I swear, one cannot make up this stuff. If it were not for the fact that the monstrously racist ANC government of South Africa has the majority in Parliament and is busy stealing the country blind, it would be hysterically funny. Certainly, the opposition member’s retort that the ANC member at the podium appears to be confusing Jan van Riebeeck with Jesus Christ is amusing.
Click on the image below to play the video of the singular event that elevated to Biblical levels the first Dutch commander of the Cape of Good Hope, who arrived on 6 April 1652, about 364 years ago. That would be rather less than 2,000 years ago. The indigenous people at the Cape were Khoekhoe people, a completely different human race from the Black Ba’Ntu people of Africa south of the Sahara. The Khoekhoe lived in dread of the Blacks further to the east. Until the 20th century, Black people lived east of the Fish River, some 600 miles east of Cape Town.
The opposition members may certainly laugh as they do in this parliamentary video, but I do not think they appreciate that the vast majority of young Blacks (all born into abject political privilege after the end of apartheid) actually BELIEVE this kind of utter rubbish the ANC is indoctrinating them with. They have absolutely zero concept of their own real history. They should be viewed as dangerous and unstable human containers who have undergone Colin Farrell’s character’s memory implant (image below) from the movie Total Recall.
Many of them truly and devoutly believe their ancestors were at the Cape of Good Hope before white men got there, whereas, in fact, their own recent ancestors—often their very own parents—were the recent immigrants to the country west of the Fish River in the East of the country. The country will eventually pay an enormous price for this rubbish.
It is roughly the equivalent of trying to suggest the Plains Sioux Indian ancestors of Sitting Bull welcomed the Pilgrim Fathers on the beaches of Massachusetts. Perhaps the fact that even some Black members of Parliament could not disguise their amusement is cause for some hope. This is how pathetic life has become in South Africa…. that one should hang onto an embarrassed smile as constituting hope.
AmaBhulu 
How on earth can a country function with people of such ignorance and stupidity at the helm? How I regret voting ‘yes’ in the referendum to scrap apartheid. Despite the Inkatha Freedom Party putting out a very nice thank you message in the newspapers, the average South African black seems to hate whites, and no wonder, with such lunatic MPs filling their heads with such nonsense. This speech would be racist as well as a joke anywhere else in the world.
As to Craig’s semi-rhetorical question, I do indeed believe there is an obligation to get the truth on record about South Africa. That is why I took seven years to write the book AmaBhulu to which this Blog is attached. I returned to the original documentary evidence to cover the history of the country.
I am particularly proud of the result around the First British Occupation. The generally confused and neglected history of that period (1795-1803) has direct bearing on subsequent events, such as the Slagtersnek Rebellion, without which there would have been no Free State, or Transvaal. I draw a direct line from the disaster of the First British Occupation to the mess South Africa is in today. It would seem no one realises that half of the Cape Colony was lost to invasion in that process. I would think such events would be considered important. But, alas!
Unfortunately few people are interested in the truth today, and even fewer are prepared to learn the lessons of history. We apparently prefer to pay with lives to learn those lessons by ignorantly stumbling about.
Well, maybe it’d be a good idea if we stopped labelling people as a single colour. Address them by their tribe and this might help people remember where they came from.
The same with white people.
Craig,
I deal extensively with old death notices, and it is striking how those who filled in those notices around 1850-1920 were careful to identify indigenous people by their tribes. Often, they would be specific down to individual subtribe, such as, for example, “Gaika”, rather than just Xhosa.
As you will notice in some pages on this Blog (“Black and White South African Allies” under “AmaBhulu Topics”), the amaRharhabe (The people of Ngqika or Gaika) allied with the old Frontier Afrikaners on several occassions against other amaXhosa groups. The Ba’Rolong of Thaba’Nchu similarly fought on Boer side against Mzilikhatse.
All this very significant stuff gets lost in the Black vs White rhetoric. This documented history does not suit the present government, nor did it suit the previous one. So it got buried.
As writers, don’t we have an obligation to find ways of disseminating relevant information like this?
Thank you for sharing!
Even more scary is the disdain with which the National Archives are regarded. South Africa’s history is one of the best recorded in the world. The Dutch East India Company (VOC) meticulously kept book of everything that happened under their watch.
As the current (Black) director shouted at one of the archivists in their employ: “Lies! This is all lies!”
It is being systematically destroyed.