Die the beloved country? (1999)
By Jim Peron
Amagi Book Publishers

ONCE upon a time, a group of white skinned people arrived on the African shores.
Curiously the villagers gathered around them, they seemed friendly and eager to know the ways of the people of the land.
After befriending the locals, enticing them with their goods and converting them to their ‘blessed are the poor’ religion they began to take everything by force.
Those who did not obey the new powers were to be executed or whipped into submission.
Soon, they had the judicial and security sector at their disposal.
They bribed, manipulated, blackmailed and murdered their way to the top and soon enough they established themselves as the elite.
A whiteman could do as he pleased with a black woman, but it was the death penalty if a black man touched the skin of a white woman even in her death.
It is even recorded that when the first settler baby was born in Zimbabwe, Cecil John Rhodes himself gave directive to drive away families from a prime piece of land to hand it over to the child as a gift.
They took the fattest cows and grain by force. They also implemented chibharo (forced labour).
This was the culture of all colonial systems on the continent.
In his book Die the beloved country? Peron describes South Africa five years after majority rule.
“South Africa will most likely walk the road to misery, corruption, despair and destruction. Give it time,” Peron writes. “It won’t be any different here than in the rest of Africa.”
Peron is an American who settled in South Africa in 1994 after the nation attained majority rule after years of Afrikaner engineered apartheid.
Peron writes under the same assumption that all pro-Western and ‘liberal’ thinkers do.
That is on independence, Africans are handed over a well functioning State that they run down.
In fact, according to Peron and some of our own local flip floppers like Simba Makoni, Africa was better off under colonial administrations.
“My husband and I decided we were better off under apartheid,” an Indian woman tells Peron in his book.
“Sure now we can live next to white people and ride the same bus.”
“But those things aren’t important.”
After majority rule, the former colonial powers realised they needed raw material and markets to sell their products.
They bribed, manipulated and made fake promises for the black governments to accept their economic policies that would ensure their relevance.
They give loans with strings attached that would ensure the country is burdened for decades.
The World Bank recommends loans and privatisation of some key sectors which leads to those sectors coming under the control of a few elites and even foreigners.
Today everything is Africa’s fault.
Most perplexing is Peron questioning African National Congress victory in the 1994 elections after a century of white domination and oppression.
“When the ANC won power, the election was declared ‘free and fair’ by European Community observers,” he writes.
“One observer admitted to a Federal Party official that the election would be declared corrupt if judged by European standards, ‘but this is Africa’.
“No one seems to care that the ANC was elected with millions of fraudulent votes.”
As Peron was writing in 1999 four years after majority rule, violence, a colonial legacy, remained rampant in South Africa.
There would be more violent attacks as the black South African remained jobless and poor in a rich country.
Peron blames the violence on the black government.
“It wasn’t this way four years ago, before the ANC took power,” he says.
According to the author white farmers are targeted.
Werner Weber, president of the Agricultural Employers Organisation at that time, believed there is an orchestrated campaign to force whites off the land so it can be redistributed.
In some attacks people are murdered, but nothing is stolen, indicating that robbery isn’t the motive.
For example, the executive management of Lonmin, Marikana South Africa allegedly receives a salary of about 245 rock drill operators.
“The ANC is pushing a new ‘Equity Employment’ bill through Parliament,” writes Peron.
“This bill will force all employers to reserve a number of jobs for blacks.
“Businesses that don’t comply with the mandatory racial quotas face heavy fines.
“And so apartheid is back, the old laws in new packaging.”
During colonial times management levels were reserved for whites and certain management courses were not opened to black people.
After majority rule, Peron recommends equality where people should begin on equal footing.
But he forgets how the tables were tipped in white favour, how the blacks were disadvantaged.
In fact, he is insinuating that we should forget the 2013 survey conducted in South African schools that revealed the inferiority of the education in black schools almost 20 years after majority rule.
Doesn’t that defy logic and is it not an insult to the black race?