by bayside » Wed Aug 31, 2011 2:05 pm
This forum, with its devoted fans of Wilbur Smith's outstanding books on Africa, has become an interesting part of my life. It's fascinating to read opinions, ideas, responses, and reactions from people scattered all over the world. Thank you all.
I hesitantly introduce an a news item I just read in today's local newspaper, knowing it must portend so much in the lives of many Forum members:
"Violent protests Tuesday by supporters of South Africa's firebrand youth leader are the latest political salvo in a power struggle that could determine the future of South Africa's president and the man who helped catapult him to power,k youth league chief, Julius Malema.
Demonstrators burned flags of the ruling African National Congress and ran through the streets of Johanesburg holding up flaming T-shirts bearing the image of President Jacob Zuma.
Malema, 30, has mobilized disillusioned and unemployed youth with demands that the government nationalize the wealthy mining sector and appropriate white-owned farmland for black peasants."
This news item sounds like it could have come from "Rage" or "Power of the Sword". I wonder how white South Africans are relating to this. There are so many -- with so much to lose. My heart bleeds for them, they are people whose families have lived there for 300 years. I can't keep from comparing them to the white citizens of the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand or South America. They created the wealth and civilization of S.A., along with all the health, welfare, and medical services (albeit, with the help of cheap, black labor)-- and they are still being called oppressors who will be forced out so the old tribal hatreds will once again be unleashed to create destruction, chaos, mass genocide of the minority tribes, poverty, corruption, mass starvation. Is this another Zimbabwe in the making.