5/30/07

PERSPECTIVE

"DE LA REY DE LA REY/ KAN JY DIE BOERE KOM LEI"



"De La Rey De La Rey/ can you come and lead the Boers", so goes one of the most intelligent song lyrics ever written by an Afrikan who is an Afrikaaner.
Ek moet tyd maak om my Boere vriende te vra hoekom gebruik hulle twee 'a's' wanneer hulle Afrika(a)ner skryf, want ek het altyd gedink dat dit was mos Afrikaner met een 'a', of iemand wat in Afrika gebore is.
If you didn't understand what I wrote above, get yourself a Boer and start a translating team, because the Boers are going to need a lot of translation when some of the songs which have been made popular by darkies are interrogated in this post. Me, I'm on the advantage side want ek kan Engels, Afrikaans, isiZulu, isXhosa, seSotho, sePedi, sePulana, isiSwazi, isiNdebele, xiTsonga, tshiVenda, Tsotsitaal, Ebonics en bietjie Swahili, Portuguese, Arabic verstaan.
Okay back to the issue. "De La Rey, De La Rey/ can you come and lead the Boers". And then General De La Rey responded from the discomfort of a grave, "Bok my seun, ek is moeg, en ek sal nie weer luister nie, want ek het julle Viljoen gegee om julle te lei, maar wat het julle gedoen? Julle het vir hom nie gestem nie. Julle het die vyande van die Afrikaaner volk gekies".
A point that should not evade people suffering from Boerephobia is that they shouldn't try to dictate to the Afrikaner how to commemorate lost glory and celebrate great men like De La Rey. Darkies especially should always be careful not to try and subject whites to the same censorship bullshit they themselves hated so much to the point that they gave their own lives to defeat.
Bok van Blerk is a talented artist who has been to the bottom of the pit, that is if you make time to find out who Louis Pepler really is. A young artist whose rant of lost Boer glory exposes the deeprooted nostalgia suffered by many Afrikaners of true leadership in these times when Affirmative Action creates another Poor White Problem, a problem the former regime addressed with Afrikaner Affirmative Action which was called Job Reservation. Interesting enough van Blerk told DE KAT magazine that "all boys must report for one year mandatory military service after school". He did not segregate, or say that it should be Boere boys only but all boys. That's van Blerk the patriot talking to you, who sees the need for discipline amongst boys who we hope they one day will become men and take in their strides burning issues that make young Boere feel abandoned.
Just right there is something even the Minister of Arts and Culture Dr Pallo Jordan should interrogate, together with Minister of Defence Terror Lekota. The job reservation system within the Afrikaner-led regime was largely rewarding on them having completed three years military service which was enforced through conscription. Opponents of the draft like the famed End Conscription Campaigners argued that the conscripts of those years were used to fight liberation movements and were sent into townships to terrorise darkies. The soldiers of today are not used for such purposes but to help police arrest marihuana smokers. The question should be; is it too late to reintroduce the draft? Or are today's young boys smoking so much marihuana that if they became soldiers they would turn Lohatla (military training facility in Northern Cape) into a little Amsterdam?
Kasiekulture, the colour blind South Afrikan thinks this might help address the issue of Affirmative Action and the bullshit that comes with it. The law will state anyone anyone who has completed voluntary (not compulsory or mandatory as van Blerk suggested) military service will benefit from a Job Reservation scheme, irrespective of race. And right there De La Rey will stop shouting to the Boers to elect their own credible leader in the wake of the failure of Eugene Terre'blance and his Afrikaner Weerstand Beweging (AWB) to liberate the Afrikaner.
Afrikaners, I'm made to believe, dream, party and hope in Afrikaans. Which is fine because even Xhosas do the same things in their own language. Then why should it be considered wrong for the Afrikaner to praise sing, reminisce and evoke the spirit of an Afrikaner General who provided the kind of leadership to the burghers that General Constandt Viljoen tried to reincarnate in the '90s before being seduced by politics of multiracialism?
Rainbownationalism should not be used to grant exclusive rights to only celebrate Deities Shaka, Mhlaba, Soshangane, Mashego, Malele, Mathibela, Nongcause, Siqcau, Matanzima, Moshoeshoe, Sobhuza, Modjadji, Mzilikazi etc without allowing the Boers the right to remember folks like Gen Piet Retief, Andries Pretorius, Simon van der Stel and others.
Given the post-'94 political reality it is understood for the Afrikaner to be nostalgic about the type of leadership provided by Retief, Malan, van Zyl, Botha and many others. When Afrikaner aspirations are met with opportunistic ideals like Die Vaderland (exclusive to Afrikaners), Orania and the Boeremag terrorism the call for unity reflected through the beautiful lyrics of van Blerk should be applauded. To allege that the song might be hijacked for purposes of insurrection is to insult the intelligence of the Boer. "Kill the Boer kill the farmer" was never taken as a call to genocide by rational darkies when the late Peter Mokaba made it the ANC Youth League anthemn. "One settler One Bullet" only encouraged bunches of youths whose future looked dim to resort to political criminal activity. There are mad Boers correct, and like darkies, they are far in-between.
Analysis of the current crop of Afrikaner leaders indicate that they are qeueing to be cannon-fodder in an African National Congress/South African Communist Party/Congress of South African Trade Unions manned artillery piece pointed at Voortrekkerhoogte (Thaba Tshwane). That is why nothing was as intriguing as President Thabo Mbeki, in full knowledge of the partisan approach to the appointment of senior government officials and public servants, which results largely in the mass exodus of non-aligned professionals of all races to ply their trades overseas, went to Pieter Mulder of the FF+ and requested him to sound a call for the Afrikaner to come and help rebuild this country. Mulder went ahead and did as Mbeki requested.
Question is, while De La Rey was so good to conquered British commander Lord Methuen after the battle of Tweebosch would he have done it without first demanding that the Boers still resident in the republic be absorbed first before he could call those overseas to occupy vacant posts?
Boers later, very much later came to call English military recruits soutpiele (salty penis), I'm told by a reliable source. "They laughed at us and said we have one foot in Britain and one in South Afrika and out penises are sucking the salt of the Atlantic Ocean".

Given the current socio-political state of the Afrikaner (which it must be noted many are quite patriotic), is South Afrika reciprocating for their service to this country? Beyers Naude and Braam Fischer have facilities named after them, but they were too aligned. When will the Boer leaders who were not aligned to the ANC see equal glory for having contributed in small ways to the realisation of the ideal that makes it easy for van Blerk to sing and sell hundreds of albums without hooded security police knocking at his door in ungodly hours of the morning?
"The ANC, without prior consultation, proposes that names of towns, which have huge historical and emotional value for the Afrikaner, such as Pretoria, Potchefstroom and Lydenburg, unilaterally be changed. This then sends a strong message to the Afrikaner that their history and their heroes are not important, and are not being accommodated in South Africa,". FF+ leader Pieter Mulder told Mbeki last year. To which the president responded that he'll look into it with Dr Jordan. He even invited Mulder to visit him on the West Wing of the Union Buildings where he joked that Jan Van Riebeek is the first one to greet him every morning as he walks to his office.

Black Afrikans have got an age-old tradition called ukuphahla (appeasing the ancestors). If it is an Afrikan practise, maybe van Blerk is also doing it in his own way, speaking to the General who art in yonder. And if the black ancestor can respond to his kin, why can't De La Rey also respond, often 200 000 times more as he is called from a quarter million houses over braaivleis every weekend?

Maskandi music, which has its roots in Zulu tradition has got interesting lyrics which one of them was quoted by
Sunday Times columnist Fred Khumalo in an article he wrote for The Media, "kwakukuhle kwaZulu, kubhincwa amabheshu, kulalwa emacansini kukuhle kunjeya, kwathi ngenxa yabamhlophe kwaphela kwathi nya! (ancient KwaZulu was divine; we wore our hide apparel, slept on our simple grass mats, oh so divine; but with the arrival of the white man it all disappeared!)"
Freedom of expression can not be exclusive to darkies who sing kwaito and hip-hop. Rapper Molemi has these interesting lines, "Bayethe Zwelinzima Vavi/ you the leader of the people we behind you/ march away Cosatu/ Make the multi-millionaire pay/ Brett Kebble money couldn't a billionaire save/ this is for the black worker in the field/ underground mining Goldfields/ Pat(rice) Motsepe rolling dollar bills/ Ka mo rona bare agela diRDP tse diwang/ building people houses that kill/ if wena o omong wa bare sokolang/down your tools now". Tomorrow one million workers might downing tools, do we hear anyone complaining about incitement? Hell no!
But some critics have already told us that the story of The Night Of Long Knives which circulated some few months ago was a result of De La Rey? Funny double standards hey? Arthur Mafokate had a song titled Kaffir. There are songs with the lines, "Senzeni na senzeni na/ senzeni na maAfrika/ sono sethu ubumnyama/ amabhunu ayizinja". Ask someone.
Maybe at the end of this De La Rey analysis one should look at what Serbian born Eurovision Song Contest winner Maria Serforic said when politicians started interfering with her freedom of expression, "I keep my hands off politics,and I expect the politicians to keep theirs off my music". Or maybe we all need De La Rey to lead us into a new Afrikan millenium.
And whether De La Rey responds to van Blerk or not, at the very end Aime Cesaire had a telling statement, "No race possesses the monopoly of beauty, intelligence, force, and there is room for all of us at the rendezvous of victory". Rest assured, once the General responds, everybody, irrespective of race will find reason to celebrate. We all need a De La Rey.
WATCH THE DE LA REY VIDEO

3 comments:

  1. Heita, I have forwarded the De la rey video to one Afrikaner lady working with us. She used to tell people that the reason she left SA was due to people like me and she fell out of favour with the Kiwis. She has since been labelled racist and she is trying to patch things by befriending me. I had visits to M&G and seen Zapiro's Zuma with a built in shower head dispensing baby oil.

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  2. Anonymous2/26/2009

    This article conflates the Afrikaner with the Boer. The Boers are only the smaller SECTION of the folks that the 20th cent labeled as Afrikaners as the vast majority of Afrikaners are not of Boer descent as they are descended from the Cape Dutch of the Western Cape. Even Hertzog / Malan & Smuts were all of Cape Dutch descent ergo they were not of Boer descent. Louis Botha & Hans Strijdom were the only Boers to have EVER governed South Africa. All the rest were of Cape Dutch descent & in the case of Verwoerd of actual Dutch origin. This is vitally important to recognize as the Boers are under Afrikaner domination as the term Afrikaner lumps them in with the Cape Dutch [ who have historically worked against the Boers ] & the term Afrikaner was cooked up in the late 19th cent by some Cape Dutch intellectuals when they started a language rights movement at a time when most of the ACTUAL Boers were living in their independent world recognized Boer Republics.

    Furthermore: Jan van Riebeeck was not the father of the Boer Nation as he was the OPPRESSOR of the Boers & their ancestors. Van Riebeeck was a cruel TYRANT who took the ancestors of the Boers & even some Afrikaners OUT of Europe & Asia & FORCED them to accompany him to the Cape. Go read his diary in which he made candid comments of utter contempt for the ancestors of the Boer people! He did not even like their language as they spoke Frankonish. The Boers were OPPRESSED by the Dutch rulers at the Cape & tried to escape them from the beginning when they became Trekboers: nomadic patoralists who trekked inland during the late 1600s & all throughout the 1700s in search of freedom from the autocratic VOC rule. The Boers declared their first Boer Republics on the eastern Cape frontier in 1795 in rebellion to Dutch rule. The Boers have very few actual Dutch ancestors as they are mostly of German / Frisian & French Huguenot origins with an admixture of Indian / Malay & Khoi due to absorption into the nascent White Afrikaans speaking population.

    The De La Rey song / video phenomenon speaks MUCH more to the centuries long suppression of Boer identity than it does to the past neo-imperial era of the Cape based Afrikaners as the Boers were ALSO under Afrikaner domination. The was most noted when the Boers were denied in their grass roots attempts at restoring the Boer Republics during the 1940s when the Afrikaner establishment organized & dismantled the entire Boer Republican movement. The Boers had been earlier somewhat co-opted by the ascending Afrikaner Nationalist movement of the previous decade when the Cape Dutch establishment which ran Afrikanerdom usurped some notable Boer history in order to promulgate their platform of White Afrikaans "unity" in the name of outmaneuvering the English speakers within the political realm as the Cape Dutch & the Boers combined under the rubric of Afrikaner Nationalism was the devise used to dislodge the British from their overt control.

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  3. Anonymous2/26/2009

    Addendum. P W Both & F W De Klerk were also of at least partial Boer descent but they were so acculturated into Afrikanerdom & viewed themselves as Afrikaners even to the point of working against Boer aspirations & goals. The un-reconstructed Boers like Robert van Tonder were prevented from rising too high in the political order as established by the Afrikaner Broederbond. The point being that the Boers were marginalized by the Afrikaner establishment as they were [ [& still often are ] viewed as a threat to the interests of the Afrikaans establishment [ the van Riebeeck worshipers as noted in your article ] power.

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