It was perhaps necessary for the dust to settle before I commented on the formation of the Cape Forum with Heindrich Wyngaard as chief executive, writes political analyst Piet Croucamp in this week’s edition of Vrye Weekblad.
I agree with Wyngaard that coloured communities are associated with specific sociological phenomena and problems, but I’m not convinced they are unique to them. There are, however, certain realities.
Roughly 30,000 prisoners are coloured, 125,000 are black and 2,500 white. As a percentage of the population they are clearly over represented. As an economic identity vis-à-vis other communities their demographic dividend — in other words access to assets and capital, schools and healthcare — has changed very little since apartheid.
The question is how this problem should be tackled and in which context. Should coloured people literally and figuratively pull themselves up by their own bootstraps? Should it be as individuals or in the context of nationalism? Does the concept of self-empowerment as implemented by Kallie Kriel’s AfriForum for Afrikaners have any functionality in the solution?
Kriel and AfriForum may be doing a good job in the context of white privilege or the marginal white poverty that exists, but it’s not hard to understand their raison d’être as primarily protecting and promoting a white, and in particular an Afrikaner, identity. They are stunningly effective in what they are doing, but they see themselves as Afrikaners first and foremost and secondarily as white South Africans. They are not my type, but if the government had done for the country what they do for Afrikaners, the southern tip of Africa would have been the land of milk and honey.
But coloured identity doesn’t necessarily mobilise around language as survival.
Many members of the coloured elite worked at least for a part of their lives for organisations that have white interests at heart. It’s not impossible to argue that many had to sell their souls for a salary and had to fill those positions for Afrikaner organisations to survive politically.
The Cape Forum is in that category.
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It was perhaps necessary for the dust to settle before I commented on the formation of the Cape Forum with Heindrich Wyngaard as chief executive, writes political analyst Piet Croucamp in this week’s edition of Vrye Weekblad.
I agree with Wyngaard that coloured communities are associated with specific sociological phenomena and problems, but I’m not convinced they are unique to them. There are, however, certain realities.
Roughly 30,000 prisoners are coloured, 125,000 are black and 2,500 white. As a percentage of the population they are clearly over represented. As an economic identity vis-à-vis other communities their demographic dividend — in other words access to assets and capital, schools and healthcare — has changed very little since apartheid.
The question is how this problem should be tackled and in which context. Should coloured people literally and figuratively pull themselves up by their own bootstraps? Should it be as individuals or in the context of nationalism? Does the concept of self-empowerment as implemented by Kallie Kriel’s AfriForum for Afrikaners have any functionality in the solution?
Kriel and AfriForum may be doing a good job in the context of white privilege or the marginal white poverty that exists, but it’s not hard to understand their raison d’être as primarily protecting and promoting a white, and in particular an Afrikaner, identity. They are stunningly effective in what they are doing, but they see themselves as Afrikaners first and foremost and secondarily as white South Africans. They are not my type, but if the government had done for the country what they do for Afrikaners, the southern tip of Africa would have been the land of milk and honey.
But coloured identity doesn’t necessarily mobilise around language as survival.
Many members of the coloured elite worked at least for a part of their lives for organisations that have white interests at heart. It’s not impossible to argue that many had to sell their souls for a salary and had to fill those positions for Afrikaner organisations to survive politically.
The Cape Forum is in that category.
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I regard Wyngaard as a friend. For the past five years he was by far the best presenter on the RSG news programmes Monitor and Kommentaar. I understand his aversion to Afrikaner and even coloured nationalism. Wyngaard is a South African who happens to be coloured. He was born into the trauma of political neglect of so many coloured children.
He’s not doing this because of coloured nationalism or language nationalism. He may well be thinking coloured communities can’t wait on the state. Maybe he argues the ANC not only exercises poor political and economic management, but its methods sometimes discriminate against the coloured community. I know he understands the future of coloured people to be in the optimistic context of a successful SA.
The problem is Wyngaard will now earn a salary from an organisation that will use him as justification for its own language on ethnic nationalism. I don’t know if he sees it as the only way out of the problem of coloured poverty, but his good intentions are dead in the water because the roots of coloured interests are drifting in the sewerage of white opportunism.
Must-read articles in this week’s Vrye Weekblad
>> Browse the full April 15 edition
BUCHA TO BERLIN | The alleged phone call between a Russian soldier and his wife in which she gives him permission to rape Ukrainian women and the reports of sexual assault coming from that war echo another dark chapter in Russian warfare.
THE WEEK IN POLITICS | Max du Preez says the disaster that hit KwaZulu-Natal was more human than natural, and will remain a disaster as long as the ANC, and specifically the RET brigade, remains in power in the province.
FREE TO READ — FURRY FRENEMIES | Who will be the ones living in houses and who will be rummaging through bins 500 years from now?
THE COST OF RESISTANCE | A new book of colour images taken during the Anglo-Boer War, and the war in Ukraine, makes Max du Preez ponder the meaning of the war that ended 102 years ago.
CAIN, ABEL OR A CRICKET BAT | Tinus Horn was wrong about Pinocchio’s role in the Bible, but on the other hand, he realised he wasn't going to get an advance on the collection money.
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