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Afrikaners: Throwaway Humans

So bizarre has life become for Afrikaners in South Africa that there are no words to adequately describe the daily horrors of their lives to outsiders who have been steeped in the usual cliches about South Africa…

Article by Dan Roodt, founder of the Pro-Afrikaans Action Group (PRAAG) -  translated 2012/3/11 by Adriana Stuijt a.j.stuijt@knid.nl

AFRIKANER FLOWER

 

March 10 2012. 'Last night I spoke to a woman who owns an art-gallery in Pretoria. She spoke about a brutal, hour-long beating at the hands of three black male attackers in her home.  They also threatened to rape her.

They put a gun to her head and she expected them to pull the trigger. Yet as she spoke to me, it became clear that she was so calmly resigned to her fate that one is left filled with a mixture of horror, amazement and humour. 

‘ Just get it over with and shoot me dead… just stop your threatening to do it…’

When they threatened to take her to her bedroom to rape her there, she  said she 'was thinking that the bed hadn't been made as yet and that she felt shame about it.'  At one stage, she even invited them to 'get it over with and just shoot her dead, and to stop just threatening with it.'

Every time they were ready to shoot her, she said 'she'd ask them if she could first turn off the heat underneath the onions she was cooking because she was afraid they would burn.'  Eventually they did let her turn off the hot-plate.
In the end these men just left there without shooting her or raping her: she was however assaulted very badly. However -- that was not the end of her ordeal: there was more when she went to the police station to report the attack.

The illiterate police officer would not let her write the words ‘white bitch’ in the police-report even that’s the words her attackers had used to abuse and curse her… 

Upon her arrival she said, 'I was received by a  person who was unable to read nor write, and who was unable to write down my report on the incident.' Then she wrote her own report and of included all the details, including the words which were used by these black men against her during the hour-long ordeal, such as 'You white bitch, we are going to rape you." Or: "You white bitch, we are going to shoot you."  When her report was read by this 'black illiterate policeman , HE objected to HER using the words 'white bitch.'  He said he 'could not accept the statement in that wording and she will have to change her statement'.
     An argument then followed: with her insisting that she HAD to tell it exactly as it happened because this was a racial hate-crime. The black police officer also refused to let her use the word 'white' – while finding the  word 'bitch' acceptable – however not the two words together:  'white bitch'. Eventually the stalemate stuck and she simply had to leave. To this day, no formal charges of assault, armed house-robbery, attempted rape, or attempted murder were thus far lodged.
    Roodt writes that he wanted her to repeat her astonishing story in front of his video camera in exactly that same casual, humorous and resigned manner she had told it the first time.
    "It was the black humour and the casualness in which she told it, which probably would have put the entire world into an uproar.. 
However, she didn't feel like it -- and so another unique story about which one could write books, has been lost forever.

So bizarre are these happenings that they cannot be described clearly with words or pictures…

Actually what is happening to us in South Africa right now cannot be described with words nor with pictures. It is so strange, so fantasti-gorical, so bizarre that outsiders would never understand it properly. Here was this exquisite, cultured and well-spoken woman who has accepted the fact that any life - also her life -- is not worth anything.
    She however has an exquisite trust in her own intelligence – she knows that she's more clever than her attackers. "They expect you to react in a certain way and when you react differently, it confuses them. Then they don't know what to do. We will always beat them in the end,' she concluded.
   Sure --  under the current rigid definition, that would be a 'racist' belief because in a world of unforgiving 'equality rules' the intelligence of the black rapist, the black murderer, the black rapist is 'equal'
to the intelligence of the white art-dealer's. They had merely made different ‘career-choices’. 

   The other interesting aspect of her retelling of the ordeal was that she never referred to the race of her attackers. Until my wife wanted to know: 'I take it they were black?" Whereupon the art-dealer replied in utter amazement:

  • “My heart -- what kind of a question is that? Of course they were black. I don't know how you can even begin to ask such a question'…

It seemed as if she was drawing attention to an unwritten natural law. ..

My impression was that she really did not care what happened to her. To this day she has not taken any kind of security arrangements.
She accepts that such things simply happen.

It's as if we (Afrikaners) are living on a different planet: one in which new laws rule: the law of the jungle and that one cannot influence this. Her fatalism was shocking and fascinating to me at the same time.
There 's a small group of Afrikaners which has recognised the grotesque other-worldly aspect of the New South Africa and as time goes on we will learn to describe it better.  Eventually we might even succeed in making the Bizarre South africa understandable to the rest of the world.  It's a very delicate process - because the usual words and average understanding fall far short to describe it with to people steeped in the well-known cliches about South Africa.

What is happening to us Afrikaners is worse than a war…

What is happening to us (Afrikaners) right now is worse than a war because it forces us - as did this woman - to accept that our lives and by extension our language, culture, history, tradition, heritage and everything interconnected with those, are worthless. Literally not worth anything.
    Perhaps that's the new definition of the Afrikaner: a human being without value, a Throwaway Human, a human being who can only be grateful that he's still alive.
    Because hanging over all of us is that sword of Damocles; that gunbarrel against your brow; that knife hovering inches from your chest.
     With all the stories of human slaughter we hear and read about, there also are many other stories of people who barely escaped with their lives.
    A friend of mine's heart literally stood still four times in the ambulance after blacks had stabbed him senselessly in the Pretoria central district. Four times the emergency personnel kickstarted his heart again. Today he's healthy as a horse and cheerfully alive.
     The fact that we still live and still can do ordinary things every day, is a miracle, a wonder.
     That's why it's hardly strange that there's a little flower called 'Afrikaner'- because indeed we are as fragile as flowers: here one moment, and gone the next.

Cut off. Killed off.

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http://praag.co.za/dan-roodt-magazine-178/11207-ons-lewens-wat-so-min-werd-is.html?tmpl=component&print=1&layout=default&page

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