Is Cecil John Rhodes the mentor and hero of Gwede Mantashe?
After Mantashe’s mad outburst on Freedom Day last Sunday, I can think of no other explanation. The South Africa Mantashe wants to see – and so it seems do most of the ANC and EFF elite – is a bland, uniform South Africa based on the language and culture of the British colonialists. It is a South Africa made in the image of Cecil John Rhodes.
Addressing a celebration at the AJ Swanepoel Stadium in Ermelo, on 27 April, Mantashe concentrated his speech on attacking a group of people whom he accused of “racism”, “hatred”, promoting “revenge” and wanting to stir up “conflict”.
He was not speaking about people who chant, “Kill the farmer! Kill the Boer! Shoot to kill!” or about the murderous attacks by black South Africans on desperate black people fleeing into South Africa to escape destitution in other African countries. He was not speaking about our terrible murder rate or the dreadful violent crime terrorising our poor black communities.
He was not speaking about our 42% unemployment, crumbling infrastructure, and failing economy, all caused by disastrous ANC policies. He was speaking about a group of 2,900 people living on an arid piece of land in the Northern Cape, 9 square kilometres in area: a group of people living peacefully and harmoniously, causing no harm to anyone else, hating no one, wishing everybody well, quite willing to help outsiders if requested, asking for nothing but to be allowed to celebrate their own culture and their own people and their own God.
He was speaking about Orania, where Afrikaners want to celebrate their own distinct culture while living peacefully with everybody else.
Why his strange obsession with Orania? Looking carefully at our history over the last 373 years, I can see a consistent pattern that explains it. The key to understanding it is the concept of nationhood, and the fundamental difference between the Afrikaners’ view of their nation with black African leaders’ view of theirs.
In one regard …
Gwede Mantashe is the National Chairperson of the ANC and the Minister of Mineral and Petroleum Resources. From 2019 to 2024, he was also Minister of Energy. In one regard I agreed with him entirely: this was in his support for coal, nuclear, natural gas, power ships and exploration for gas and oil in our southern waters. He seemed sceptical about solar and wind for grid electricity; they have been an unmitigated disaster wherever they have been tried, being staggeringly expensive and causing dreadful harm to the environment.
Spain has recently suffered national blackouts as a result of solar and wind power. I’d far rather have Mantashe as Minister of Energy than Mileham of the DA (although Mileham has been replaced). Otherwise, Mantashe has been appallingly bad as Minister of Mineral Resources, a primary cause of the slump in our mining exploration and investment. But let us return to his attack on the Afrikaners’ right to self-determination.
You might say that the Afrikaner nation was born sometime in the 18th Century. It was descended from the Dutch (or rather Flemish) Free Burgers, a group of small-scale farmers (Boers) that Van Riebeeck brought over to Cape Town to grow food for the crews of the Dutch East India Company (DEIC) ships sailing from Holland to the East. Very soon the burghers began to chafe at the discipline and limits of the DEIC. They didn’t want to be told what to do. They began to move outward, north and east. They were joined by similar people from France and Germany. Somewhere in the vast, arid plains of the South African veld they became a nation, a separate new nation with their own distinctive culture and their own language, Afrikaans.
Afrikaans was mainly Flemish, but with some French, German, English and Malay influences. The British took over the Cape in 1806 and proceeded to colonise its people, including the Afrikaners. The Afrikaners resented British rule as much as Dutch rule. In their Great Trek, they took their wagons and moved out of British dominion, with one wish: to rule themselves in their own way. They didn’t want to be British or to speak English; they wanted to be Afrikaners and speak Afrikaans. Wherever they went, the British followed, determined to control them and make them British.
Fretted unhappily
The Boers formed a small republic in what is now Natal. The British annexed it. The Boers set up two republics, the Orange Free State and the South African Republic (the Transvaal). The British, led by Cecil John Rhodes and Lord Milner, fretted unhappily. They couldn’t bear to see Afrikaners ruling themselves. They wanted them to be ruled by the British. Rhodes provoked the Boer War (1899 to 1902). The war had nothing to do with the rights of the Uitlanders (who just wanted to make as much money as they could and then go home to England) or with British greed for Transvaal gold (they could easily have made some deal with Kruger to get all they wanted).
The war was purely imperial. Paul Kruger was absolutely right when he said, “It is our land they want”. Rhodes wanted the Boers to submit to British rule out of pure imperial ambition. He was a money-making genius, but money wasn’t his driving ambition; the driving aim of his life was to make the whole world British, to make British culture the universal culture and to make English the universal language.
The Boer War, although the Brits won it, sounded the death knell for the British Empire. The Boers won the peace, and after 1910 took over the whole country. They did develop Afrikaans culture and language but not to a fanatical extent. That came in 1948. The incoming National Party (NP) government had one overriding aim: to promote the Afrikaans nation.
To do that, NP members believed they had to preserve white minority rule and to do that, they invented apartheid, which made de jure the de facto racism of the past. They suppressed the black majority with brutal force and with a million petty and humiliating laws. They treated blacks very badly, but they treated their own nation very well, just as they had promised. They promoted their own culture and their own language. They set up schools with teaching in Afrikaans and sent their own children to them. They recognised English as a world language (as Rhodes had wanted), and learnt it as a second language, but they kept Afrikaans as their first language, the teaching language of their schools and universities, the language they used among themselves, in their churches and libraries and pubs, the language they loved, their language.
Quite different
The history of black South Africans, and their own feeling of their culture and their languages, is quite different, as Mantashe’s outburst last Sunday shows. “Black Africans” is a vague term. The correct, accurate and honourable term is “Bantu”, which means “humans”. The Bantu entered what is now South Africa from the north over 1,500 years ago. They moved south and then west, but stopped at the Fish River in what is now the Eastern Cape, because the climate to the west had winter rainfall and their crops needed summer rainfall.
Even more important was that the Bantu were not one nation, like the Boers, but many nations, many tribes, with different cultures and different languages. (As always, I use tribe and nation interchangeably). Boers and Bantu clashed, Brits and Bantu clashed, Brits and Boers clashed, Bantu and Bantu clashed most of all, as you can see from the devastation caused by South Africa’s most important soldier, King Shaka. But here’s the thing. While it was always clear that the Boers were fighting for their own culture and their own language, this was not the case with black Africans.
The turning point of apartheid was the Soweto Riots of 1976. After that, the impossible dream of apartheid died and what followed was just a forlorn rearguard action. The nominal cause of the rioting by the school children was against teaching in Afrikaans at their schools. But they did not want teaching in an African language. They wanted teaching in English.
Black people have ruled South Africa for 31 years. They have made little if any attempt to promote African culture or African languages. The black elite want their children to be taught in English, not in an African language. The ANC has passed various race laws promoting affirmative action or DEI, and it passed the Employment Equity Act, which says that since blacks are 93% of the population, 93% of teachers at all schools should be black. Actually in most schools in South Africa, 93% of the teachers are black. But the same black leaders who promoted these laws deliberately send their own children to elite schools where most of the teachers are white, promoted on merit not DEI. They get furious when you point out the contradiction.
Recently the government gazetted the “Determination of Sectoral Numerical Targets’ for the new EE Act. These are guaranteed to shut down businesses, deter investment, drive skilled people out of South Africa and increase our unemployment rate. Will these targets persuade the ANC leaders to send their children to schools that meet the “sectoral targets” for schools? You must be joking.
Never felt safer
In October 2015, I spent a few days in Orania as part of a libertarian seminar there. I thought it was wonderful. I’ve never felt safer anywhere else in South Africa. The was never a sign of hatred anywhere. There was a very strong community spirit, but the people were all quite friendly to us outsiders, mainly soutjies. I’ve never seen a more equal society anywhere on Earth. No human society is completely classless, but the Afrikaners have probably developed the closest thing to a classless society there has ever been. Black Africans, by contrast, for historical reasons, live in the most class-conscious society on Earth.
Upper-class blacks, such as Naledi Pandor or Julius Malema, would shriek with horror at the thought of their own children sitting next to working-class black children at school; Afrikaner leaders are quite happy for their children to mix with working-class Afrikaner children. In Orania, everybody goes to the same school (which gets a 100% matric pass rate).
For an African subject to approach his King, he had to prostrate himself before him and never look him in the eye. For the humblest Boer in the Transvaal to approach President Kruger, all he had to do was walk onto his stoep, address him face to face as “Oom”, exchange a few vulgar pleasantries, and then bring up his matter of concern.
In Orania there was very little difference between the town leaders and the lowest workers, and they addressed each other as equals. All the dirty, menial work is done by the Afrikaners themselves. There is no baasskap. The town is modest, clean, efficient, almost self-sufficient and increasingly successful economically. Orania is very religious. There is a little hill with the statues and busts of past Afrikaner leaders, including Verwoerd. There is a statue of a koeksister. They’re not trying to hide anything from their past, nor trying to pretend that all their dreams are very elevated.
Privately owned
The town of Orania is privately owned. People wishing to live there are required to be interviewed by the town committee. To buy land there means becoming a shareholder. People with a criminal record are likely to be barred. Being an Afrikaner is the most important criterion for admission, but non-Afrikaners may be admitted if they agree not to oppose the Afrikaans culture. Atheists and unmarried couples living together are unlikely to be admitted. Would black people who agreed to accept the Afrikaans way of life be admitted? Yes, say the elders. But would they? Well …
Anyway, that’s Orania, and that’s what these Afrikaner people want for their nation there. Now what does Gwede Mantashe want for his nation? In fact, what does he consider his nation to be? One South Africa?
South Africa is a colonial construct. The borders of South Africa were drawn up by white imperialists who cared nothing about African people or African nations. They grouped together more than ten African nations, some of whom had nothing in common with the others, some of whom hated each other, and some of whom who had fought bloody wars against each other.
The British forced upon them the English language and British civilisation. The Afrikaners resented both. Most black African leaders accepted both, preferring both to their own languages and their own culture. The fact is that South Africa is not a real nation at all. It is an economic union, very much like the EU, which works well as a trading union but not as a political union. Greeks and Swedes have little in common; nor do Pedi with Xhosa. What is the united South African culture that Mantashe wants? Everyone speaking English, as Cecil John Rhodes decreed? Everyone watching bland British and American TV soap operas? All the blacks becoming Afro-Saxons, dressing and acting like Englishmen and Americans, hoping to send their children to universities in England and America? Mantashe has said he would like to send black people into Orania to build there. Build what? MacDonalds instead of braais? A statue of a Krispy Kreme donut instead of a koeksister?
Fills them with shame
I believe the deep psychological reason why Mantashe and so many others of the black elite hate the idea of Afrikaner culture and identity so much is because it fills them with shame. Afrikaners are proud of their language and their culture. The African elite, with important exceptions, are ashamed of theirs. The Afrikaners show them up, and this fills them with resentment. They want to wipe out Afrikaner culture and language. Hence Mantashe’s outburst. Hence the BELA Act.
But not all the African elite think this way. Jacob Zuma, for all his faults, is proud of his Zulu culture. He flaunts the fact that he has had ten wives (approximately), as befits an African chief. In KZN, his Majesty King MisuZulu kaZwelithini is the sole trustee of the Ingonyama Trust, 28,000 square kilometres of prime land (over 3,000 times larger than Orania, and with much richer soil), for the use of the Zulu people. (I don’t know if non-Zulus are allowed to live there but shouldn’t care if they are not.)
Outsiders might object to the financial subsidies to this land, but I have heard of nobody, certainly not Afrikaners, objecting to land reserved for the exclusive use of Zulu people – or any other black people for that matter. The same applies to the Royal Bafokeng, the ethnic homeland of the Bafokeng people, in North West province. Does Mantashe object to these communities who want to celebrate their own cultures?
Railways, roads and electricity transmission lines unite South Africa. Nationhood does not. We are different peoples with different cultures and histories, but there is no reason why we should not all get along amiably while recognising our differences. There is every reason we should not all be forced together into one bland, uniform, lifeless, Afro-Saxon culture.
[Image: Statue of Rhodes, formerly at UCT https://www.flickr.com/photos/barbourians/7347447748]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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