17 Friday Dec 2021
Tags
African National Congress (ANC), Cape of Good Hope, Cyril Ramaphosa, Fish River, Land expropriation without compensation
On 29 November 2021 I had a close on three hour livestream video session with Scott Balson on his Loving Life channel. The full show may be seen HERE.
— Harry Booyens
12 Sunday Aug 2018
I had another interview (click the image) with Erin Ryan and Bill Cundiff of WeThePeopleRadio today. The subject was the above title. By chance it was exceptionally well-timed, because the ANCs list of targeted farms for expropriation apparently slipped out this morning and has been published by Afriforum; unfortunately only in Afrikaans, which does not help me fight for Afrikaners over here in North America.
I personally believe the bell is ringing next to the graveyard in South Africa. Even the most die-hard ANC apologists among self-loathing White and opportunistic Coloured and Indian people must by now being crawling under their beds. I do not have to tell the Khoi and the San people descendants what the Blacks did to them. I do not need to tell the Indians of Durban what WILL happen to them. Do I really need to remind them that they are isolated at the mercy of the Zulu? Do I have to tell them how an Indian ANC supporter told me,
Harry, I was not white enough for the previous government, and I’m clearly not Black enough for this one?
Their fathers will remember 1949 when Indian folks were driven over a cliff to their deaths at Cato Manor by the upset Zulu hordes. If they do not, I’ll help them remember; Time Magazine reported on it under the banner “Bulala!”– Kill!!! (Time Magazine, Monday 24 January 1949).
How ironic is it that the farm attacks do not involve much stealing from farmers, but are all about killing farmers. How interesting that the ANC is all about stealing from the farmers without the burden of having to kill them. How are those for two perfectly complementary policies with, as most believe, one source?
The whole interview may be heard HERE.
I suggest folks open the following LINK to follow what I discuss in the last half of the show.
I shall be following up this interview in the next few days with a more formal written post covering the subject of territory and secession
Folks can listen to www.WeThePeopleRadio.us at 2pm Pacific Standard Time every Sunday. I am invited now and then to talk about South Africa.
—Harry Booyens
24 Saturday Mar 2018
Posted in Land & Farm Murders
Tags
—The political types forever want to present a picture of Black and White having been permanently at war in South Africa. That is simply not true. As we have seen in the first three Chapters of the series South Africa: Who stole the Land?, it took 130 years from the Dutch settlement of the Cape before the first Frontier war at the Fish River, about 500 miles to the east of Cape town.
They also never tell the innocent reader that, in the first two frontier wars, the strongest amaXhosa King actually solicited the help of the Frontiersmen against (what he saw as) rebellious followers who were invading the white folks’ country. The struggles went back and forth over the coastal Suurveld countryside in the image above near Grahamstown, and in the drier interior in the Achter-Bruyntjeshoogte area around what is now Somerset-East (below).
The politicians also do not tell the reader that the amaXhosa councillors stated to British negotiators in 1819,
When our fathers and the fathers of the amaBhulu first settled the Suurveld, they dwelt together in peace.
That would be the Afrikaner Frontiersmen—the amaBhulu—that the councillors were talking about, complaining about British conduct up to the Fifth Frontier War, being the third such confrontation with the British.
In Chapter 4, (click to access), we recount what happened during the First and Second Frontier Wars. Both of these were between the Settlers and the “spin-off Houses” of the amaXhosa people. The powerful amaRharhabe people and their king sided with the Settlers.
I guess the Media and Politicians did not tell you that, did they? I just thought the reader should know these things in a spirit of openness and honesty.
The complete story of the development of the land issue in South Africa may be read in South Africa: Who stole the Land?
— Harry Booyens
21 Wednesday Mar 2018
Posted in Land & Farm Murders, South African History
—In the Third Chapter of my series “South Africa: Who stole the Land?“, we show how the Great Fish River was established as the line between Black and White in South Africa. Click on the map below to enlarge. We provide the evidence from the books and letters of the time.
The Nguni group of nations, spearheaded by the amaXhosa, was expanding down the east coast of the country. The white people were moving east through the drier semi-desert interior between the two mountain ranges. The eastern half of the south coast was well-nigh impassable, with deep crevasses and enormous forests. That coast today sports the world’s highest man-made bungee jump into one of those crevasses.
The Black folks from the east were nearing the limit of the 350mm summer rainfall line, which limits the ideal cattle herding region, being longer grass. They also grew millet and other agricultural items on a subsistence basis and mostly still do in that region, though they have since added corn and other items. Their very existence was predicated on their cattle herds, because they largely lived from milk and milk-derived foodstuffs.
The West Cape had meanwhile established itself as a superb place for fruit and wheat, largely a winter/spring rain crop with greater drought resistance. The climate of the West Cape is Winter Rainfall Mediterranean that arrives on violent Westerly gales. It is almost completely dry in Summer.
One look at the geography of the country immediately reveals how the continuous chains of rugged mountain ranges practically propelled the two drastically different civilizations headlong into each other. They met at the Great Fish River.
In later chapters we discuss the movement of the Ba’Tswana and Ba’Sotho, as well as the Vha’Venda. The country’s latest president is of Venda descent.
For the complete story, see South Africa: Who stole the Land?
— Harry Booyens
19 Monday Mar 2018
Posted in Land & Farm Murders
— The first overland meeting between Black and White people in South Africa came in 1702, fifty years or two generations after the founding of the settlement at the Cape. It happened between hunting parties from either side near the Great Fish River (above – click to enlarge), some 500 miles east of Cape Town, in a completely different climate zone. The author’s own Bezuidenhout ancestor was leader of that party.
Before the first serious clash between the two sides around 1780, more than five generations after the founding of the settlement, the nearest Black people lived further east along the coast.
As part of a 2008 formal investigation by the Black Dominated ANC Government of South Africa, the Elders of the amaXhosa Black people explained that the people of their nation were immigrants to the country that would eventually become South Africa, and that they were still migrating southwestward by steps at the Mtata River even as the Dutch were already established on the continent to the west. They also maintain that the amaXhosa lived far beyond the great Kei River in the half-century after the Dutch settled the Cape. And, according to the survivors of the 1686 wreck of the Stavenisse, it was San Bushmen who lived further south along the coast. There are no coastal San people left in South Africa.
Read more in the Second Chapter of South Africa: Who stole the Land.
— Harry Booyens
25 Friday Dec 2015
Posted in South African History, The US & South Africa
We are used to calling the country “South Africa”, but this is likely what causes millions of Americans to think that Africa is one country. As frustrating as that may be, it is probably forgivable, as they are also faced with terms such as South Vietnam, South Korea and South Sudan, all of which have political reasons for having the word South in the name. So they just mentally discard the “south” and proceed unwittingly into hapless illogic. This is how this author, a native of South Africa, ended up being blamed by a M.Sc. Physicist in New York for the excesses of Idi Amin in Uganda.
We can start with the Portuguese, who at first called the Cape the Cape of Storms. That was improved to Cape of Good Hope by their own king. And that is where the name stayed for a very long time, later becoming simply “The Cape”. Everyone on earth, with the possible exception of Americans, knew innately which Cape was implied by the single word “Cape”. It was THE cape; the cape that defined the word “Cape”. It was the geographic point about which Western civilization revolved. Whoever possessed it controlled the Sea Route to the East, and thereby the world economy.
Let us go back in time just a little to the Portuguese in the late 1500s and early 1600s, before the Dutch settled the Cape. Here is what they said:
Drawing a line from the southern borders of Congo across the continent eastward, there remains to the southward that great portion of Africa, to which the barbarous inhabitants have given no name, but was called by the Persians Kaffraria, and the inhabitants Kaffirs, which signifies a rude people without law or government; and our late geographers call it Ethiopia Inferior. Above this, on the east, runs for above two hundred leagues that coast which we call Zanguebar; but the Arabians and Persians give this name to all the coast as far as the Cape of Good Hope. Above Zanguebar as far as Point Guardafui and the mouth of the Red Sea is that which the Arabs call Aiam or Aiana, inhabited by the same Arabs, and the inland by heathen blacks.
This is from Asia Portuguesa (Tome 1 – Part 1 – Chapter VIII) by Manuel de Faria e Sousa (1590-1649) as translated from the Spanish by Captain John Stevens and published in London 1695. The text was reproduced by George McCall Theal in his Records of South-Eastern Africa Vol.1, page 11. “Zanguebar” is obviously what we now know as “Zanzibar”. We know the Arabs progressed as far south as Mozambique. To the south, beyond the very dangerous Cape Correntes on the Tropic of Capricorn in Mozambique, the territory was unknown to them.
So, before the Dutch settled the Cape, all of South Africa was part of Ethiopia Inferior for the Portuguese, Zanzibar in the minds of the Arabs, and Kaffraria in the mind of the Persians. We should note that this spelling is a European abstraction of the term “Kufr” or “Kufar” used by Moslems for an “Unbveliever”. On 11 September 2001 it was used by hordes of celebrating Palestinians to refer to Americans– and no, CNN did not fake the footage; it came from Reuters. Confused Americans can view this Youtube clip to hear themselves referred to as “Kafirs” in an American accent within the United States.
The Dutch had no name for the territory as a whole, though they made extensive use of Portuguese maps. It was these maps that the early commanders at the Cape used to send explorers into the interior to find the legendary Land of Monomotapa. My own ancestor, Peter van Meerhof was among these men.
I recently found the following interesting bit of information in a book on the centennial of the town of Uitenhage in the East Cape. I cannot vouch for the fact that it was the first use of the term, but it is the oldest formal government document that I have ever seen to contain the term “South Africa” in formal reference to the country. The document in question is the proclamation of the new district of Uitenhage by the Batavian Republic Governor of the Cape, J.W. Janssens. It was being split off from the larger “Graaff-Reinet Colonie” in view of the depredations by the amaXhosa and Southeast Cape Khoekhoe, including the Gonaqua or “Gonnas”. It was obvious that a new district, focused on the problems originating from the Eastern Frontier, was required in the wake of the disastrous Third Frontier War described in AmaBhulu.
The very capable Captain Ludwig Alberti of the 5th Waldecker Battalion was given the task of determining a suitable place for a drostdy (magisterial offices and seat of local government). Waldeck was one of the large collection of German states in Napoleonic times. Eventually Alberti chose the spot now known as Uitenhage on the Swartkops River. He was, at the time, the commander of Fort Frederick at what would later become Port Elizabeth. The government purchased the spot from the very tough widow Bettie Scheepers, widow of the author’s ancestral cousin, Gert Scheepers, who had been killed in the Third Frontier War. [Note in warning: this last link perpetuates the institutionalised British fallacy that Coenraad de Buys had anything to do with Cungwa’s/Conga’s people in the 3rd Frontier War; as the step-father of their enemy, Ngqika, he actually fought them.]
The document closes with: “Thus done in South-Africa at the Cape of Good Hope, 25 April 1804 — The Governor and General and Chief, J.W. Janssens”. I have yet to find an earlier document bearing the name “Zuid-Africa” or “South Africa”
.
At the time “South Africa” extended from the Cape to the Fish River and then inland to the Tarka east of Cradock and then northward, but still excluded most of the present Northern Cape.
Of course, Vasco da Gama saw the coast of Africa off the Kathlamba Mountains at Christmas 1497, and named the region the Land of Natal, thereby respecting Christmas. So, Natal got its name 518 years ago.
17 Thursday Dec 2015
Posted in The US & South Africa
One of the most frustrating things for Caucasian South Africans in settling in North America is the general lack of knowledge on the continent about South Africa. Many cannot point it out on a map, despite the name. Millions honestly believe Africa is one country. That is how this author was attacked by an American lady with an MSc in Physics for not removing Idi Amin from office! Most likely I need to explain that he was the despotic ruler of Uganda in the 1970s.
Those who at least know South Africa is a country, know only one word about it, and that word is ‘apartheid’. They somehow believe they know what that is, until one asks them one or two questions. They truly believe that people of different races walked on different sides of the street. And they will stare at one blankly when one honestly reports that one had never seen such a thing. A young student told me in the last 5 years that they had recently been taught exactly that in school. I’d love to meet the author of the text book they are studying from.
BUT, here is the other thing they all believe they know about South Africa. They believe to a person that there were Black people at Cape Town when the Dutch settled there. Of course, they are dead wrong. When the Dutch arrived in 1652, the Black amaXhosa were at what is today the southern boundary of the KwaZulu-Natal province. That is some 800 miles from Cape Town!
Once one explains this, the argument usually becomes one of “Yes, but that is very long ago and the Black people were everywhere soon after“. In fact, that is also a massive fallacy. But, who is this author to verbally wave his arms about and explain, if it can be done much more elegantly by none other than the first British Commander at the Cape in 1796. This was less than a year after he arrived. It was also 144 years AFTER the Dutch settled the cape.
To give some time perspective, the first of the much lamented apartheid laws were formulated in 1948. By then the settlement at the Cape was 296 years old. That means the halfway point in history up to that moment was the year 1652+148=1800. So, the question is, what was the distribution of people roughly at that halfway mark.
So, let us proceed to the words [1] of the first British Commander at the Cape, General Craig, as written to Henry Dundas, the Secretary of War under Pitt on 12 April 1796. This was around six months after taking the Cape from the Dutch to prevent it falling into French hands:
A few days ago arrived here three Caffres, who said their sole business was to see the new nation, which they understood was now come to the Cape...[…]...I did my utmost to conciliate their friendship, and sent them away loaded with presents. It is a great many years since a Caffre was at the Cape. I endeavoured to persuade him, that it would be proper, that the King himself should come here, that I would furnish him with everything he wanted, and wished much to be friends with him, but he replied seemingly with some indignation at the proposal, that the King would not leave his own country, but that he would get him to send some of his principal men here.
It is so elegant when history stands up and gives black on white testimony to the truth. Here we have the man who would have intense interest in the matter of a competing nation “on his doorstep”, and he records that “it is a great many years” since a Black Southern African man was at the Cape. It would have been more accurate for him to say there had NEVER been one. The simple reason for this, is that the black people were actually some 600 miles east of the Cape at that point.
17 Saturday Oct 2015
Posted in Race Relations
Tags
Afrikaners, amaBhulu, amaRharhabe, assegai, Cape of Good Hope, Commando, Dutch East India Company, Fish River, flintlock, Rharhabe, South Africa, Suurveld, Xhosa
—The impression has been created by the Media and various Governments of South Africa that White and Black have always been enemies unto death. In reality, Black and White have allied on numerous occasions in South African history. While this may surprise people outside the country, I venture to say it will also be a revelation to many South Africans. It is a truth that is as uncomfortable for the present government as it was for the previous.
The pre-1994 government of the country corralled its political base by convincing it of the Swart Gevaar (The Black Danger). It formed the basis of the Old Apartheid Laws. The present Black ANC government has ratcheted up this approach by orders of magnitude, inciting murder with its singing of “Kill the Whites”. This gets it votes from millions of the Uneducated, the Ignorant, and from racist Africanist Blacks. It forms the basis of the New Apartheid Laws. It appears not to realize that it is vindicating the old government. If it does, then it simply does not care, because the West has given it a free pass to do exactly what it pleases to the utterly powerless Whites.
I hope and trust that the examples provided here will show there was Black and White cooperation and alliance at many seminal events, and that the country does not have to be the divided nightmare that its government has made of it.
Click on the title below to read the first article in the series and see the evidence.
In 1780 King Rharhabe of a powerful Black amaXhosa group offered a treaty to the White Afrikaner Frontiersmen on the Eastern Frontier of what was then the Dutch Colony of the Cape of Good Hope. He sought their alliance in bringing to heel several other amaXhosa groups that he saw as his rebellious underlings. 
These were exactly the same people who were raiding the Frontiersmen. The resulting First Frontier War created an alliance between the Frontier Afrikaners and the amaRharhabe Xhosa that would last at least 20 years. It would play the strangest role in 1800 in an episode that the British Empire would simply write out of its own history. The unique relationship between the Frontiersmen and Rharhabe’s descendants would again surface 35 years later in 1815 in a seminal event that would create 150 years of bitterness between Boer and Brit.
Read the full story of the First Frontier War and the lives of the men who fought it in AmaBhulu – The Birth and Death of the Second America.
10 Saturday Oct 2015
Posted in The US & South Africa
Tags
African National Congress (ANC), Afrikaners, amaBhulu, amaThembu, Cape of Good Hope, Fish River, Grosvenor, Hercules, Nelson Mandela, President John Adams, Shipwreck, South Africa, Tamboekie, United States
— It is a winters day like any other, some 600 miles by oxwagon east of Cape Town. We are on the New Year’s River, a tributary of the Bushman’s River on the outermost limits of Christian civilization [1]. See the map below and click to enlarge. The location is not far from the 21st century town of Alicedale behind the Suurberg, west of Grahamstown.
There have already been two wars with the amaXhosa people who have been pushing westward over the Keiskamma River. The powerful amaRharhabe Xhosa leaders, who have allied with the White Afrikaners, have been trying to bring the local chiefs to heel. This effort has not been successful. Relations therefore remain tense. Groups such as the amaTinde, amaMbalu, imiDange and and particularly the amaGqunkhwebe have repeatedly crossed the Fish River border into the Suurveld. Chief Cungwa (“Congo”) of the amaGqunukhwebe is now living pretty much full time west of the Bushman’s River near the 21st century town of Alexandria. Ironically, it is close to where Diaz turned back in 1488. In the distant future, a road sign near Alexandria will still read “Congoskraal“.
Jan du Plessis is dressing two carcasses of animals his son shot the previous day. He is doing this immediately outside his mud brick and thatch roof house. Jan is a captain in the militia and a rather remarkable man for his time and place. While he lives on the far frontier, he is a literate man and his diary will survive into the 21st century. He is 64 years old; the grandson of the immigrant Jean Prieur du Plessis from Poitiers. His younger sons live on the farm and he has one daughter who is not yet married.
Jan’s grandson, also Jan du Plessis, will one day be one of the two leaders of the so-called Double Trek in the Great Trek. They will arrive at Piet Retief’s camp in Natal on the very day of the Bloukrans Massacre. He will eventually fight at the pivotal Battle of Blood River. The present account, as well as that of the younger Jan and his relatives on the Great Trek, may be read in AmaBhulu.
When Jan looks up, he sees a sight that freezes the blood in his veins. Standing dead still some distance away are two Black Tamboekie warriors, assegais (throwing spears) in hand [2]. It is only three years since the last war with the vicious amaXhosa, and here he is now confronted with the Tamboekies. They live even further away to the east than the true Xhosa, and these two are totally out of place. He yells to his sons in the house, and turns to fetch his schietgeweer―his musket―and the powder horn. But then some disheveled white men and even Indians appear among the Tamboekies.
The leader is an American ship’s captain named Benjamin Stout. They have been aided by these two Tamboekie warriors all the way from the land of the Tamboekies where they were shipwrecked. Jan promptly dispatches his sons with a wagon to collect the rest of the shipwrecked men, who are beyond exhaustion and have been left along the way.
That evening, Stout discusses the state of the country with Jan, who makes it clear that the farmers distant from the Cape are disgusted with the Dutch East India Company [3]. It taxes them, makes rules for them, does not understand their needs, and then leaves them in the lurch in times of danger. They would welcome any decent liberal authority on the local coast and they would be happy indeed to trade with them.
At this point, Stout asks Jan the one question that has bothered him all day since their arrival:
“What on earth are the two massive carcasses you are dressing outside the house?”
Jan responds without blinking an eye:
“Two rhinoceros my son shot yesterday.”
Jan arranges for the men to be taken to the distant Cape. He writes a note in Dutch for Stout and his party to show to all the farmers along the way to aid in their passage. The captain will later immortalize this note in a book:
Good Friends,
Be so good as to help these people forward towards the Cape. They are Americans, who have lost their ship beyond the river Biga. The Caffers have brought these people to me.
Your friend, Jan Du Plessis, the elder.
The River “Biga” is some 15km south of the present coastal town of Hamburg. In the 21st century the name of the river is spelled Bira, but in isiXhosa an “r” is pronounced as the guttural “g” in Dutch. In fact, the shipwreck occurred near the wreck of the Grosvenor, which was at the Mkweni River far to the north, halfway between Port St. Johns and Port Edward on what is today the Pondoland Coast [5]. Since Stout’s day, the Tamboekies, or at least their territories, have moved more inland.
The survivors are taken by wagon to Cape Town. One, a Swede named Peter Ernst Wahlstrand, elects to stay in the colony. He will become the Graaff-Reinet Court Messenger [4] and will eventually marry Maria Magdalena Olivier, an Afrikaans lady in the author’s ancestral family. In this way, a Swede shipwrecked on an American ship in Africa will become and Afrikaner. Fact is usually stranger than fiction.
On 16 June 1796, the American ship, the Hercules, was wrecked on the Suurveld coast. The Master of this ship was Captain Benjamin Stout. He was well treated by the amaThembu (“Tamboekie”) subgroup of the extended isiXhosa speaking nations, and was impressed by the countryside. He was equally impressed with the White Afrikaner farmers who went out of their way to help his party get back to the Cape. When Stout returned to Europe, he wrote as follows to his relative, President John Adams, suggesting the establishment of an American colony on the Southeast Coast in the land of the amaThembu [6] :
To the Honorable John Adams,
President of the Continental Congress of the United States of America.Sir,
If this Narrative be transmitted across the Atlantic, and should find its way to your hand, receive it as the voluntary homage of a native of America, who from his earliest life hath been taught to venerate and admire your virtues and your talents. […] It has never been understood, when the Dutch took possession of the Cape of Storms, as it was originally styled by the Portuguese, that they also claimed a title to the whole of the southern part of Africa; such an undefined and unlimited claim must at once appear not only presumptuous, but preposterous; and on this ground I argue, that the people of any nation have an unquestionable right (provided the natives give their assent) to settle on such parts of the southern continent of Africa, as do not interpose with the lands already in possession of the colonists.
By the early years of the 1800s, American ships were trafficking up and down the southeast coast of the present South Africa. Ever more American sailors were calling for an American presence in South Africa. Britain prized its trade route between Britain, the Cape and the River Platte in South America. Losing America was one thing, but conceding its trade routes to the Americans was another matter altogether.
In the event, President Adams turned down Stout’s suggestion. Thereby died the intriguing thought that, had he accepted, Nelson Mandela, the later South Africa’s first Black president, might very well have been born an American citizen or subject. Nelson Mandela was a Thembu; a Tamboekie!
AmaBhulu 