Majorityrights Central > Category: World Affairs

The Boer years were rolled back yet further yesterday when some official commission decided that the RSA capital Pretoria should henceforth be known as Tshwane.

A city built as a monument to the white Afrikaner heroes - and a symbol of resistance to the British during the Boer War - will soon carry the name of an African chief who once ruled the area.

Critics said the change was designed to obliterate the symbols and folk memories of the country’s three million Afrikaners.

But Ben Mncube, 28, said whites should learn to live with the new name. “It was the whites who introduced all these names when they came here,” he added. “There should be African names for African cities.”

Leaving aside the question whether there is such a thing, strictly speaking, as an African city, I don’t think one can argue there with Ben.  Sorry Pretorians of old, hunkered down behind your electrified fences, a loaded gun in every drawer.  African heritage and culture should inform the naming of the seats of power in African nation states.  Leaving aside, of course, the question whether there is such a thing as an African nation state ...

Justice ... nay, not merely justice but democracy and freedom demand that this worthy principle must translate everywhere.  That, after all, is only being equal, isn’t it?  Can’t argue with that.

And so to Britain, where the new colonisers have, with typically uncaring and selfish disdain, imposed their own culture upon us in the form of, quite probably, hundreds of alien place and street names.  Are we not to share in the rights of all ancient majorities, so expressly contained within that one glorious, never to be forgotten word, “Tchwa ... Tchaw ...  Tsch ... well knee, anyway?  Or Nay.  Or Nur.

Probably not.

Those who still try on the old RDNE line and the one about evil white racists have some explaining to do this morning.

White farmers may be allowed back on their land in Zimbabwe as part of a plan by the government of Robert Mugabe to solve the country’s deepening economic crisis.

The president’s key finance aide has called for some of the farmers whose properties were confiscated in a land seizure programme to be allowed to resume growing crops to boost the country’s flagging agricultural output ...

“In order to ensure maximum productivity levels, there is great scope in the country promoting and supporting joint ventures between the new farmers with progressive-minded former operators,” said Mr Gono in a state radio and television broadcast that lasted nearly three hours.

He added that the skilled whites and other new investors would be given special guarantees of uninterrupted tenure of five to 10 years, backed by government force to prevent any disruptions on the farms.

Mr Gono was careful to say that it would not reverse Mr Mugabe’s redistribution of white-owned land to blacks.

However, observers say his plan would be an implicit admission that the land seizure policy has failed.

A Zimbabwean economist, John Robertson, said: “This shows the desperation of the government to improve the economy. They say it is not a reversal of their land seizures, but it is. It won’t get very far.”

I hope it doesn’t.  Not out of the simple desire to turn a profit ... not out of some romantic notion of Africa ... not out of any satisfaction born of righting the injustice of Mugabe’s land “reforms” should Zimbabwe’s former white population turn again.  A bitter lesson should have been very thoroughly learned.  White Rhodesians are stateless until they come home to where they truly belong.

Such a unique natural disaster as the Asian Tsunami should not go entirely unmarked on any news-based comment blog, and to date it has done so here.  So we will correct that.  It behoves us to acknowledge the human suffering the great waves caused and, also, the humility with which Mankind, however Westernised and modern he may be, must stand before such total, elementary and blind force.

We are of the natural world and not the master of it - not even the master of ourselves, though many a political fool of liberal mein may think so.  We do not yet truly understand the natural world, much less control it.  We have only really reached the callow stage where we may observe it systematically.

The sense of awe that follows upon that exercise is, perhaps, no longer awe of the Almighty.  But who among us, thinking on their own thoughts and feelings as they study the images on this link to News@Nature, can say with any certitude that the quality of those feelings is any more refined, better or even different to those of our faithful forefathers.

Because I see gathering ethnic instability in my homeland and throughout Europe and try to calculate the consequences I’m a bit of a sucker for prediction in general.  A particularly fascinating example of the species appears in the Telegraph today.

The always thought-provoking Niall Ferguson offers the vision of a new authoritarianism in Russia.  The parallels he draws between Hitler’s Germany and what is emerging in Putin’s Russia are arresting: a weakened parliament, media control, a developing state control of the economy, a disregard for private property rights and the rule of law …

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The world is watching Ukraine.  In Kiev and in all the cities across that 75% of the country which is Ukrainian-speaking the rights of the electoral majority are being asserted.  The only question would seem to be whether peaceful protest will be enough to dislodge Viktor Yanukovich.

It is not certain that it will.  The results of Sunday’s run-off are to be officially announced today.  If Yanukovich is declared the winner, as he has insisted he was, a highly unpredictable trial of strength will ensue.  Yanukovich has powerful friends, among them State President Leonid Kuchma (who in 2001 was embroiled in the extraordinary scandal of the disappearance and gruesome decapitation of an opposition journalist, Georgyi “George” Gongadze).  Russia’s President Vladimir Putin is another, and has already welcomed Yanukovich’s self-declared victory.

The great unknown was the position of the army, security services and the police force.  Only the Defence Ministry was thought to be definitely loyal to the President.  But this morning Defense Minister Oleksander Kuzmuk has declared neutrality.

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