Kelly-Jo Bluen is apparently content to sit safely in London and spew hatred against the country of her birth.
I had absolutely no idea when I was invited to record a podcast for the Renegade Report last Monday that I would literally have to enter the belly of the beast to do so.
The Renegade Report is recorded in a studio on the premises of the Institute of Race Relations in Richmond, Johannesburg – the Gauteng lefty’s equivalent of Mordor, as I later discovered.
The friendly faces and congenial banter obviously had me fooled because I would never have known that I was unwittingly a guest of a white supremacist hate group had it not been for somebody called Kelly-Jo Bluen. Just to mess with your mind, this white supremacist hate group employ someone called Sihle Ngobese (known affectionately as Big Daddy Liberty) who is, I’m sure he won’t mind me saying, not very white and was certainly devoid of any hate on the afternoon I met him.
The first time I encountered Kelly-Jo Bluen was a few month’s back when the IRR invited me to participate in a debate in Stellenbosch on the future of South Africa. Ms Bluen appeared on my timeline and seemed a trifle miffed that the IRR should be seen to be associating with one of South Africa’s best-loved columnists and free thinkers. I made some joke about her rounding up a few lefties to object on the evening, mentioning that I had bought a taser for the occasion. Ms Bluen, who was clearly at the back of the queue when a sense of humour was being handed out, took great umbrage at this and became hysterical, asking how a respectable university like Stellenbosch could even entertain the prospect of someone who had threatened violence being allowed anywhere near the campus. Fortunately the university authorities ignored her hysteria and the event went ahead with huge success, playing to a packed and racially diverse audience in the Pulp Cinema.
Ms Bluen reappeared on my time line last week after she attended the IRR Friends evening in London and attracted some social media attention.
There’s a video of the event on this website, but in case you don’t have time to watch the whole thing (although it’s well worth it) just go 39 minutes into the programme when you can see Ms Bluen in action and learn the awful truth about the IRR. It’s worth noting the reactions of audience members around her.
Now, looking at the video, it would be all too easy to dismiss Ms Bluen as just another swivel-eyed loony who’s into conspiracy theories, but the reality is that she is a PhD candidate at the London School of Economics. A quick visit to the LSE website reveals the following in somewhat fractured English: ‘Kelly-Jo’s research examines the colonial, raced and racist narratives and materialities of atrocity crimes…’ blah de blah de blah…. ‘she is primarily interested in how criminal law produces white innocence and raced unhumanning.’ (Apparently you can make words up in academia)
It goes on in much the same tedious vein, producing what can only be described as academic gobbledygook worthy of Pseuds Corner in Private Eyemagazine.
The sad reality is that Ms Bluen is just another work-shy South African rich kid sitting safely in London and spewing hatred against the country of her birth. Thanks to daddy’s money she’s already got herself a couple of degrees and is now trying to bag a PhD. To cleanse herself of her white privilege guilt, she clearly feels the need to label all whites racist (including daddy presumably) and to pour scorn on those who actually live here and want to build a better and fairer South Africa. That’s why she’ll block you on Twitter if you disagree with her and why she’ll refuse to engage in any rational debate with white people. Perhaps the convivial Big Daddy Liberty would have more luck.
Another major talking point this past week was the article by Daily Maverick’s Marianne Thamm on the post-SONA contents of the EFF’s rubbish bags at a rather expensive guest house in Camps Bay. The luxury-loving freedom fighters apparently got through quite a lot of premium booze during their stay and also appeared to have gone on a couple of luxury shopping trips, if the receipts found in the trash can be believed. Anybody who is prepared to get down and dirty and open rubbish bags to get a news story is worthy of respect in my book.
But the point of the story wasn’t to highlight the top-end tastes of the EFF central command. After all, they’ve been described for a long time as a bunch of bank-robbing thugs who would look much better in orange overalls than in red. The point of Ms Thamm’s juicy piece, sensational though it may have been, was to ‘police hypocrisy’. There are cheaper places to stay than a foreign-owned villa in Camps Bay and there are cheaper things to drink than Glenfiddich 18 year old, Veuve Clicquot and Tanqueray Gin. So why would a party that claims to want to uplift blacks economically and to limit alcohol consumption because of the social ills it leads to not walk the walk in addition to talking the talk? The answer to that is very simple, Comrades.
In order to be able to warn your impoverished supporters about the white man’s evils it is necessary to experience them first. Arthur Scargill, the man who led the crippling UK miner’s strike in the early 1980s, preferred to be driven in a Jaguar XJ6 (or it may even have been the more refined Daimler) the better to warn his union members against the temptations of capitalism.
The horrors of white monopoly capital and the misery they can lead to can only really be experienced after you’ve nursed a humungous headache after polishing off the best part of a bottle of Glenfiddich 18 year old. The same goes for the choice of a prime location to stay in and the need to shop at some of the most exploitative and racist stores on the planet. How else is a Marxist revolutionary to warn young susceptible minds about these evils?
Ms Thamm did make reference to finding used condoms among the discarded booze bottles, receipts from luxury stores and takeaway food containers. She also referred to young women waiting in the street for lifts home after the EFF party vacated the property. It would be quite improper to infer that the used condoms and the stranded young women are in any way connected. I’m sure they were just participants in an impromptu EFF workshop on the ‘evils of capitalism and how to avoid them’.
[I will be taking a short break in order to boost the UK economy and welcome the new Prime Minister on 22 July. This column will resume on July 28]
David Bullard is a columnist, author and celebrity public speaker known for his controversial satire.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the IRR.
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