, sir? He not only won an award for such a ridiculous book (as have so many Blacks before him whose acts have paid homage to white racist notions of Africa), but Richburg no longer stays in America, the last I did a check on this weird character – some years ago – he was living in Japan (expressing that he at no stage intends to move back to America – because of his resentment of Blacks even there). But why would a Black person resent even his own? Whites are increasingly naive in their belief that racism has absolutely no psychological effect on Blacks, that it had absolutely none on the African slaves they hauled there to America. Richburg displays classic symptoms of an inferiority complex bred by the racist nation he grew up in as a young man. And in fact, in the very last chapter of his book, he narrates an incident (that made me not to hate him, but pity him for what he allowed white American racism to do to him) wherein he had accompanied a white friend to Bank. The were both 16 years of age, i think, and a high school female teacher of theirs had sent them to deposit a collection the entire class had been making and saving for a trip at the local bank. When Richburg arrived in the bank, he was wearing sunglasses and a hood(I think), & earlier that morning, the same bank had been robbed by a Black male wearing the same attire with glasses. Whilst they were waiting in the queque, all of a sudden, he expressed that he heard noises & saw SWAT Teams pulling out sniper rifles from neighbouring buildings with their lasor pointers aim straight at him & his person, and they announced ‘You are surrounded, surrender’. And he was hauled out of that Bank like a common criminal, being pulled by his clothes – I felt sorry for such a young man to be in the middle of that kind violent racial profiling that America is notorious for. Personally, I believe Richburg’s resent of American blacks in poor ghettos in America & those in Africa, began that day with the trauma experienced there. And by the way, Langston Hughes father suffered from the same inferiority complex when he abondoned his family to go reside in America because he hated ‘American Blacks’ (a black person hating blacks). How naive are whites really on the effects of racism.
        
        & this instance (of Richburg’s complete bias throughout his book) was displayed in his visit, not merely in SA but even in Zimbabwe, amid which he treats an entire chapter during his stary there, and at that time, Mugabe, through the guerilla warfare tactics later emulated by the SA armed Struggle, had just managed to win a substantial portion of that country to get the white Rhodesians to relinquish their hold over that state. It is important to note that, in that chapter (a pattern consistant throughout all of his works), in no part does he even bother to interview the Blacks whom white rule had ruined their lives. He interviews a deeply racist Zimbabwean official, in one passage who insults Blacks to the extent of even insulting him – and Richburg, for the Uncle Tom that he is – swallows all of this with chagrin. Whilst complaining about how traumatized he was during the Rwandan genocide, he further goes in SA during a car ride with someone, to express himself that why don’t they unleash an all out genocidal war on whites in SA themselves.
        
        I find it dismissable that you’d make reference to someone like Keith Richburg (of all people, the biggest Uncle Tom to have lived in America, worse even than Jean Toomer.). He is in love with the Japanese & Chinese now, & if I recall correctly, intends to say there in Asia til he dies. Richburg was a fraud.
        
        Now on your unfounded allegation of the so-called ‘back-ward nature’ of African culture. What exactly do you mean by this?Can they possibly be anymore backward than the Christian tenets held by racist American Christian sects as Warren Jeffs’ FLD sect? Or even the Western Christian tenet in the belief of an ‘immaculate birth or conception’, that is celebrated annually on the 25th of December. How is that not ‘backward’? Whenever Westerners use terminology like backwardness, I really think they need to asses themselves firstly.
      - http://twitter.com/louisth16 Sterling Ferguson
        
        Richburg went to Kenya to replace a white American and during that time the problems broke out in the Horns of Africa and later Rwanda. He went to W Africa to cover the civil war in Liberia and witness the suffering of the people there. If you read Richburg’s book, what you are saying that he didn’t tell the truth about standing on the bridge watching all of people hacked to death floating down the river? Maybe, you are saying a black reporter shouldn’t tell the truth about blacks. He talks about when he was inLiberia, Taylor had these children to rub sap from the trees on their bodies so, the bullets would bounce off of them. He told how the African leaders would staged these mass killing to keep their hold on the political power in the these countries in Africa. He talks about the corruption by the African leaders and one leader told him how he plans to steal the foreign aid given to him.
        Therefore, when a black reporter writes about blacks, he is a racists for the white media.
      - http://www.facebook.com/kwame.dubois.3 Kwame Du Bois
        
        Sterling,
        
        I should firstly apologise for one thing to you, that is mistaking you to be a person of reason, & moderate intelligence. Not merely in this comment, but the later one you made below (concerning ‘rain’) is indicative of how much misinformation is doing the rounds out there about Africa, and how people (unquestioningly) lap it up. Firstly, let me engage with the remark you made about African migrations, ‘rains’ and ‘towns’ below, to your friend, the neanderthal: MooiNooi . You said the following:
        
        “The major problem with Africa is the climate, it rains too much or it doesn’t rain enough. For years the Africans would follow the rain and this is why no towns were ever built in black Africa. In almost all of Africa the famine is right around the corner and this is place where millions of people starve to death every year.”
        
        I actually laughed out loud when I read this, and a friend had to come & see what I was laughing at. You must have a profoundly simpleton & plebian/pedestrian background/understanding, not merely on Africans, but I think generic human nature. ‘For years the Africans would follow the rain & this is why no towns were ever built in black Africa’ you say [laugh]. A simple question to you Sterling: where on earth have you ever heard of people migrating from country to country following seasonal showers? This is literally unheard of (anywhere!). Even the swallow bird flees the impending rains, because no work can be done during their fall. In any case, how on earth would they do such a thing: sniff the air & follow the direction where the scent of rain is profound? Never mind the fact that rains are seasonal:what? they follow them for this one season & when they find them, settle & erect their living quaters in muddy surroundings (with lightning & extreme showers)? How do they live & carry out their farming & (the key word) ‘WAIT’ for their crop to bear fruit? Does any of this make sense to you? Sterling, where did you get this information? I urge you, seeing as how you can be a person of reason when you opt to, to stop making conclusions about things you’ve never thoroughly researched yourself: and by research, I mean reading things written directly by the source, not a secondary one as dubious Western Academics. Let me explain to you the reasons for the ancient migrations of Africans.
        
        I myself hail from the Sesotho tribe of Southern Africa. A largely pastoral tribe. Our people do not originally come from South Africa (they settled here thousands & thousands of years ago), & even the traditional mythology of their origins speaks of places I think unheard of in Western literature. One of the earliest mornachs of that tribe was King Mohlomi’s father (& this is something even confirmed in Western textbooks that litter SA high schools), Mohlomi’s father spent the better part of several years migrating the Sesotho people to the Southern tip of Africa, & his reasons for doing so had absolutely nothing to do with following ‘rains’, but because he wanted to find an area that had easy & ideal military strategic defence position & had continuous supply, not merely of water, but fertile land that was not easily flooded amid the rainy seasons. That is how the Sesotho people, today residing in The Kingdom of Basotholand, a land-locked country inside South Africa, came to reside there. It is a deeply beautiful mountainious area & with some of the loveliest rivers & seasonal snows, that was so easily defensible that when the British tried to invade it, they failed & lost numerous wars because it had many areas from which it was inaccesible. & I know for a fact, that that was the very same reason the Zulus of Sourthern Africa, specifically selected the eastern shores of South Africa & the Xhosas the Western. The English lost numerous wars also trying to invade Xhosaland because the territory was defensible from numerious facets.Such are the reasons for the migrations of African peoples, and upon finding such areas they settled to build villages (not towns – a Western concept, that is no better or worse).
        
        Africa has never had a climatic problem of too little or too much rain. In the entire section of Southern Africa, there has only been one period of drought & that was thousands & thousands of years ago, when the first white missionaries arrived in Marian Hill – A monastary ran by Christian Monks led by the Abbot Francis Pfanner (from Europe). Unlike the white settlers who were the first to arrive in SA with their colonial hostility, Pfanner was a deeply kind & loving Christian monk who opposed the intermingingly of racism with Christianity & that monastery was finaly broken off from the its main branch in Rome for this. Those monks (who never spoke a single word but remained mum) ever intermingled with the natives, & as local legend has it, during the drought period, the monks were called by the local Zulu chief to pray for them in their village. Whilst they were in a circle humming a Gregorian chant, with the spell of 10 min, the were dark clouds all over SA & rain that lasted for over 2 weeks. That was the last climatic issue that Southern Africa has ever had. And even Ethiopia had 1 drought in the 1990s, & that was it. I honestly don’t know where you get your information.
        
        You continued:
        
        “Maybe, you are saying a black reporter shouldn’t tell the truth about blacks[...]Therefore, when a black reporter writes about blacks, he is a racists[sic] for the white media.”
        
        I think when you say ‘the truth about blacks’, you mean ‘[m]aybe, you are saying a black reporter shouldn’t [make truthful reports on the present political condition as observed whilst visiting an area residing] Blacks”. Do you see how my statement sounds less like Blacks have this deep dark Satanic element that just simply needs to be spoken about (‘shouldn’t tell the truth about blacks’). I believe how one phrases a sentence, makes all the difference. Again, you misunderstand me ; my labeling of Richburg as a racist & an Uncle Tom (of which I do believe he is), has absolutely nothing to do with his reports, and I will explain further below. But firstly, Sterling, let’s consider this: What are the normal things that happen during a war? How would what Taylor did or the Rwandan condition, have been any different – in the slightest – to what say Hitler put the Jews through with the ovens & medical experiments or Europeans put Africans through with Slavery & pregnant Africa women being cast overboard because a ship was too overloaded . Human ghastly violence during a time of war is endemic & surreal. There is nothing wholly uniquely African in this. I believe it is only a racist personna that sees such a thing, and immediately, without peer reflection of its own faults & history, presume to suppose that it’s worst assumptions about another have been confirmed. I do not know if you know the story of how Toni Morrison came to write Beloved. She expressed during an interview that she had been reading a journal owned a portuegese sailor (i believe), who had been involved in the slave trade (because these men normally kept journals of their travels throughout the world). At one point, they had raided a village in Africa (I can’t recall where), they literally massacred that entire community & hauled some of slaves unto their ship. When it was time to live, the ship was unable to move in the river, because the entire meandering river was literally saturated – from top to bottom – with the bodies of children & women & men that they had to get off ship & swim in tha solid river & remove bodies. This is the violence of which all men are capable of – nothing uniquely Taylor or Rwanda. For every episode you bring forth to me of something horrible you say about Africa, I can come up with just the same about Europeans & their descendants.
        
        Now on Richburg’s racism.
        
        The condition of Richburg to speak insultingly about his own (not merely Africans, but including African Americans) has a precedent in slave literatures, esp. those of Arabia – and Richburg exhibits classic symptoms of the inferiority complexes that plagued some of the greatest Black poets who lived in the Arab lands as slaves of the marauding gangs of Muhammed & his Allah. In his book, Richburg cries that his hair is wholly, is paranoid about how conspicuous is his Blackness when amongst whites at an ATM queue. Further pleads with whites to accept African Americans because they are not truly African. Pleads for the case of what he terms ‘Advanced Blacks’, as opposed to those dying in the squalor of American ghettos whom he explains embarres him when commiting crimes & being involved in gang bangs . As I explained above, Langston Hughes’ father suffered from the same sensibility & during his life, stemming from his resentment of American Blacks, he left the US to go and reside in Mexico (in the same way now that Richburg resides in Japan, & sometimes boasts in articles in the Washington Post about how Africans finally have cellphones as if an African American invented a cellphone). Now let me show you the effects of white racism and how internalised this contempt can become for blacks, such that they not only hate their own people, but resent the conscipicuousness of their Blackness amongst whites. Arabs, through the principles emboddied in Islam, were & continue to be largely racist in nature. Of the ancient Nubian poets who resided in Arabia, during the thriving of the Islamic empire, the following is reported by AI-Baqir al-Afif Mukhtar ( a brilliant Nubian scholar from Sudan) – as you’ll notice, some of this behaviour is classic Richburg:
        
        “An example of internalizing contempt is Nasib al-Akbar, another poet of Nublan origins. His attitude was similar to that,of Uncle Tom in western culture. He chose not to confront the society and to conform to its prejudices. When his own son proposed to a lady from the family of his former owners, who were willing to accept him, Nasib came and ordered some of his black slaves to drag his son [by] his legs and to beat him hard. The slaves beat up his son. Then Nasib saw a young man of nobility and said to the lady’s uncle “marry your brother’s daughter to this man, and I will pay the dowry”.[109] Thus he did not find his own son fit to marry a woman of nobility, and beat him in order to know his place. Another story reported that the Unimayyads Caliph, ‘Abdel Malik ibn Murwan asked Nasib to Join his drinking group, but the poet apologized that he was too low to deserve such an honor. He said to the caliph:
        
        Oh Amir al-Muminin (commander of the faithful) my skin is black, my frame is deformed, and my face is ugly and I am not fit to be in this position (of being the Caliph’s drinking partner). [110]
        
        Another story reported that he resorted to invisibility. He wanted to conceal his blackness from his audience, when he was asked to read his poetry to some women, in order not to injure their feelings. He said: “Let me perform behind a veil. Why should they see me? My skin is black and my hair is white. Let them listen to me behind a veil.”‘ Antra, the heroic poet, gives us another example of internalizing contempt. He seemed to resent his Ethiopian mother, Zabiba, as the one who was responsible for his blackness.”
        
        This is just classic Richburg for me. An internalised contempt, such that one even cries that his hair is wooly & doesn’t blow in the wind. His obsessed with how conspicuous his Blackness is when amongst whites. Must he not report on what he sees? Yes, he must report on it. But the question I ask is, imagine looking at life through the lenses of such a disturbed person – which, by the way – is what finally reaffirmed the doubts I had reading his memoir. I am not against any criticism offered to Africans from Blacks residing in America – a simple question I have, is from what position is this criticism stemming from. Let me give you an example. In american, you have had & (bless the powers that be) continue to have a brilliant African American scholar by the name of Frank Wilderson |||. Wilderson, unlike Richburg, was actually in South Africa during the colonial period for a significant number of many years & he actually fought in the front line & lived in the squalor that was the townships of SOWETO that was constructed by the Apartheid government, and he worked for several years as a lecturer in politics at a local community college then whilst doing private struggle work. Originally he hailed from & was educated in America. At one point even, Mandela once refered to Wilderson ||| as a fundamental danger to South African harmony & security, and that he needed to be removed from SA. Following the 1994 democratic elections, Wilderson taught at WITS university for a significant number of years before finally leaving to return to America, but he still does commute between the two countries & as a visiting professor at WITS (which counts as one of the most distinguished academic institutions in SA). Just three years back, I think, he wrote a memoir of his life in America & South Africa – I believe the book is called Incognegro – and in it, he offers some of the harshest criticisms for the present government & not merely that, these are analytic harsh criticisms and on the technicalities that brought failures to the liberation struggles of SA. Failures which he feels are evident today. He was in SA @ WITS again, last year in June for an entire week, giving a reading of his book and it had a huge show up each day with some people standing outside. His criticisms were hostile but welcomed & understood, because the people whom he wrote the book for, understood the lenses with which he sees these realities. What is it that one writer once said about journalists as Richburg:
        
        “The eye that sees is not merely a physical organ that returns to you the imagines it has seen, but rather an eye that returns imagines seen through the lenses manufactured by the realities within which it has been reared”
        
        In simple terms, you never have such a thing as simply an observer. People have built personalities that condition their sensibility of reason, all of which is predicated on past experience. My line is that Richburg hated Africans long before he set foot in Africa. & Imagine experiencing Africans through such eyes! It from that point that I have a problem with his reporting.
      - http://twitter.com/louisth16 Sterling Ferguson
        
        Why were you laughing at the problems Africa is facing with even today. The only reason that many Africans aren’t starving to death because food is being shipped from overseas primary, North America. At the best of times most of the African countries don’t produce enough food to feed their population. The towns in black Africa were all built by the Europeans and Arabs when they came to black Africa. The only exception was Ethiopia that built towns in that country. You should down load the map of Africa and look at the rainfall, and you will see what I am talking about. The UN just sent out a warning that over a hundred million people are at risk for a famine in the Sahel parts of Africa. The experts are saying the same thing that I wrote, and if you know better, you should put it on the table.
      - http://www.facebook.com/kwame.dubois.3 Kwame Du Bois
        
        I was laughing at you & the ignorance you displayed in the post I mentioned above. Forgive me for thinking you’d be swift enough to catch on. I mean really, even now I still think it ridiculous; people following rains helter skelter? Sniffing the air for the next shower to follow: what if it’s not mild rain but a hellish storm? There was just absolutely a dearth of logic in your statement, sir. None. And I dare say, an underestimation of generic human nature.
        
        There you go again with your ‘town theory’. What exactly is it with you and your obsession with ‘towns’? There is nothing special or even ‘not-special’ about ‘towns’. I expressly said Africans built networks of villages – which are analogous to towns in innumerable respects- & the reasons thereof I stated earlier. And the Africans were not the only people to construct villages, even the Mambae and Makasae tribes of East Timor, as far as South-Eastern Asia built networks of villages (existing even to day, as with the Africans). Did American Indians built towns? Did the aborigines of Australia build towns, before they were massacred? You keep ranting ‘town’, ‘town’, ‘town’ , ‘town’, ‘town’, ‘town’, as if there’s something special about ‘towns’.
        
        And you are lying, continuing the trend followed by MooiNooi of thinking of Africa as a homogeneous entity. You can’t say ‘all the towns in Africa were built by Europeans & Arabs when they came to black Africa’. There are ‘towns’ (your favorite word) in West Africa that were built completely by Black Africans. I’m thinking presently of Mali in particular, in which some of the architecture (including the written literature pre-dating European colonialism) itself is still well kept to this day.
        
        You continued to lie ( and I swear after this post, I am no longer talking to you because, sir, you have lost my respect, I relinquish it right here). The UN famine announcement was not about famine in Sahel parts of Africa. It was about a worldwide food shortage affecting even the United States & Europe (including the Middle East) because of the present weather conditions that are plaguing even the US itself – a consequence of global warming (one of the by products of pollution released by mines all over the World: modernization – for all the lauding people give it – has come at a hefty price to mankind because even presently, the wetlands themselves (even in the US) and the wealth of species that inhabit them are dying). Either the water has become too salty or there is none because of the excessive heat due to global warming. If you’d actually bothered to read the UN food-shortage report properly, you would know that the West harvested the lowest wheat crop since the late 70s. This is presently a world wide problem,but no, cast a broad brush over it entirely and single out Africans & ‘the rains’ (and let’s not forget our favorite word ‘towns’). I resign myself. The above are the facts ‘the experts’ are putting forth, which you deliberately twisted to make seem as food shortage is a uniquely African problem when even the US itself is beginning to asses its situation. I don’t know anymore.
      - http://twitter.com/louisth16 Sterling Ferguson
        
        The answer to your question if the Indians in America built towns and the answer are yes.
        heir Not only did they build towns the Indians developed a system of writing and the Mayan had a calendar that’s is very accurate. The Indians also developed a system of farming that’s irrigated their crop all year round.
        
        The reason why the black Africans didn’t build towns is because they didn’t have a knowledge of making tools for building. Another reason the black Africans didn’t build towns because they didn’t produced building material. There was no need to build roads because there was no wheel to use to travel on. When the anthropologist study the culture of a people the people with the highest level of development were people that built cities and towns. Mandela said in his book “Long walk to Freedom” the Europeans brought science and technology to Africa and SA. You have been sitting down in the tip of Africa and don’t know what’s going on the other parts of Africa and SA. Most people in black Africa don’t have access to clean water or electricity and the governments are trying to give them cell phones.
      - http://www.facebook.com/kwame.dubois.3 Kwame Du Bois
        
        @Sterling Ferguson:
        
        Wow. Ferguson, please note that this is the last time I make a response to you & it is not because I am tired of this conversation, but because you’ve displayed yourself (to me) to be a deeply ignorant person. One in particular who embodies remarkable levels of prejudices predicated on notions he has simply formulated in his own heard. I earlier asked your sources of information (& to this moment, am eager to review them sir) just so to appended a name & face to whoever has crippled your sense of reason & intelligence.
        
        On American Indians.
        
        Our position was ‘towns’. For reasons unknown to me, you opted to veer off to terrain I didn’t even speak about : Calenders, Writing, Mayans blah blah blah. You know very well that I was talking about the Indians who inhabited a significant portion of what is now the U.S ( I think they’re called Cherokee, Apache & others, tribes lost to the genocidal activity of Europe there). Oddly enough, these tribes themselves spent a significant part of the precolonial ages migrating helter skelter over what is now the US – for what reason? I have not researched, but I’m fairly certain it has absolutely nothing to do with following rains! Those people resided in villages (NOT TOWNS!) with conical tents (called tipis) manufactured from buffalo skin, and from what I’ve read of their literature that is available – the development of their languages into written form coincides precisely with the time Africans (in the Southern parts of Africa) developed theirs. In the cases of Ethiopia, the Swahili people, the Hausa and others, who reside in west & East Africa, they had written languages long before the above mentioned American Indians – and what is more, their written languages were not predicated on any European form (as opposed to the Apaches & Cherokees, which we know the time they considered developing a written form of their language was when they were associating with Europeans & felt a need for it). The Swahili & Hausa people of West & East Africa had written poetic traditions that predated the est. of written languages among the above mentioned Indians of America.
        
        On Africans. You had the following to say:
        
        “The reason why the black Africans didn’t build towns is because they didn’t have a knowledge of making tools for building. Another reason the black Africans didn’t build towns because they didn’t produced building material. There was no need to build roads because there was no wheel to use to travel on. When the anthropologist study the culture of a people the people with the highest level of development were people that built cities and towns. Mandela said in his book “Long walk to Freedom” the Europeans brought science and technology to Africa and SA.”
        
        Secondly, I am not going to dignify (with a response, & so waste my time) the repugnant stupidity & ignorance in this line:
        
        “The reason why the black Africans didn’t build towns is because they didn’t have a knowledge of making tools for building [Really? According to whom, Mr Ferguson?]. Another reason the black Africans didn’t build towns because they didn’t produced building material [Really? According to which source, Mr Ferguson?]. There was no need to build roads [You mean in a western sense - a tarred road with street pavement & lights?] because there was no wheel [According to whom, Mr Ferguson?] to use to travel on”
        
        Thirdly. I am not a fan of Nelson Mandela. I do not, at all, admire nor like this man. He has absolutely no importance to me. I do not know what you hope to achieve by quoting him to me. Let me put it this way, if Mandela were to die today, the Black world wouldn’t have lost anything at all. What is it that the brilliant African American scholar, Frank Wilderson |||, said about Mandela in his award-winning memoir (Incognegro)? Ah yes, Wilderson ||| said:
        
        “He[Nelson Mandela] is the perfect example of what I call an anger management course for Blacks”
        
        Oddly enough, Wilderon ||| also isn’t fond of Mandela. There are far greater scholars & men in Africa than this man, who have done their due – some of whom continue to engage with contemporary African politic to this day & daily write articles on present African political conditions (in their old & aging state). I am thinking in particular of acclaimed academic Chinweizu (whom, by the way, dislikes Mandela also). Of Mandela, Chinweizu said of him in an article:
        
        “[His] Black Consciousness is shallow[...]even opportunistic;[and] hiding under [his] black mask is a blancophile heart. To call yourself a leader of blacks, one leading them out of the prison cell of white power, and yet insist on bringing whites into every organization for blacks – isn’t that folly of the first order?”
        
        On your remark that “[I am] sitting down in the tip of Africa and don’t know what’s going on the other parts of Africa and SA.” I have only to say that you are sitting wherever you are sitting & have contented yourself with plebeian & naive explanations of human mass migrations being inspired by ‘following rains’ (an absurd theory – for anyone to come up with), the Cherokee building ‘towns’ etc. etc. when we well know they lived in villages. I know more about Africa sir, & the politics that inform her, than you ever will – that much is a fact. I daily read online newspapers from all corners of Africa – including as far as Nigeria (Nigeriaonline.com). I long ago rejected browsing the New York Times online, Washington Post etc., for news reports on Africa. I go directly to the respective countries & read their papers online to find their own articulation of their condition in lieu to presentations I very well know are by people who harbor racist opinions & prejudices. Can you say that much about yourself?
        
        An example of this was the last Zimbabwean issue following the time in which Mugabe expelled white farmers from Zimbabwe back to Europe. The New York Times, admittedly so grudgingly late last year (by which I mean, the article was littered with insults & compliments & ‘but-let’s-no-forget-what-he-did’), that despite the criticism Mugabe received for the bloody expulsion of whites there, the farming industry in the hands of Black locals & commoners of Zimbabwe has thrived to produce profits 10x better than it did when it was being run by whites there. Even the quality of tobacco crop is excellent, with China being their number one client with exporting the product. The interesting thing is that I was talking to a Zimbabwean friend of mine who informed me that to some extent, he pities South Africans for the bondage that they’ve sustained with whites, which has involved occasional scandals or racial humiliation & degradation that was synonymous of the apartheid days.
    - http://twitter.com/louisth16 Sterling Ferguson
      
      Achebe is a black African writer, and he has said the same thing in his book about African culture in “Things fall apart”. Syonka a nobel prize winning writer has written about the African culture and has put it down.
- http://www.facebook.com/kwame.dubois.3 Kwame Du Bois
  
  “The ANC has never been a reservoir of ‘ clever ‘ but rather cabal of evil and corruption. There have been thousands of instances of subversive behaviour whereby members of the ANC have acted against the interests of the Country and people.” – gumpy51.
  
  Racial hypocrisy runs supreme in S.A. They were certainly a ‘reseviour’ of something pleasurable to whites in 1994 (I dare say may have even been dubbed ‘clever blacks’), when they did not follow the characteristic African pattern of then – that is expel whites to Europe (their homeland). ‘[H]as never been”? Really?
  - gumpy51
    
    Yes, you have constructed a nice comfortable intellectual crutch for yourself.
    But there is one flaw, you are lying to yourself.
    The motivation to end the apartheid system came from Fredrik Van Zyl Slabbert,
    through a system of meetings with ANC leadership, white business leaders and journalists.
    Eventually the Nasionalist government had to reform.
    South Africa was handed over to the ANC volantarily and in good faith.
    Recognized world wide for what it is
    That good faith has been betrayed.
    At no time in the forty eight year apartheid government did the ANC
    make any attempt to find a intelligent solution.
    - http://www.facebook.com/kwame.dubois.3 Kwame Du Bois
      
      You say the following:
      
      “[T]here is one flaw, you are lying to yourself. The motivation to end the apartheid system came from Fredrik Van Zyl Slabbert, through a system of meetings with ANC leadership, white business leaders and journalists. Eventually the Nasionalist[sic] government had to reform. South Africa was handed over to the ANC voluntarily [sic] and in good faith. Recognized world wide for what it is That good faith has been betrayed. At no time in the forty eight year apartheid government did the ANC make any attempt to find a[sic] intelligent solution.”
      
      By the way, I do forgive you for your bad spelling & grammar. And again (by your statement ‘[a]t no time in the forty eight year apartheid government did the ANC make any attempt to find a[sic] intelligent solution”), you prove my point that to
      racist whites blacks are only ‘clever’ if they follow propositions that have vested
      white interests in them. In any case, (not that they didn’t) but why would
      anyone make attempts to find ‘an intelligent solution’ to a problem he did not even create in the first place? How preposterous! Dutch colonialism in SA, was
      as uninvited as it was unwanted. And of course, by your words (‘Recognized world wide for what it is’), are you honesty going to try to solicit a ‘Thank You’ to whites from me for the 1994 negotiations?! Pathetic! Now, on SA & Apartheid.
      
      You are a very ignorant, stupid & unread person (with bad spelling & English grammar!). Fredrik Van Zyl Slabbert in no sense initiated nor was he the ‘motivati[ng]’ force for the pathetic negotiations of 1994. Slabbert, to my memory, was part of Helen Suzman’s dubious & racist PP (Progressive Party), which purported to be a non-racialist/non-racist party, yet did not even allow Black/Indian/Coloured members into its division until the late 80s leading up to 1990. Characters like Slabbert & Suzman, did not really believe in genuine liberties for Africans, save more so Alan Paton’s version of ‘Liberal Paternalism’. Alan Paton himself, a move later emulated by Helen Suzman in Europe in the 1930s at the World Summit, once expressed that he is against ‘a bunch of tribal Blacks’ (his exact words) being allowed into society, unless it was under the tutelage of whites (& this comes from the so-called Great Anti-Apartheid figure – Alan Paton with his patronizing Cry The Beloved Country, was a devout white supremacist!) Furthermore, the NP did not relinquish office to the ANC out of ‘good faith’ or a moral awakening on their part, but partly because of the sanctions the British govt. & America had imposed on them, which rendered SA to be falling apart economically & poor & destitute (SA was an economic disaster between the mid 80s to 1994, & literally on the verge of a civil war with Boer police unable to even enter the townships anymore). Now, I say ‘partly’, because the real story of what happened in 1994, and in fact, all over Africa during its transition from Colonial Rule to ‘Independence’ has been deliberately covered-up by white scholars to portray themselves (as you did above) as having ‘good faith’ & ‘intelligence’ (as if they had ever).
      
      Characters like Slabbert, FW de Klerk, Suzman, Mandela etc. were, in effect, British pawns. The British were behind the 1994 negotiations, with the precedent being earlier set during Zimbabwe’s transition from colonial rule to its false ‘Independence’ in 1979. In 1979, Mugabe after having fought to liberate the Black Rhodesians from colonial rule of Britain, had taken the decisive pattern throughout most of Africa then – that is to expel whites & return the land they had stolen to Blacks. But he was coerced into keeping them in Zimbabwe by the British Lancaster House Agreement (through negotiations synonymous to those of SA through Mandela) – a situation he did not even want to be involved in. Mugabe was literally blackmailed into that Agreement, even by the OAU Liberation Committee, which had accepted unquestioningly Britain’s sudden liberal stance. Now, I ask, would you ever have had the bloody situation of forced land removals in Zim. if whites had left then?
      
      Of the SA negotiations, Thembinkosi Lehloesa, in his historical study, ‘Roots: How Britain Carved SA’S Neo-Liberal Age 1806 – 1996’ (published in 2011), Lehloesa revised SA’s own interaction with the British govt. and he was able to uncover, through a trail of documentation buried even deep in the archives of the British National Library, & also the Margret Thatcher foundation in America to prove that during SA’s negotiations (and the epoch leading up to that), Black leaders – throughout the whole of Africa – were essentially manipulated & played by whites to protect the Economic interests of Britain in SA & this plan – initially drafted by The British Secretary of State for Colonies, namely Leopold Amery had been in effect from as early as 1921 (long before your Fredrik Van Zyl Slabbert was even born in 1940). Lehloesa, to his credit, bless him, even publishes letters from Amery (who was at the time holding office in East Africa) to the British Monarchy to explain this process of transition & the need to use ‘Black African Anti-colonial resistance’ to British favour, because he expressed that colonialism -with the uprisings as in Haiti – had no future. The British, immediately after the Sharpeville massacre (a crime committed by people you believe to be of ‘good faith’), proposed these plans initially laid by Amery to the Boer government, which began drafting policies like BEE (BEE was not a Black initiative), and the interesting thing is that BEE is behaving exactly as it was meant to: to create a smoke-screen of inclusion into the echelons of ‘white capital’. About the false SA independence from white rule & the ridiculous negotiations of 1994, Lehloesa in his brilliant historical study, had the following to say in his introduction:
      
      “[S]outh African school textbooks, including university courses in history and politics, show no focus on the relations between South Africa and Britain, and how these produced in South Africa a present of frustrated ambitions and hopes, including inverted anger in the face of rising joblessness, income inequality, absolute poverty, and crime…It made sense for me to study the relationship going beyond the normative sources. And in doing so, I was introduced to facts that make the claims [by the British govt.] of inability to intervene [in the SA apartheid situation] decisively dishonest. For these reveal that long before the change in ideology amongst the members of the ANC
      came to be noticed [the change to include whites in SA society & not expel
      them to Europe], from 1992, by 1929 already, Britain had fully conceptualized how change would happen. The secretary of state for colonies, Leopold Amery’s East Africa Commision saw it in stages that were marked by the ‘parallel development of blacks and whites’. The theme, which was premised on the domination of white interests, consistently reverberated throughout the years in the relationship. Its outcome was duplicity in racial segregation and apartheid and a deceit of the international community…Under the policy framework of the protection of strategic interests and those of the West under its stage department, a program [the 1994 Negotiations kind] was coordinated to
      develop liaisons with ‘moderate blacks’[like Mandela, Mugabe] including whites and groom ‘future leaders’ [the Mandelas]. But this only buttressed and increased the scope of a program Britain effectively began from the early 1960s already. Whilst the involvement began in 1806, it is the period that began in 1960 that proved critical. In this, Britain maneuvered at first to get the Afrikaners under the NP to see its view on the imperative to end apartheid. Through increased
      intervention and close coordination, the strategy delivered its results in the
      1990s as Thabo Mbeki in the ANC came to play for Britain in economic policy.”
- http://www.facebook.com/suhail.varachia Suhail Varachia
  
  you writing crap. Too subjective.
http://twitter.com/Njongozethu Mfundisi

“The measure of a man is what he does with power.” —Plato.

ANC —I rest my case. QED.
Ahmed Vayej

The consultation is only with sympathetic pliable “clevahs”
http://www.facebook.com/jack.kukard Jack Kukard

Hahahaha, what a lovely chuckle for a Monday….
http://twitter.com/ZemZONDO ZEBLON ZONDO

My opinion of Barney is that he is an idiot who formed COPE and has now realised that ANC will never be defeated on the polls,hence he singles out Msholozi as his target.
james naker

The average ‘intellectual’ in the ANC has an IQ of 30, a standard three education and an EQ of a three year old child.
somuchricherthanyou

the anc is an empty cavern without so much as an echo. clever lol. they have achieved nothing for the betterment of south africa. they are all self enriching children in a candy store
Adrian Thomas

Our President has no formal education, this equates to street education, which is what we have at this time street politics, and politicians, no wonder wehave a crime and corruption spree. Moral fibre should start from the top down, not from the bottom up !!
rema

I contacted Dr HOODOO in regards of my lover. who was no longer wanted to associate with me anymore. He was interested in working out of marriage, after begging and pleading with him I realized it was because of another girlfriend, he really was leaving me. My co-worker went threw a similar situation and told me that YOU had helped her. I cant thank you enough, I’m grateful she introduced me to YOU. After discussing the resolution with YOU, your get your lover back spell has done more than what I expected. My lover not only came back to me, but he had also totally left his girlfriend me and now were engaged, we are getting married next month, I don’t know what I would have done without YOU,I believe you are my guardian angel. DR HOODOO want to thank you & your gods for all that you’ve done for me all these years.I’m thankful for all the time & effort you & your gods have put into my case.I am very happy and I will always be grateful sincerely,His email is hoodoolovespell@yahoo.com
Ophthal

“If you trawled through all the committees engaged by ministers in government, you will find a rich intellectual presence in the structures we create.”

Ho, ho , ho! If that were the case we would see an intellectual response to criticism of the ANC instead of the ad hominem attacks, juvenile insults and sniping responses we always get.
Go and look at the reccord Ms Pandor.
Ophthal

“I think the better thing at this stage for you to do would be to stop making comments on this page because with each post, post after post, you reveal how ignorant, stupid, unread & intellectually retarded you are. It is an utter disgrace that you are actually the mother of 3 children!”

If you are a politician, Kwame Du Bois, you prove my point.
mpho

The ANC is lost the basic of drafte the policy that will assist the poor people of south Africa however we have policy guide line that some of cde the don’t want to used is the freedom chart

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