Welcome to Caribbean Rhythms, episode 144. I have a special guest. It's my honor to introduce to you Robert Duygen. Robert, I don't know if I'm pronouncing that correctly, but Robert is a researcher, a commentator, and a writer from South Africa, which is reaching a somewhat critical situation. Everyone talking South Africa now, but very few people know. And it's my honor to introduce to you writer Robert Duygen on Caribbean Rhythms to talk this matter. Welcome to the show, Robert. Thank you for having me on. By the way, the name's pronounced Digan, but no one ever gets it right from the spelling. It's Irish, everything is spelled wrong. Yes, well, forgive me. I am just a East European peasant. I don't know this, but I use American accent.

You, to me, use an incomprehensible South African accent. I don't understand almost anything you're saying. But in any case, welcome to the show, Robert. Tell us, it come up much in the news, South Africa lately, especially every day, every other day I see tweets about the failing electrical grid, electrical system. Other friends tell me there are other things failing in the country. But most people don't know, even the recent history, they don't know current events or delay of the land. Would you please give the audience some introduction to what is going on in your country? Oh yeah, well, I mean, where to start? Pretty much everything's failing at the moment. We got one of the highest homicide rates in the world. We've got one of the highest suicide rates in the world.

We have one of the highest traffic fatality rates in the world. We have one of the worst performing electrical grids in the world. One of the most expensive and yet worst performing education systems in the world. I don't even know where to end. I could just list everything off and say we're in the top 10 worst of everything. And it's just, I mean, we have literally the worst unemployment rates in the world. You can just name anything. South Africa is like one of the worst. And so easily the worst run country given what it had to start off with. When we came out of apartheid in 1994 and the sanctions, the international economic sanctions were finally lifted, we just retired the nuclear warheads. heads. We had the only nuclear power plant on the continent. Yeah, we were doing very well.

World-class engineering, world-class medical system, world-class postal service and telecoms networks and rail and road and, you know, all the shiny modern stuff that you could expect from any developed country. Although there were regions that the infrastructure didn't reach, One must recognise this. However, the thing is that the predictions or the failing, everyone kind of knew it. I think even people who are well on the dreamy side of the left wing here, they kind of knew things were not going to go great, but everyone has to maintain the facade. I mean, one of my favourite little guilty pleasures is this liberal writer, is a historian from South Africa called Arthur Keppel-Jones. Now when I say liberal, being a South African who was writing in the 1940s and 50s,

he's much blunter about facts and realities than most people would be who you could call a liberal. But he wrote this fictional book called When Smuts Goes. And Smuts was a statesman who ran the country more or less for 50 years, and single-handedly wrote the constitution that lasted until 1961. And Keppel Jones, he writes this book and said basically after Smuts goes, you're gonna get an Afrikaner nationalist government, they're gonna run a police state for about just shy of a generation, and then there's going to be a black nationalist uprising that takes over and runs the country into the ground, and civil war will ensue, and then the UN will come and run the ashes for us. And that was written in 1947. And while things actually didn't proceed quite as fast

as you said it would, we're getting there. We're working on it. I remember, and I won't say if it is myself or a friend, but many people are attracted to the natural beauty of South Africa, the national parks, the animals and so forth. And, but even in the early 2000s in Johannesburg, they would say on TV, it was very depressing because every other commercial was for AIDS coffin specials, you know, two for one coffin special for AIDS and such. And it's been going on like this for a long time. And you are right that there are many liberals I hear who were very much against apartheid. But after that, it's not that they became for apartheid, but they saw the regime that followed that became hopeless. And these men, R.W. Johnson is well known outside South Africa, although, yeah.

Whoa, he's a stunning chap. Yeah, no, he's great. I mean, the details he pulls out in his books, stuff that pretty much everyone tries to bury. Even serious conservative types don't mention some of the details he puts in his books in public. He's been quite unashamed of putting the unvarnished truth out there, actually. Yes, and of course no one can accuse him of being motivated by racism or pro-apartheid thing. As far as I know, he was very much against that before. But he has a book, what is it called, Cry the Beloved Country, something like this. Oh, no, Cry the Beloved Country is a novel written by, oh, what's that bugger's name? No, I'm not talking about the novel. Of course, it is the novel, but what is it called, the R.W. Johnson book.

I've recommended it myself to friends quite a few times. How long will South Africa survive? That's from 1977. South Africa's brave new world? Yes. Foreign native, that's the one. Yes, yes. I'm sure. Foreign native, must be that one. Yes, yes, yes. So anyway, the one I've read is the South Africa's brave new world. The beloved country since the end of apartheid. It's not cried the beloved country, he just uses the same phrase, the beloved country. But I found an enormous wealth of facts in that book. That's written more than 10 years ago. What is it now? 14 years ago. He's stunning. If you want to catch where... If you want to keep an eye on South Africa and have sensible commentary, the actual place to get it from is a website called Politics Web.

It's run by a really, really smart guy called James Mayberg. James Mayberg lives in Germany and he's notoriously difficult to get a hold of. But he's done good original research on South Africa. He comes up with stuff that I struggle to find other people who've even heard of it. heard of it. He uncovered this really, really hair-raising and stupid but very interesting plot by the ANC in 1971 to overthrow the government in South Africa, which is quite funny. It's called Operation J. He writes about this in this series on politics web called Singapore revisited, sort of asking, you know, why couldn't, you know, comparing South Africa to Indonesia, and very interesting. So Operation J came about because at the time, you know, the ANC was basically run by the Soviet Union.

The Comintern told us all what to do and where to go, and what happened is that they looked at the revolution in Zanzibar, the Arab minority were massacred and shoveled into mass graves and noted that it was triggered by a very small armed band who just started running amok and triggered a mass uprising. And not realizing that this is lightning in a bottle, not going to happen twice, they thought, well, all we need to do is get a few African nationalists together, give them some machine guns and some rocket launchers and dump them off the east coast and with a few leaflets calling for genocide and everything will light off like you know like a felt fire but what happens is they get into their little boat off the coast of Somalia and very soon they

manage to somehow get seawater in the engine and have to be towed back to port and the whole thing is aborted. Which, you know, for me, the funniest bit was the part with O.R. Tambo, the then leader of the ANC, being treated as nothing more than a sort of busboy. He begs the Russian commenter and says, please let me go along on this sacred mission, literally begging on his knees in tears to go along and massacre white people. And they said, no, no, you're not suitable for this And I always had to chuckle and think of Operation J whenever I see something about O.R. Tambo International Airport. Yes, it's very interesting, the history of the ANC. I mean, most people know what that is, but it's the main black nationalist party, right, of South Africa. I guess communist party, you can say.

They actually rule in coalition with the South African Communist Party, who don't really feature much in politics. They keep their heads down and write a lot of boilerplate government policy stuff. They're the intellectual wing of the ANC, shall we say. Actually, I want to get into some of the history of the ANC and the history of 20th century South Africa that you were just talking about. But before we do, would you care to tell more to the audience about day-to-day life in South Africa? You mentioned the power grid is one of the worst in the world and is failing or is going to fail, perhaps completely. I've heard the water supply has similar problems. The man we just mentioned, R.W. Johnson, and I know you also talked about the same thing.

Thabo Mbeki is seen by outsiders as perhaps one of South Africa's good post-apartheid presidents. But he makes the case, and I think you make the case also, he is really the cause of many of South Africa's problems now. Would you just please tell a little bit more to the audience about the failing infrastructure, in particular the electricity grid and the water supply, and perhaps also the insane so-called affirmative action or really, rather, it's racial discrimination policies that South Africa has been using. Oh, well, it's very simple. So, look, the settlement that came out in 1994 was negotiated for under conditions of really mass violence. So the ANC, in the 1970s, they were kind of nothing. They couldn't get anything off the ground and the Soviet Union kind of forgot about them.

In the meantime, you started having the CIA reaching into South Africa. Yes. A father of a good friend of mine, Alain Spencell, known on Twitter as conscious caracal, his father sent me a link to something very interesting. There's the U.S. Information Agency in 1975, they set up a reading room in Soweto. And it seemed that they were busying themselves with conscientizing the black youth in the area by showing them silly little films like Roots amongst other things. What was this? This is 1975. If you go on Google Books you can actually find a yearbook quite like sort of celebrating the establishment of this. And I found the minutes of the budget meeting when this was announced. And the next item on the on the roster was how to increase female representation within the USIA

So from 1975 already quite done the progressive Yeah, but at any rate so the very next year we get Steve Biko Amongst other sort of luminaries of the black consciousness movement, which interestingly enough was started by the Anglican Church This is an aspect that they don't like mentioning, but the Anglican Church spawned the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa. This gets very interesting because when the Black Consciousness Movement managed to organize the student uprisings the next year in 1976, hit the news everywhere because the police decided to just put them down with live gunfire. Immediately, the Soviet Union realized, oh, wait, South Africa does have revolutionary potential, in their words.

So they start pumping money into the ANC again, except that they figure, well, the ANC are quite incompetent, so we need to send them on a training trip. So they send them on a fact-finding mission to Vietnam, for how to do, you know, sort of insurgency stuff. And they get this thing from, what's his name, the General's name is von Wenziap. And von Wenziap had this idea called the People's War. And it's the same sort of Schmittian partisan war stuff that was talked about beforehand, but it's much more clearly laid out and it's much more sort of practical stuff. And the idea is basically every man, woman and child is either under your command or they are an enemy who will be destroyed and so this tactic the People's Wars launched in 1979 and the idea was to mop up all competing black

liberation movements so this this campaign the official figure the bodies that we actually managed to count roughly about is over 20,000 yes and most of this is the ANC and they because they had accomplices in the UN High Commissioner of Refugees. Anyone who fled South Africa was sucked straight into their torture and internment camps in Zimbabwe and Tanzania. And so they quickly got rid of sort of Steve Beaker's sort of former colleagues who they now pretend are their comrades all along. Yes. Because Steve Beaker's very stupid little book and it's not very, it would be frowned upon to say that it's stupid these days, since it is the most stolen library book in the country, and it's very popular amongst intellectuals. But this is a man who said that, in all the history

of Europe, the worst thing that happened when a white man conquered another white man was a little admixture of languages. But when they conquer us, they torture us and kill us. And I sort of thought, this is a man born after World War Two, you have to be incredibly stupid to say something like that but yes you know yes yes um but yeah so um this people's were drags on and you have necklaces you have you know people being burnt alive in the street beaten stone to be headed these things were common i mean my father-in-law's uh uh you know um what's it called uh special forces um fella and uh yeah i he's uh he speaks a little bitterly of this kind But the thing is, by the time you get to the 1990s, it's basically just the ANC who's mopped up the whole liberation movement.

The only competition remaining is the Zulu nationalist IFP, whose leader has now died in the past week at the age of 95, and is now getting hit pieces from all of the old white progressives who called themselves anti-apartheid activists. They're all writing in the British newspapers and stuff, all of the invective they can to slander the man for defending his nation against communist terrorism. But the outcome of it was that there's this compromise settlement. So the nationalist government is too strong for the ANC to fight head on, but they're also too weak financially and diplomatically to keep the ball rolling. So they brokered a settlement. And in the settlement, you get joint government for a couple of years while they're writing the new constitution.

And the new constitution gets signed in 1996. And the Nationalist Party just walk off into the sunset. They just retire after the constitution's written. Most of them actually joined the ANC. And the last leader of the Nationalist Party, Martinez von Schalkweg, when the party was wound up in the mid-2000s, actually ended up as, I think he was Minister of Tourism and Fisheries or something. This is someone from the Afrikaner Nationalist government, you mean, South Africa. Yes, that's correct. What people don't actually know is that the government actually decided that they were going to dismantle apartheid in 1977, the year after the Soweto riots. So beforehand, there was something called the Vihan Report. So that came out, that was commissioned

in 73, 74, and that was in response to a general strike centered around coal mine workers in Kuzulu-Natal, sort of Kuzulu area, Natal province at the time, and the basic sort of problem with that is that they've realized that they couldn't really contain the union movements without costing them really, really badly economically, because remember the elites have to continually balance with the mining mine houses, which is a dimension that I can get into later. But the issue with the Vihan report, when it came out in 77, it basically said, this is unsustainable, we're not going to be able to keep the colour bar going for very long. So Prime Minister Forster basically announced, we're going to slowly dismantle everything.

So, they removed the color bar in certain artisanal sectors and increased it for more and more sectors over time since then, and started getting rid of laws against miscegenation and so on and so forth. They also agreed in 77 to join the embargo against Rhodesia, which choked the country out and they only lasted another two years. I read before that South Africa turned against Rhodesia because they felt they could not control the government of Ian Smith, but that they could maybe control the black African governments in the surrounding countries. And so, is this correct? I don't know if it's right. At least this is what a Rhodesian nationalist would say. I don't know. It's hard to say, because a lot of the documents that would have been revealing have been destroyed.

The picture I get from reading up on this stuff is more or less that they kind of realized the writing was on the wall, and that they couldn't keep it going forever, and so that whole period from 77 till 93 is just damage control. Yes. just damage control. So they don't believe in what they're doing anymore. They're just trying to balance power and keep a balance of forces in control until they can work out and exit. And yeah, it's very, very sad because people for nearly a generation were sitting there thinking that they were fighting for something real. There are people fighting on the border against communism. I mean, look, there's a legitimate reason for the border war, I mean, you have, you literally have... Tell the audience what the border war is. The border war is the result of,

South Africa basically had a mandate over what's now Namibia from 1918. And my great, great uncle, Keisper Reitz Hofmeir, was actually the first governor of that mandate. Yes. And he was a bit of a violent bugger. He looked a bit like Frank Zappa, actually, if you want to picture him. And the way that he dealt with native unrest was usually extreme excess. So there was a group of mixed race people called the Bondelswarz, who were banned from having, there was a ban against having hunting dogs or rifles for some reason. and they decided, no, we don't care for this law, we're gonna keep our rifles and our hunting dogs. And Mr. Hoffmeyer decided that the best move would be to use the newly invented Air Force to drop some bombs on them. This is in Namibia. Which is... Well, yeah, I mean...

So even the conservative press at the time thought that was rather terrible, so, yeah. But at any rate, when the Portuguese that the bordering Angola sort of kicked the bucket under the Colonation Revolution, there's massive civil war breaks. Just to tell the audience, the Portuguese empire essentially fell apart in 75. Angola and Mozambique used to be Portuguese colonies. I think actually that's what wrote Rhodesia's death warrant because they were getting most of their supplies through the Portuguese, I think. So when that failed, just to give the audience some historical timeline, I believe that was 75, right? And then civil war started in those countries, supposedly because of Soviet funded local communist so-called black nationalist movements.

But in fact, I think there was quite a lot of American involvement there too, but we can talk about that later. Yeah, no, I mean, the big thing is that we had, the communists immediately took over and you had, while people sort of point out that there's like material support and what have you from Russia and most of the, and that most of the people fighting there were, you know, Angolans, Cubans, and so on, and some Namibians. The thing is, a lot of their battles were actually personally directed by Soviet generals. So there was a serious war on our border, because Namibia was part of South Africa at the time. There was a war on our border with the Soviet Union, and that raged on for a good 25 years,

And it ended in a sort of face-saving compromise for both parties, where the communists go back over the border, and South Africa lets Namibia have democratic elections, and yeah. But we were already winding down at the time. Yes. Well, sorry I interrupted you just to give the audience some of the border war, but yes, you were saying? Yeah. I mean, but we had conscription. Every young man had to go to the military unless they had, you know, there were a few get out clauses. Like, my father didn't want to go to the war, so he decided to, he decided to go to university and then he dropped out in his first year and then went to join the merchant navy. So he punted container ships all over the globe for about six, seven years and then and came back and did chemical engineering.

Yeah, I mean, he was very into his programming, so he did, he made the, for some reason, IBM got a contract with our merchant Navy company, Saf Marine, and they had these big mainframes on the ships they didn't know what to do with, so my father programmed the first digital navigation software for the South African merchant Navy. Yes, of course. I don't want to say that would be made illegal now under South Africa's new insane affirmative action so-called, but it would be made very hard. I like this story of as soon as new submarines were launched a few years ago, they would immediately run into the ocean floor. And it's just... I know you probably don't want to spend this whole show... ...complaining about the sorry state of what's going on, but just...

No, I mean, sometimes it's funny. I mean, look at this point. At this point, I'm not even depressed. It's like, you know... I've gone through my whole sort of grief and depression stuff... ...about the state of my country. But I grew up under black leadership, black government and all of this. So for me, it's sort of, it's part of the fabric of reality. And there's no point in getting depressed. There's a lot of young people who get depressed, there's no future, whatever. I think the thing is that most people haven't even tried to think of alternative ways that things could be. And the thing is, right now, we're headed towards a very, very exciting period of time where there are real opportunities to change.

It's going to be a bit scary for a while, but the country could actually break up in the next two years. Well, I want to talk to you later on this episode, Robert, about, sorry, I don't mean to cut you off, but this is too important to just say it as an aside. We're talking, of course, about things like the Cape Town independence movement. And so I certainly think that there are serious, not just possibilities, but probabilities, even certainties that the present state of things there can't continue. But I just want to give the audience, again, I'm not encouraging you if you don't want to complain to complain, but I want to give the audience some idea of just how bad the structural problem with affirmative action, because in the United States, where people

know about affirmative action, it's quite bad, but it's nothing like what it is in South Africa, and would you tell people about just the structural form that affirmative action takes there, for example, you're a corporation, or even a small company or business, you want to do business in South Africa, what does the South African government, which is, you're being very polite, I will be as polite as I must be on this show, I will say I believe it's not controversial, it's a a racially mobilized government. What does this force companies to do? A, and B, what are the effects of this, again, in regard to the infrastructure, the water system and such? And also, what is this thing called KEDR deployment that Thabo Mbeki introduced,

and that R.W. Johnson says just really wrecked the country almost more than anything, but yes. Oh, absolutely. I mean, the thing is, it's a great place to kick off, to return to where we were in the timeline, because when, where we were just now is we were in the middle of the 90s. So, you know, border wars ended, ANC signed their little documents on the Constitution. We've got now got a constitution that in its opening paragraphs pledges social justice and blah, blah, blah. So it's the wokest constitution that's ever been written. and so it's gotten a lot of praise. However, so the interesting thing is that they didn't want to outlaw racial discrimination as such, only what they call unfair racial discrimination. So they left themselves the window very cleverly.

And Nelson Mandela didn't concern himself very much with these kind of things. He just sort of spent a lot of money on poor people, building lots of houses, having lots of nice sexy welfare packages for the voters and then it turned out to not be sustainable and then to reel this in a bit but Thabo Mbeki realized when he took over from the aging Mandela in 98 he basically pushed out all of the old sort of white civil servants that had been hanging on after the transition period just cleaned out the departments and you can see that in all of the of the major departments in all of the government, the last real report where you can get, where the real sort of competent leadership is in charge, is in like 1999. And for ESCOM, which

is our national electricity provider, it's very illustrating. You can still find this on the ESCOM website, in the old, damaged Xerox copy that's been PDF'd up, where they report and they say, at current rates of electricity generation, if we do not build more power stations, we are going to be experiencing rolling blackouts by the year 2007. And, lo and behold, very early the next year, rolling blackouts arrive. Prediction, marvelous. But this goes for all of the departments. I mean, it's not that they weren't sort of crumbling by the 1980s, because we had high inflation and so on, and the government was no longer enforcing much its security laws as effectively as it once did. Many reasons for this, but by the time you get to 2003, this is the real tipping point. Thabo Mbeki decides that

there's a report that 2003 is a great year, because here you get the Oppenheimer family, which are these, they are a sort of a mining magnate group that was, that took over most of the mining in South Africa with financing from JP Morgan in the 1920s. And they were, and they, yeah, by the 90s, during the 80s, they funded not only the Nationalist Party, but also the ANC and the Divestment and Sanctions Group overseas, so that you got this interesting trifecta that they pushed, which meant that they accelerated the divestment from the South African economy, which meant that they could pick up foreign companies at fire sale prices. By the end of the 80s, they controlled, either directly or indirectly, around 80% of the formal economy.

As we say here, they're very scallom people, but in 2003 they decided on an initiative it's called the Brenthurst Initiative, and they wanted to sort of shape the way in which the black nationalist government would appropriate the private economy. And this ended up becoming black economic empowerment. And black economic empowerment essentially means that not only do you have quotas in management and employment for how many black people you're supposed to hire, But also, if you're a publicly traded company, then at least 26% of your shares have to be given to black shareholders. So, you get these people who get a free ride, they don't have to invest, they don't have to work, they don't have to do anything, they just get free shares.

And also, they started something called a CADO deployment, which means that specially picked members of the ANC get placed in special areas in civil servants and in private companies with BEE, because who are you going to do business with? If you want to make sure that your business runs smoothly, why appoint some random black guy off the street when you can appoint a ruling party stooge who will sign all of your documents nicely for you? So now you've got a situation where the commanding heights of the economy are babysat by members of the ruling party who, while extremely incompetent, are at least very corrupt and therefore allow certain things to happen. And in 2003 there's another thing that happened, which is that a report on farm murders

that was commissioned by the Mandela government in 1998 on their way out. Now one must remember that killing farmers was an act of terrorism that was promoted as a prominent tactic in the 1980s and it had continued even after the ANC took power and so there was a big report you know have to make it look serious they had a look into it and it took five years to come out and then it came out with a a statistic that 66% of all rural homicide victims are white, even though they are less than 5% of the rural population. Yes. And this was very embarrassing. And so Becky jumped right on it and decided he was going to do something. And what he did was he removed race from public police statistics. And he cut the number of rural police stations in half.

And so now, yeah, the situation has moved at pace. He also tried to suffocate the rural economy by removing all of the farm sanction subsidies, but this didn't have the effect intended. And what it did is it increased the efficiency of South African farms, as well as leading to consolidation of the less competent farms by bigger conglomerates. And not much of the farmland ended up in black hands after that after all. Because most people who apply for land claims, land restitution, they don't want land, they just want the money. And so the statistics on rural land ownership don't change much no matter how many court cases go through for land claims. Yes, everyone is horrified listening news about the farm murders and so on. By the way, we should go to a quick break soon

and come back perhaps if you would like to talk some in more detail, the history of South Africa. But before we do, I want to ask you about this question about the farm murders, they are reported sometimes but not enough in media and recently there was this character, Malema, who seems to be openly calling for genocide or things that sound like genocide or openly calling for murder. And I want to ask you about that and what, is there an imminent danger of something happening in South Africa, like what happened in Rwanda or maybe not that big, but something along those lines? Is there something, is there a danger like this in the near future, you think? Well, I would say, very simply to answer that, no, South Africa is not Rwanda. We are too big, too diverse, and our leadership is too

malcoordinated to really pull off something like Rwanda. You would need something very, very, very severe to happen over very many years for us to do a Rwanda. I mean, Rwanda, one must remember, was on the brink of starvation when this happened already due to extremely poor land management. So we haven't reached the level of land reform. I mean, remember, the kind of land reform that our ruling party is promising is the kind of land reform the Hutu nationalists did in 1960. So it was another 30 years before they pulled the machetes out. So I think I think one must remember the conditions in which this occurs are much more extreme than the conditions which we are currently exposed to. There are also other reasons.

But if anyone does want to understand the farm murders thing, the guy to go to for this, and there are many interviews with him online, and his book on the subject is full of fantastic statistics about South Africa, and media bias, and rural economy, and farm murders, and Africana nationalism, and all of this, and the fella's name is Ernst Roetz. That's E-R-N-S-T-R-O-E-T-S. He was until about a week ago, he was the head of a group called AfriForum, who sort of does legal advocacy on behalf of mainly Afrikaners, but also other minorities in South Africa. And he is now moving to Solidaritait, which is sort of, it started around a mine workers union that began in 1902, but he's moving towards building a parallel government in South Africa.

So, Ernst Rütz, his book Kill the Boer, very, very good stuff to read. I have done a little work with AfriForum before, good people, very, very sound source of information on most things to do with South Africa. They also recently put out a report on the amount of racial legislation in South Africa, which is very interesting. Very interesting, Robert. Erstrud of Solidaritet, formerly he was at AfriForum, we, yes, get his book. It's called Kill the Boar, right? Get the book. Correct. And we will be right back to talk in more detail history, recent 20th century history, South Africa. Is this good? Robert, you have to go for a smoke break now. I do indeed. Very good. We will be right back. Dimitri Shostapovich, Vice is Musa Gikina Filmo, Pierre V. Echevo.

with Robert Duygen, who are talking about South Africa. And by the way, we are going to discuss South Africa history on this segment. And Robert, you have a substack called Marhobane, M-A-R-H-O-B-A-N-E. It means rogue, I believe, yes. And marhobane.substack.com, you talk much about South Africa politics and history and such. I strongly recommend listeners to go this. But Robert, I wanted to just, many people don't have even a basic grasp of South Africa's so-called colonial history, and I wanted to ask you about that, because when the Portuguese first came, and they used, I believe, the territory around Cape Town as a way station on the way to Asia and India, But the territory was largely uninhabited. There were certain tribes there, but those tribes are, again, correct me if I'm wrong,

they're not the main political players in any of the main ethnic factions today. And perhaps people are not aware that the Dutch in English, the Dutch have been there since, what, the 1600s? Same as in the United States. 1652. 1652, same as in United States. And most of the black people there came later, and so this whole discourse about, oh, you're a colonialist and you took our land and such, I think, well, I talk too much, Robert. Do you want to talk about this? People don't know this history. Yes, I think the thing is, it's not quite as clear cut as that. So let me put it this way. The first fact to get one's head around is that South Africa is about three times the size of Germany in terms of land area. It's a very big country and now, you know, in the middle of the 19th century,

there were about 2 million people living in South Africa. And if you go back to the first days of settlement, it's significantly smaller. So lots of open space. Most of the people living here were either nomadic tribes or, you know, at least only semi-settled. So the people who lived here at the Cape Peninsula where the first white settlers popped up were mostly hunter-gatherers, some of them were cattle herders, but no settled agriculture. But the black people, the Bantu settlers, they had been in the rest of South Africa from about 1,000 to 1,500 years ago, depending on who you ask, but they didn't come into what is now called the Cape. So I got into a Twitter spat about this with a pro-black colored gentleman from the Cape who disputed this and

based on a sort of third-hand account in one of Jan van Rubijk's Now, Jan van Riebig was the Dutch governor of the Cape from 1652, set up the first way station. The Portuguese sort of stopped by, said hello, killed a few natives and ran away. But the Dutch were the first people to really put down a settlement. I mean, almost immediately the Dutch burgers rebelled against them for, you know, taxing their agricultural products too hard, which is sort of, if you read Hermann Giliomir, that's G-I-L-I-O-M-E-E, he is the premier historian of Afrikaner history, and his book on the history of Afrikaners opens with this particular little tax revolt, which kind of sets the tone for Afrikaners, because they don't like following anyone, they don't like

They're very much, they have a very sort of autonomous, fuck you sort of attitude towards most things and always have. But the early days of the Cape, the best person to look at there is a fellow called Mansel Upham, who's currently residing in Japan. He was a sort of renegade archival historian from the age of 14, who has an absolutely eidetic memory for anyone who was born, lived or died in the first 50 years of the Cape. He will tell you their entire life story. The man is extraordinary. That would be the best source to go to and he runs a blog called Muateze. Very, very good to follow that gentleman. Sorry to interrupt you. I'm a little drunk. I don't mean to cut off the train of your thought. You mentioned Japan. He lives in Japan. The Japanese were classified...

The first person, the first foreigner to die on Japanese soil and be buried was born in Cape Town. Is it true that the Japanese under apartheid system were classified as white or am I wrong about that? Yes, this is true. So funnily enough, up until the mid-70s, black Americans were classified as honorary whites because the basis for apartheid was a cultural one at a theoretical level, rather than a genetic one. And even Hendrik Verwoort, who was... This is the most peculiar thing, is that while much of his party were very sort of aligned with national socialism, had much... There was lots of talk of, you know, Herrenfolk and all of that kind of stuff. For Wurtz himself, who was the big sort of apartheid sort of architect, as he's known,

personally wrote in many of his psychological treatises that black and white people were genetically equal, but culturally distinct. And that was his basis for defending the system. It's very, very peculiar. It sort of makes the head of white supremacy a liberal reformer. It's one of the peculiarities that you get down here. That's very interesting. I interrupted you. Sorry, go on with the early Cape Colony. This is interesting, yeah. Yes, well, so the first 50 years, you hardly had any white women. And so a lot of the white men down here had relations with the native women. And the basis of citizenship was not race, but baptism. And so you had, as long as you were baptized into the Dutch Reformed Church, you could be a full citizen.

And until the French arrived, 50 years after the settlement, the French Huguenots, of which I am descendant, there was a lot of racial admixture and pretty much anyone from the really old white families in South Africa will have about 1-2% native Khoisan blood in them. in them. Interesting. But I got into an argument about this period of history with someone who pointed to something in Jan van Riebeck's diary, where one of these first natives to join the settler community, a woman called Eva Kratua, she acted as a translator and and things about alcoholism, prostitution, lots of seedy things as usual for our part of the world. But she claimed that just outside the peninsula there was the empire of Monomotapa, this enormously wealthy black king and so on and so forth.

And he called the people the kaborna. Now, the fellow basically insinuated that the Cape had been settled by black Africans since the Dot, but I had a look at it, and there was talk about this amongst historians to try and find who the Cabona were. It turns out that 30 years after the settlement, some Dutch explorers went out to try and make contact with them, and they described riding 500 miles east along the coast and then finding that they were still a five days horse ride away from where these people settled. And I marked this out on the map and it turns out to be just east of the Sundaes River, near what is now Port Elizabeth, or as it has been renamed, Grebecha. And what's interesting is if you look

the 2011 census of South Africa and look at the, there's a very autistic but wonderful fellow called Adrian Frith who has made these fantastic dot maps of all of the sort of ethno-linguistic data about South Africa. If you look up Adrian Frith South Africa on Google images you'll get all of these wonderful maps and it turns out that the areas where you find majority plaza speaking versus majority Afrikaans speaking, run right along a vertical line just above the mouth of the Sundes River, even 300-400 years later. But the Bantu-speaking peoples, when they arrived, they have about one third of their genetic material, sometimes less depending which tribe we're talking about, coming from Khoisan origins, and the reason for this, it's almost exclusively

on the female genetic lab on the mitochondrial line, and the reason for this is they, well, it's based on, you know, raiding and slavery and so on, and there's very little writing on this, but there are some, there are some, let me have a look and see if I can remember the title, What have you captured for your family? I think is the title of the article. Here we go, by someone called Morelli from 2019. There's an article on pre-colonial slavery. So there was a fairly developed inland slavery practice in South Africa. And the Koi and San peoples were the primary target thereof. But there are two main linguistic groups in South Africa. One is the Nguni peoples, that's Oza, Zulu, Ndebele and Swazi, right? And then there's the Sutu Tswana peoples, which are, well, Sutu, Tswana and Pedi.

Now, the Sutu Tswana peoples have very few cliques in their languages. Some loanwords from Khoisan languages that still have a clique in them, but mostly none, right? The Nguni languages have tons of clicks, even in words that have a Bantu linguistic origin. And the reason for this is very interesting. So they had this practice called ogosla nipa, which nowadays where the sort of taboos are mostly eroded, it generally means sort of respect, right? But it used to be a very complex system of taboos that included that the syllables in the name of the husband family you marry into, may not be pronounced. And so women, as well as the sacred sort of animals that represent their clan. So the women who were forced into these marriages through what

was called ugo-toi-loa, which is a broad word that sort of means getting something, And it can also refer to making bargains with evil spirits for special favors, but it also means sort of bride-kidnapping. And it still happens to some degree today, the bride-kidnapping, although it's somewhat less than it used to be. But the women who kidnapped into there were forced into this ulfani-pa sort of linguistic taboo, and they swapped in the sounds from their native languages to avoid pronouncing the forbidden syllables. That was very interesting. And this is how it migrated into, so this sort of artifact is even left in there. But I came across one really interesting thing, which is that when you discuss these topics with them, they refer to the native peoples of the Cape as the, as Twa. Yes.

And I recognize this as the word that the Congolese used to refer to the Pygmies. Yes, this is the Pygmy class also in Rwanda. They're called the Twa, I believe. Yes, absolutely. And so despite being separated by about a thousand odd years of continental migration, they still use the same words and concepts. And funnily enough, if you've tried learning any of these languages, particularly the sututana languages it's very very apparent so they have this whole thing where so they have noun classes like bantu languages have these noun classes so they'll refer to they have classes that refer to people yes so like mo is one person and ba is many person like they is ba and then for inanimate objects they'll have ma and le and so on like you know in the same way that you have le

and la in French or dar dee das in German, except they refer to, they have meaning. Yes. Right. Yes. And if you, so if you, if you speak Setswana, let's say there was a, like, some incident at the tavern and people got stabbed and what have you, you'd say, you know, banabatso balaya, banabararo le zulu. So you would say, they killed three people and a zulu. Yes. So you would have this peculiar thing where people who are not within your tribe are not considered people. Yes, that's very interesting. And we are referred to as lekkoa, not bakkoa. White people are le, we are things, we are not really human. And in the Nguni languages, we will never be referred to as umtu, which is a person, we are always umlungu. It is a completely distinct

When they refer to people, whites are not within that category. Oh, that's very interesting. You know what's interesting? The thing you say about the Twa. Because as far as I know, the Hottentots, the Koi and the San people, are not especially pygmy-like, but they are hunter-gatherers. And I think maybe most people are not aware when they talk about Africans that the Bantu people are not hunter-gatherers or hunters. They're mostly farmers, and I don't want to pronounce whether they're competent farmers or not, but they are farmers, and they are seen in Africa as farmers and understood to have the stereotypes that farmers all over the world have. Whereas the only real hunter-gatherers are the pygmies, and again, the very ancient peoples that populated

South Africa before the Bantus and other black peoples came, the hottentas, the coensans, and so on. And so it's very interesting that they probably refer to them as the Toi because they are hunter-gatherers like the only other hunter-gatherer people they had known, the pygmies. I don't know, but everything you say... Well, they're not referred to that anymore because their descendants were included into the coloured racial category. And so many of them are sort of racially mixed. And whether they come from a mixture of European and Bantu ancestry or Khoisan ancestry, or Malaysian ancestry because there was big Malaysian-Indonesian slave trade here. Yes. Regardless of which of that genetic background they come from, if they're neither white nor black, they were categorized as colored.

And the colored peoples are sort of, for lack of a better term, a melting pot. and while they share a lot of culture and language in common, they're not very united and they tend towards a very paranoid political style where they trust neither outsiders nor their own people for political leadership. They're very divided. This is very interesting. I want to move the conversation, if you don't mind, to the 20th century now because your discussion of everything you've said so far reminds me of how politicized the word indigenous peoples is because after all the indigenous peoples are the Hottentots and so on in the same way that in Australia the indigenous peoples there was a pre-Aboriginal population unless I'm getting the name wrong I think Keith Winshuttle talks about this

They were totally wiped out by the Aborigines who delete and wipe out their art whenever they encounter them, they scratch their art out. And in the same way in the United States, where it's a very unfortunately racially charged atmosphere now and talk about indigenous peoples, but you hardly ever hear anymore about the Native Americans and their rights, the command chief, such exists, the Apache. It's a completely politicized word, and I think the legacy of 20th century, let's say, world revolution inspired by the Soviet Union and by the Marxist-Leninist project, which I believe intended to mobilize the global south against the global north. Now, you don't have to agree with that, but I am interested in this, in how it came about the current situation in South Africa.

I interrupted you on previous segments. You were saying very interesting things about the ANC. Would you care to talk more about this, the ANC, which foreign powers, the Soviet Union, of course, and such, but others too, it was supported by, yes, Soviet involvement in South Africa. I keep bringing up this book by R.W. Johnson because it's the one thing I read recently on South Africa. And he mentions that Chris Hani and all the other leaders of the ANC were fluent in Russian, they had all studied in Moscow, and so on and so forth. Do you have any opinions on such things? Well, I mean, yeah, the ANC were not all that competent when they were formed in 1912. They were just mostly sort of educated clerks and African aristocracy, and they were just lobbying for more rights.

And while they had some negotiation with the government of Jan Smuts, who took over after Union. Now, Jan Smuts was a, he was a Boer War General who led the guerrilla campaign after the conventional forces were defeated. And for two years, there's a fantastic book called Commando by Denise Reitz, whose father was Secretary of State for the Free State. And so he has insight into, you know, the politics, but also was in most of the conventional war as well as the guerrilla campaign. Deneith Reitz covers this campaign quite extensively. Very good, very first personal account. I had a copy for my 18th birthday. But Jan Smuts, who led this guerrilla charge, he ended up as the prime minister after General Borta died, and he also single-handedly wrote the interim constitution for the Transvaal,

And then the Union of South Africa, which was from 1910 until 1961, that constitution was in play. He also wrote the constitution by himself of the League of Nations and much of the architecture of the United Nations. This is a figure who basically characterizes the entire era. And while he was in charge, the ANC had people to talk to in the administration. But when the Afrikaner nationalist government came into power in 1948, they were completely shut out. So they didn't have much to do. So they reached out internationally. And in 1951, I believe, they made deals with the Communist Party. And in 1955 they managed to bring out something called the Freedom Charter. You can look this up, it's one page of very childish political demands... for basically nationalisation of everything.

And very interestingly something where they say... and this is kind of important for what's happening now... the right to settle anywhere one pleases. Right now we're dealing with a problem of land invasions. land invasions is basically you own a piece of land someone comes and puts up a shack on your land if you want to get rid of them you have to get a court order this takes five months if you're lucky and in this time if they're they will be made aware that you're launching a court case against them and will probably physically attack yes so so most farm attacks stem from land land invasions. So yeah, this is something. Same thing, by the way, I guess it's a Zimbabwe process of seizure by squatting, but it happens all over South America. That's a whole other discussion, though.

People don't know that large swathes of Brazil and Argentina, squatters simply seize land with the help of the local leftist government, usually. But so, yes, this campaign, including the border war, which you said had Soviet generals and such, but the campaign against South Africa, it's known to have been supported by the Soviet Union, but there were other countries also that supported it. No, so for example, you mentioned on last segment. Sweden. Yes, I believe that Sweden was either the second maybe an even bigger funder of the ANC, second or only to the Soviet Union, or even more. Any opinions about that? Why do the Swedes do it? Is it just Scandinavian moral narcissism, moral supremacy of the Scandinavians?

Quite possibly. My insight into the Scandinavians is quite limited. I have some Swedish ancestors, but they were very poor and didn't carry much history with them. My understanding of the Swedish government is limited to my investigations into their drug policy and the works of Niels Bayrot, so I don't have a lot of insight there. I know Olof Palme. I found myself, when I was doing my Masters, living in a small village in the Netherlands, called Bachnobsam. The theme song of the town from the Spanish War of Independence turned out to be used in as the battle song of the Boers, it's called Marktokhustark, and the main bridge over the highway in the town is named after Olof Pomer, who had sent government funding to the ANC. And when he was assassinated, it was

rumored for many, many years that he was assassinated by South African Special Police, but it turned out, it was found a couple years ago, that it was some personal issue with some alcoholic lunatic who very, very sad and depressing into a story. I don't like when stories end on these boring random details. Yes. They need to be antagonism. It was supposed to be the Yugoslav Secret Service or the South African or some other, but Olaf Palme and the Swedes, I believe, were just motivated by sincere, moral, moralistic megalomania, and that's why they funded it. I think it's a different matter when you get to American involvement in so-called decolonization of Africa. And you mentioned in 1977 or so the government of South Africa decided to end apartheid.

I know of some secret communique from that time, 77 or 78, when Bertha, I don't know if I'm pronouncing his name right, But I think he was foreign or defense minister at the time. And he wrote to South African leadership saying that who we really have to worry about is we can manage the Soviet threat, but the threat that comes from the United States is, in the long term, much more severe to South Africa. And I want to read for you. I have in front of me open the Hillel du Berrier archive, which I mentioned before, but I recommend to any reader who wants maybe alternative true history of 20th century, although said from the point of view of somebody who was connected to French intelligence services, but I think he tells the truth. I will just read a short paragraph if you don't mind,

Robert, I am reading now. Oh, please. It has been 18 years, he's writing this, by the way, in 1977. It has been 18 years since Labour's revolution Soer, Irving Brown, and New York lawyer Lawrence C. McQuaid toured black Africa, telling the people, unite, you have a continent to regain and nothing to lose but your chains. It has been almost 16 years since Mr. Brown's friend and associate, Mr. Jay Lovestone, one-time Secretary General of the Communist Party USA, wrote his famous letter of December 1, 1960 to the UN representative from Communist Mali. Mr. Lovestone rejoiced that 1960 would, quote, go down in history as the year of Africa, end quote, and called for greater efforts to free the remaining African nations, again quoting, still fighting for their emancipation, end quote.

Already on March 9, 1960, Walter P. Reuther had called on the labor unions of Africa to demand that the United States recall her ambassador from the Union of South Africa. He called for pressure to make the US cease buying gold from South Africa and ever ready to sabotage our defense program, asked African leaders to insist that we cease buying South African strategic materials being stockpiled for defense. Anyway, he keeps going and then he blames Kissinger for what he did in Africa after that. But do you have any opinions on this? Because this man who I recommend to all to read his book, Background to Betrayal, which he wrote about Vietnam in 1965, documents in some detail how, for example, Mondlane, the leader of, what is it, FRELIMO,

the Mozambican communist so-called liberation movement, which, you are right, it was Soviet-funded and led, but Mr. Mondlane had been a professor at the University of Syracuse in United States, and so almost all of these decolonization movements and the agitation in and against South Africa was in some way inspired or trained by the Americans. Am I going too far, Robert? Do you have any opinions on such things? Well, the Americans' influence, I think, was limited to the black consciousness movement. I think, actually, the British had more input there, to be honest, as well. As I said, Anglican church ties. I mean, Desmond Tutu, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Anglican Archbishop. But the thing that I sort of pick up on is I think that P.W.

Butte was right to see America as a threat because America had already decided at that point that the civil rights movement had already become an article of faith in the whole American political system. And so them exporting this vision of democracy over the rest of the world was it had a certain defining character, whereas the Russians were happy with any sort of system that pushed socialism, regardless of who was in charge. I mean, in Cuba, they weren't too keen on any kind of racial justice system or anything like that. And they had their own sort of segregation system in Russia as well, as the scholar J. Otto Pohl, that's P-O-H-L, a descendant of Volga Germans who is taught in funny little places, but he's written a very good book on the ethnic cleansing

and segregation policies in the Soviet Union. But I think what Berto was picking up on was that the United States was not likely to be defeated, and because South Africa relied on them as their sole support in the bipolar world that existed at the time, they could easily foresee that if America changed their mind, South Africa being on its own would not last long. And sure enough, as apartheid started being wound down, America started approaching several members of the ANC as well, because what they wanted to to make sure of, was that when the ANC did come to power, they wouldn't do anything silly like nationalize the mines. And the British were actually a very, very good point for this, there's a fellow called Robin Renwick, who became one of the most influential contacts

in this regard, and he still flies in and does and gets up to funny shenanigans in this country that are mostly, you know, covert, and no one really knows what he talks about with our leaders behind the doors, but he's, I think he's a member of the Fabian Society. The Fabian Society had a very interesting, it's hard to follow exactly what they're up to because they're very covert, but they had a little offshoot called Common Purpose, about which I can find very little online, but I read the founder of Common Purpose, Julia Middleton's book from 2007, And in it, she records having recruited our current president Sol Ramaphosa in 1999, as well as senior member of the Reserve Bank Kuban Naidu. So we have a lot of these strange little secret society influences.

South Africa is full of secret societies. I mean, the Afrikaner Nationalist Party was run mostly by a secret society called the Bruderbund, which was founded in the town next to mine by an ancestor of mine called Jan Hendrikov-Mayer. Initially, as an organisation for protesting the tax on brandy. But quickly, I mean, brandy is the sort of stereotypical Afrikaner drink of choice, and so it's almost too fitting. But by the 1980s, they were melded quite thoroughly with the Freemasons. And the Freemasons are unusually prominent in South Africa. I mean, you don't hear much of them in much of the rest of the world, except maybe for France, where they lean into politics in a way that's almost comical. But here, the actual Houses of Parliament are owned by the Freemasons.

And there was a scandal a few years ago when the Liberal opposition was accused by several of their members of letting Freemasons pick the party list for Councillor selections in city administrations. So, yeah, so there's still a bit of that floating around and my, my stepfather, not my stepfather, my father-in-law, I should say, I don't have a stepfather. Well, it's the same thing. My father-in-law, he was in the military and he lost a transit promotion because he decided to give a lecture. He's a very fundamentalist Christian and he decided to give a lecture to all of his subordinates when he was made captain about the evils of masonry and why one should keep their eye out for any hierarchy of masonry. He swiftly got a letter from hierarchy saying, you are not suitable officer material,

at which point he grins and says, it's okay, I've already resigned my commission, see you guys later. Yes, that's interesting about the masons, so they are connected to the Afrikaner Broderbund. I want to ask you, the Brøderbund, do they still play a big role in South African politics? It sounds like you're saying they do. Oh no, not really. No, no, no. I think they were absorbed and disbanded. I mean, there'll be these little sort of surviving networks of elderly local businessmen, but on the whole, they went the same way as the nationalist party did, whereas the Freemasons are liberals. So they co-opted the Afrikaner nationalists for the most part, rather than the other way around. It's very interesting. What about this character, Julius Malema? He's much in the news.

He looks like a hateful, excuse if the word means anything, you don't have to, he looks like a hateful subhuman to me. He's just a man driven complete by genocidal hatred. What about him, before we end this segment, what do you think about him? Who is behind him? Is it true that China is encouraging that side of things in South Africa? Well, I don't think China's behind it. I'll say this up front, because of the latest BRICS conference, the Chinese tried very hard to convince us to drop black economic empowerment, because they don't think it's a very wise way of moving. And it also blocks their efforts to to penetrate our business operations, because while Chinese people are classed as black in South Africa for these purposes, it is only if they are full citizens that they can do this.

Whereas the Chinese, not allowing a dual citizenship, want more chance to penetrate our economy, and so don't want this policy. The ANC told them, no, this is very important to us. So I don't think so. I think that China prefers the ANC to the EFF, the EFF being the economic freedom fighters, Julius Malema's party. He started this, and this is actually a very good window into our political system right now. He started this party in 2014 in response to a very specific set of events. So Julius Malema was part of the party since he was, I think 13, and he became a local council at 16. He is certainly a very shrewd and clever character, and he was head of the party's youth league until he was expelled from the party in 2013.

And what happened the previous year was something called the Marikana Massacre. Now in Marikana, and this is a big thing that was the cause célèbre amongst third-worldist communists at the time, at the time, and Thomas Piketty mentions this in the opening of his book, Capital in the 21st Century. So in August 2012, there was a wildcat strike in the platinum mines in South Africa. Now rock drill operators, they've got a fairly sort of monotonous job, but the machine vibrations eventually caused nerve damage and arthritis and so on. And so the rock drill operators wanted more compensation, they wanted medical cover, things like this. And there was a monopoly on union representation by a union run by Saul Ramaphosa called the MUN. Now this was set up

in conjunction with the Oppenheimer family who have had a close relationship with him from the the beginning and so this was at the Lonmin platinum mine and the because the the shop stewards for MUN don't allow any strikes unless they're okayed by the ruling party and the ruling party won't okay strikes unless they have a dispute with the company that they've got these BEE connections with black economic empowerment connections with there's a nice balance of forces they even sort of co-opt local tribes because there are still traditionally governed areas in the shadows of the former Bantustans, the sort of homeland areas into which black people are restricted to live for the most part in South Africa. They have been sort of quasi-formalized into traditional

governance areas, and so these people are given primacy of employment recruitment in these areas. But anyway, so there's a wildcat strike by a group called AMCU, and no one gives them attention. They weren't recognized by Lonmin, and they start attacking security guards, they start attacking scabs, they start attacking policemen, they kill a few policemen. And then when they're protesting a little while later, the police show up in force with live rounds which is against a normal police policy so they would have had to have very very high level of clearance to use it as a default usually rubber bullets and attack dogs and water cannons are par for the course even under the old regime but they show up with live rounds and they fire into the crowd killing 17

and then hunt down another 17 that they shoot at point-blank range so this this event becomes horror you know shock horror across the country and so Ramaphosa's name is, you know, is dirt in the media. Jacob Zuma becomes smeared even harder. The black nationalists sort of accuse Ramaphosa, but the white liberals accuse Jacob Zuma, who's the president. And Julius Malema, who up until this point had said he will kill for Jacob Zuma, starts attacking him, starts going after him, starts going after Ramaphosa, saying the party has become anti-black, they've sold out to white monopoly capital and disobedience is not tolerated, he was expelled from the party and then he forms his own party another year later and takes the

entire youth league with him, collapsing the party's youth support. They've only managed to restructure the youth party now in the last in this year, so a whole decade gone for them And in the meantime, Julius Malema has managed to capture roughly 10% of the vote, and they've split the ANC support so that young radicals are now looking to his party. Yes, that's interesting. And let me ask you before we go to break, because this is very interesting. But for example, in Angola, there were several factions, parties, fighting during the so-called war of independence from Portugal, the MPLA ended up coming on top. They were Soviet supported. They claimed to rule in the name of the whole nation and in the name of communist and universal principles and so on, but their actual base of support

inside Angola was a very small, all mestized class, mulatto class, mixed class, whatever you want to call them, maybe two to 3% of the population. And that was the base of the MPLA, whereas the other parties, which also claimed to represent the country, I think UNITA had its base in the Kimbundu tribe. In other words, they were all fronts for ethnic interests. And so in relation to South Africa, I want to ask, is Julius Malema, you are saying he represents the Young Radicals, but does he have particular ethnic base as opposed to other parties in South Africa? And closely related to this question, the European population there, do they have alliances with certain tribes against other tribes and so forth? Or is that viable? Well, actually, this is a very interesting question.

This is a very interesting question. the ANC, from their founding right up until 2009, had been entirely run by Khoza people. Mentioning this fact used to get you lynched in the party, back in the old days. And so Jacob Zuma, he was selected and agreed to be leader because the ANC needed to cut the support of the IFP, that is the Zulu Nationalist Party in KwaZulu, in that province. They needed to cut that party's support, so they picked a Zulu leader. And that was his main sort of reason. But he was more reactionary. He favored sort of building up tribal institutions and cutting deals for his own people and so on. And he was a very traditionalist, had multiple wives, all of these kind of things. And so he pissed off the liberal establishment and the communists.

There's a big very Republican sort of faction in the ANC, and Zuma was very big on building traditional institutions, and so he ruffled a lot of feathers. He also created his own sort of patronage faction, which came to a violent head many times with his opponents in the last few years. Yes. Juliet Malema himself, and so Ramaphosa are from some of the tiniest groups. So Ramaphosa is a vendor. Vendors are only a couple of percent of the population. They're very tiny. They're from a very small part up in the poorest province of South Africa, but they have a reputation for being sort of similar to the reputation that Jews have in stereotype, sort of being sort of shrewd businessmen who are somewhat stingy and ethnocentric. So that's sort of the reputation that vendors have in South Africa.

And Julius Malema is, I believe, petty, which is a very small branch of the Sututana group. But his, I believe, and I'm not sure, it's rumored that his parents were immigrants from just across the border. So there's possibly a big reason why he's so big on Pan-Africanism and open borders and so on. So which is costing him a lot of votes, because there's a big populist movement for black nationalism that's not pan-African. They call themselves like the put South Africa first crowd. So that's very big. I mean, we have lots of xenophobic riots in South Africa every few years. Well, district nine famous movie about just this, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, Neil Blomkamp, it was very strange. I don't know how you managed to get the extras for that, because some of them are very colorful.

Yes. The movie was fine for one shot, but white South Africans, they're very simple to understand. It's mostly English, I mean mostly Afrikaans. And then about just slightly more than a third are English. And then there's a smattering of Portuguese in between. Right, and so I mean the Afrikaners, they left the Cape in 1835 to 1838, around that period, and my cousin, my family, my cousin still owned the farm that Petritif, the most famous of these Fuerchakas was born on. There's this big story, I mean, it's very exciting stuff. They basically went into the interior to try and purchase land from native tribes in order to sort of carve out their own space, and they struck a deal with the successor to King Shaka,

Shaka Zulu, the man called Ndigane, and Ndigane was Shaka's half-brother and he assassinated him and there's this whole belief that he brought upon a curse on the nation because of it. In the 90s there was an opera that was written by a Zulu fella called Mzilikazi Kumaru, right about this somehow, you know, the curse was brought upon us by Ndigane. This is why we are, you know, colonized and so on, and so Petritif rides up and tries to organize this and he says, I'll return the cattle that was stolen from you by this neighboring tribe if you give us this land, and he returns the cattle and Dingane says, okay, cool, let's go inside and have a chat, leave your weapons outside, so he massacres the whole party, then rides through the camp and kills the women and children, and Afrikaners

who were camping out further nearer to the coast, decide there has to be some kind of punitive expedition, so they ride into to declare revenge. And there's this famous battle called the Battle of Vladivar where, yes. But this is very important. This is probably possibly one of the most important events in our country's history, because not only because of the defeat of the Zulus by a numerically far inferior sort of force, but because of the religious significance, because Andres Pretorius, who was leading the charge, had dedicated a prayer, dedicated the fight to God. He said, you know, if the Lord keeps our powder dry, we hold your name sacred on this day, every year, and this will be the sacred chosen land, and we are the chosen people.

And lo and behold, not a single casualty died on the Boer side, but they killed, You know, over thousands of the Luyendys. Yes, it's an amazing fight. People should look at the Battle of Blood River. Yes, but the thing is that it became the foundation for Afrikaner nationalism for years to come. And the Day of the Vow, 16th of December, is still celebrated by people in this country. But the new government declared it a national holiday called the Day of Reconciliation, just to try and, you know, get past that as much as they could. Robert, this is all very interesting, but we are coming up on hard commercial break, and also we must each have a smoke and relax. But I want, if you can, to come back for another segment so we can talk future of South Africa, what do you say?

Yes, because then we can do Orania and Cape Independence and potentially Zulu independence. And maybe if we have time, the 2021 riots, which will answer the question of whether there's a future for minorities in a much more sort of serious and tangible way. It's very interesting. Very good, Robert. We will be right back then. This sounds very good. We'll be right back. All right. Caribbean Rhythms, this is episode 144. I am here with Robert Deigen, a researcher, commentator and writer on matters of South Africa, and also a thinker and planner on South Africa future. I am glad to have you on show, Robert. And we were going to talk South Africa future, but you mentioned this rather dark event or maybe it's a farcical event of 2021 riots. Most people don't know what this is.

What happened, what are these riots? Oh, well, this is very interesting. So Jacob Zuma is the main cause of these riots. He was the previous president of South Africa And he was the first leader of the ANC, who was not a Xhosa. Now, he was a Zulu, and the Zulus have their own nationalist movement, who didn't want to be integrated into South Africa quite as much as the rest. But, so there was a, most of the violence in South Africa during the 1980s was between the Zulu nationalists and the African nationalists, black nationalists. And so, you know, having a Zulu leader of the ANC was seen as a strategic way of containing the Zulu nationalism in the province, where the IFP had been the biggest party up until that point.

And Jacob Zuma campaigned on IM 100% Zulu boys, and he cut the IFP support in half. But he was not friends with the traditional oligarchy, which is composed of the Rothschilds and the Oppenheimers. Instead he brought in his own foreign patrons from India, a group of people called the Guptas. And the corruption in that regard was referred to as state capture, capture because of the amount of say that the Guptas were allowed in day-to-day governing in South Africa. He was pushed out of the presidency of the party by the current president, Zorana Poza, after billions of rams were dumped into his campaign coffers to bribe people within the ANC to vote certain ways. This violence occurred in many, many assassinations, mostly in KwaZulu-Natal province during the 2017 leadership campaign.

A lot of taxi violence as well, because the minibus taxis that dominate the cities here are tied into party patronage outfits. So a lot of targeted assassinations during this period. But one of the big international pressures was on the ANC to tackle corruption, and Ramaphosa ran on this. He even got an endorsement from The Economist over and above the liberal opposition party. So The Economist endorsed a black nationalist socialist instead of a liberal party, despite them being a liberal newspaper, simply because they're the shared patronage network in the transatlantic oligarchy. So in 2021, this came to a head because they'd been investigating Jacob Zuma and no one ever gets arrested for corruption at that level

of the party but they had to make a show of it. Every time there's a change of presidency there's a corruption investigation that ends up arresting nobody and it's a very big long show trial that goes on in the news media for ages and the one the Zondu Commission is the one that we're talking about now and Jacob Zuma got tired of them and just decided he wasn't going to show up and so he was charged with contempt of court and he was arrested at his palatial compound that was built, I personally believe, with the last packet of UK foreign aid to South Africa because the amount that he paid for that palace is about the same size as the UK foreign aid budget for that year. Very cheeky, very cheeky.

So, when he gets arrested, because he was head of military intelligence for the ANC during the struggle years, he could mobilize the loyalty of the armed wing of the party, Mkhonto E Sizwe, which is now known as the Veterans Association, but they're not really veterans, they're kind of still paramilitaries. And to try and neutralize them, the president disbanded the MKVA on the 8th of June. And what happened is that the MKVA immediately mobilized to seize the major highways, the supply depots, ports, all major infrastructure were completely shut down in the eastern part of the country and the corridor that runs from Johannesburg to Durban. Most of our productive economy sits in the deep interior of the country and is landlocked.

The very cause of the Union of South Africa is this very fact that in order to control those resources, one also needs to have ports that are part of the same country. That is the reason the British tried to unify South Africa and did so, and it nearly failed because of competition over rail tariffs between the different former Boer republics back in early 1900s. But now the MKVA, after they shut down these sort of main infrastructural units in order to protest Zuma's arrest, they proceeded to stoke widespread chaos by organizing groups through WhatsApp in the townships and what have you to mobilize them to attack white and Indian-owned businesses, specifically. And they stoked very, very aggressive genocidal rhetoric. And this led to widespread looting, billions of rands worth of damage,

to the point that it threatened the bottom line of the major insurance companies at a national level. And big calls on reinsurance that, yeah. Yes, so, excuse me, so what happened is once they'd run out of sort of the juicier targets, they started moving on residential areas. And at this point, the reasonably well armed private security and ordinary citizens had formed a sort of ad hoc militia to defend their homes and their businesses, and they had so far prevented any casualties amongst minorities, but what happened is that in Durban, one of the areas, and there are maps of this with sort of ethnic boundaries and so on that you'll find on my blog, some of my recent posts, one of them on Kuzmin and Tal covers this. But the suburb known as Phoenix became the focal point for this, because

while Johannesburg calmed down after two weeks, because they sort of run out of looting targets, and because Soweto, the biggest black township, also pushed back, they mobilized their own people against the ANC's chaos and this sort of birthed a much more rigorous nativist nationalist movement that is anti-immigrant amongst other things, but that's a story for another time. In Durban, they tried to target this Indian suburb known as Phoenix, and I've listened some of the voice notes on WhatsApp with them sharing how they're going to rape, murder and steal their way through the suburb. And the Indians, if you can see footage from this, there's a lot of gunfire going on. But in this one incident and one night, 300 black looters

were shot dead on the outskirts of Phoenix, trying to make their way into Indian homes. And this has been referred to as the Phoenix Massacre and it is occasionally mentioned on Twitter with howls of indignation by black nationalists. And some of the Indians who defended themselves are currently being prosecuted. But what was interesting about this event for me was that despite the full might of the ANC's irregular forces being mobilised and no police stopping them in any way. even police stations were being raided and looted for their seized firearms. Many police stations had to call on local minority-led militia to defend them from the looters. So it was very, very indicative of the fact that state security can do nothing.

But even these irregular forces of the ANC, as well organized as they were, enough to shut down half the country for several weeks, they couldn't really do anything, their supporters couldn't really make a dent in the minority's populations. What happened in the aftermath is that the government mobilized the armies in order to pacify the regions, but the rioting had already died down. The ordinary sort of white and Indian and to some extent as well black citizens had actually pretty much achieved peace on their own and re-established logistics control and so on. When the military rolled in they couldn't even last two weeks because they couldn't supply their own troops with water and food in a domestic urban deployment. The incompetence of this is

extraordinary. And so, I think one of the things when people fear a Rwandan style, not to say that, you know, racial violence could not get really ugly in South Africa really quickly, but something like Rwanda couldn't happen here for the simple fact that the organization and the motivation is just, it's not there, the coordination is not there, and the competence is not there. It's a different world. This is very interesting, but this is a level of dysfunction, genocidal intentions combined with epic incompetence. When a state reaches this level of decay, there are often movements to separate territories and such. One of my favorite books is Nostromo by Joseph Conrad. And it's the story of, well, a whole part of the book is called The Silver of the Mine.

It's a story of one portion of a dysfunctional country that tries and eventually succeeds in separating. And I know you have a part of such, I don't want to, I don't know what to call it, whether it's a movement, it's a political party, or an organization, or an intention, a spirit, perhaps, among many classes and many, from what I understand, it's not uniracial. It's many races and many peoples who want to separate Cape Town from the rest of South Africa. Would you care to talk about this or the possible different futures of South Africa? Well, the way that I understand it is that there are two cessation movements that are ongoing. that one is very clear-cut traditional secessionist movement and the other one is almost more along the lines of a network state

and would probably be the world's first test case for such a thing. So the first one, Cape Independence. Cape Independence is an idea that was for many, many years as this very fringe movement, a tiny, tiny little eccentric party run by a first-generation immigrant of mixed American and Russian ancestry called Jack Miller, who still runs this very tiny French party called the Cape Independence Party. But in recent years, the movement has been promoted more by a couple of leaders, namely an Afrikaans businessman called Des Palm and an English businessman by the name of Phil Craig, who lives in the same town as me, incidentally. And these two men between them have managed to organize a fairly significant support for Cape independence, not only amongst the white minority here,

but also amongst the broader colored majority. So in the Western Cape province, which is the one that wants to secede, black people are a minority, a reasonably large minority, but they are still a minority. unlike in the rest of the country, with the exception of the Northern Cape province, which will not be coming away with us, at least not immediately. But in the last few years, they brought it from a fringe movement to one which now according to professional polling, has achieved support, 68% support for a referendum, 58% support for secession. and amongst the supporters of the provinces governing the Liberal Party, the Democratic Alliance, the DA, amongst the DA supporters, I think it's 70% support for independence now. But the leadership of the party doesn't want independence,

so they push back against it very hard and they say silly things like, the Western Cape is not racially different enough to go independent, but even if it was, it would be racist to do so. all of this sort of silly sort of logic pretzel nonsense. But it is the one part of the country where things are still relatively, yeah. But it's the one part of the country where things are still relatively functional. And you know, so, and most of the population is Afrikaans speaking, as opposed to the rest of the country where it's mostly sort of various Monty languages of majority. So there's a real possibility here of this happening and the big pivotal point is that in the next election there's a new political party that will be formed by various members of the movement in the next month or so.

and that will be targeting more liberal voters in order to sort of get at the DA's support. And then there's also a small Afrikaans party called the Freisfrontluss, or the Freedom Front, which I support because I prefer more of a conservative sort of approach. But between the two of these parties, there's a lot of growing support as people are starting to get disillusioned with the democratic alliance's sort of hopeless strategy to try and unseat the ruling ANC at a national level, which will never happen. I mean, in order for that to happen, they'd need an 18% swing from black ANC support to their sort of multi-party coalition, which is not going to happen. It's unprecedented. And there are also lots of very credible rumors

that a big portion of the DA's leadership is actually seeking to form a coalition with the ANC in order to get into government, because there's a sensible prediction that the ANC might lose their 50% majority next year. Not guaranteed, but possible. And then there's this whole thing of, oh, will the EFF Julius Malema get into power, or, you know, such as... But this is extreme interesting. You're talking really about possible foundation of a new nation which is, again, very possible from the figures you're saying. This is not like a case in the United States where maybe you've seen there are people talking about national divorce, but it's really a tiny minority of intellectuals and hardly any popular support. You're talking about, what was it, 50% to 70% support, or 70% in some cases?

Correct. And yes, and the thing is that support amongst the colored population is now higher than support amongst the white population. So, you know, there's support out there. The reason that people keep voting for the Democratic Alliance, despite wanting a drastic change that the party itself doesn't support is they're afraid of the ANC getting into power but the problem is that they don't most people just don't know what the voting stats are or how the voting system works because if you I mean if you look at we have a proportional representation system and in this province if you add up all the charterist parties the ANC and the EFF and what have you they don't they make like not like just shy of 20% in the in the province so they're never

going to get into power. However, the DA has just over 50%, 53% of the last election support here. So all we need to do is move the needle by five to ten percent and we can force them into a coalition where they will have to give us a referendum and get us out of South Africa before it collapses. Yes, no this is wonderful. It's going to last much longer. I don't think it would, but how soon is it plausible that such a referendum and full separation could be affected, and what would you need to have that done? Well, currently the leadership at the moment is asking for a question to be added to the ballot in May of the general election in May in 2024. Constitutionally, it's possible because the constitution allows premiers of provinces to to declare a referendum? Yes.

Oh, the premier's pretending that he doesn't have these powers and that it's sort of legislation specifying how it should go about hasn't been made. But I mean, we don't have unambiguous legislation about how to run an actual normal election anyway. So this doesn't seem to me to be a real obstacle. Yes. But you know, even if we don't get it on that ballot, we can try and run one the very same year anyway, if the leadership is favorable to this. But I mean, the way I look at it, it's really a question of whether we can get enough funding soon. And I mean, look, South Africa has politically a very, very shallow market. I mean, you look at some of the budgets, the annual budget for elections, I mean, the biggest donation that you will get for any party,

from any source is like, what, 15 million rand for a whole year? And that's, I mean, what is that in dollars? That's not even a million dollars. And for a fraction of that, for like, let's say a quarter of a million dollars, you could run a very, very serious campaign at the provincial level to, which can seriously shift the needle. Yes, and I know I have listeners who are interested in the future of civilization, and I really see that that's what you are defending here. It's not just the future of one people. It's the possibility of, you know, people having teeth in their mouth and not dying of starvation or dirty water or such. What is the time span that you would need this around quarter of a million, and who would they be donating to?

Well, look, the one party that would be the key to donate to hasn't been officially founded yet. But in the meantime, there is one organization that will carry these funds and use it appropriately, and that would be the Cape Independence Advocacy Group, which is run by Phil Craig. And the other one would be an Afrikaans party called the Freedom Front. At the moment, the Freedom Front are relatively small. They've been small since, you know, since they were an opposition party under the old regime. But the growth they've had in by-elections recently, in the last year or so, has been really, really impressive. And if you add the the sort of hypothetical sort of single issue referendum party to the Freedom Front score,

they should have enough to actually clear the DA out of their majority position next year. This is very interesting. Just to clarify, you don't need to say the name of this planned new party, but you are saying it will come into existence very soon, in the next month or two? Yeah, yeah, pretty much. I mean, look, I think they might be a bit jittery about the fact that I'm mentioning this ahead of time, but the fact of the matter is, look, if there's someone out here listening who could chuck funds, I have to actually mention that they exist. Well, no, I can't think of a better cause, and people should realize that in situations like this, quite a little money can go a long way. I know of friends, I don't want to say in what country they are, but they're in a rather

let's say, first world country, and the political system there is, you know, compared to what you're describing, it's very high functioning, but it's a rather lackadaisical political culture, and they hardly had to spend any money, Robert, through some NGOs in the American model, really change important laws in a very good way. I don't want to show cards and so on, but it's through a minimal amount of money in certain countries you can have a huge effect, and what you're describing sounds like just wonderful opportunity at historic inflection point. Exactly. There's another one though, and this is the complement to it, because most white people actually live in the interior, not in the cape. And so the question is what happens to them. Now, what they have going for them at the moment is

There are a couple of big sort of civil society groups that operate in a big cluster, and that would be like AfriForum, Solidaritate. Broadly they're called the Solidarity Movement, or Solidaritate Bevechles. But Solidarity have, they're led by a man called Flip Base. I actually should really get back to translating his book, because he's written about what his whole philosophy of this stuff is. started out as a white trade unionist under the old regime and moving now towards more sort of ambitious parallel state organization and they have a they have this thing called anchor town plan and the idea is that look Afrikaners are way too spread out and thinly distributed and they find themselves in cities where they're the minority but the idea is that by concentrating in

towns where they could make themselves the majority. They can actually secure their future on a local level and then gradually build sort of interdependence, trade, all this kind of stuff by increasing their economic autonomy. And they're looking to sort of accelerate this plan. There's sort of one tiny test case for this and that is Orania. Orania began when it was the most possibly difficult to do it. So, I mean, Iran began as an intellectual idea back in 1978. Time frame, obvious. But they finally got a piece of land in 1991. And now they have about 3000 people living there. And it's growing by roughly just shy of 10% every year. They're about to become... They're independent from the state's water supply and they're about to become independent from the state's electrical supply.

If you look up the Orania movement on YouTube, they actually, every now and again, they put out little posts sort of telling you how they're developing various things, how the town works and so on. They're very friendly people. They don't like bothering anybody. They try and maintain good relations with everybody of every race in the country for diplomatic relations as a tiny little microstate kind of a sort of thing. And this sort of broader complex of Afrikaner nationalist movements, the one thing is I see the Cape independence as being vital to this because some of the moves that are being made by Soilem Apoza, some of the reforms threaten sort of capital stability and land tenure stability for or much of the minority population. So I see Cape independence as being very important

to sort of ring fence all of the vital capital that will be necessary to fund this movement over time. And a lot of this will require capital coordination, which I think actually mostly can be managed within the country provided organization moves quickly enough in the next five to 10 years. I think the thing is that the communities in the interior are much more prepared for collapse than the Cape is in a paradoxical sort of way. Because they're used to this. They're used to not being functional roads and rail and electricity and all this. Much more than we are. We still have a modicum of modern government. Yes, is the idea that you would have an independent Cape Town and also an independent network of internal communities like a few Oranias,

or is the long-term plan that the European population moves from the interior all move to Cape Town, or what would that look like? I think if we were talking realistically, a lot of people from Gauteng, that's Johannesburg and so on, will probably move to the Cape. However, for Afrikaans people, Pretoria is growing. They have above replacement birth rates and they have big immigration from the rest of the country, Afrikaans speaking people, to Pretoria. So the real challenge is if the opposition coalition can gain that province next year, which is certainly possible. possible. The big challenge will be to have them redraw the municipal boundary so that Pretoria is not swallowed up by this huge gerrymandered swathe of black towns around

it, so that then they have a greater amount of local autonomy and they can shore up their local economy and their security. The same applies to a lot of the other little towns that are in mind, although I think in future a lot more of them will be placed in the Northern Cape as time goes on. This is very interesting. What would the political regime structure of this new nation look like and its economics, what would these things look like? Is that talked about? Well, I mean, from what I understand, a lot of it will be based on like import substitution thinking because the idea is how do you reduce dependency on the surrounding economy. That's kind of the most important thing so there will have to be a sort of more economic nationalist approach but it'll be geographically

decentralized. In terms of organization there's this very sort of odd corporatist structure to the whole movement which is based on voluntary participation so they They aren't like democratic elections or anything inside these organizations. They're very corporate in their function. But because they depend on donations and membership and so on, and they have the plurality of the Afrikaner nation as members, they depend on actually functioning. They depend on people approving of what they're doing enough to actually donate every month, something to these organizations. So it's sort of like public choice economics at a massive scale. It's very peculiar, but it's also tied into things like farmer's unions and worker's unions. And they're building their own universities and schools.

And they have, I mean, they have, they built a technical college that is one of the most impressive things I've ever seen. So I did a tour of the campus and they do this whole thing where they teach you, like the kids learn everything from like high voltage electrical wiring for everything from houses to factories, how to design integrated circuits, how to build and repair every type of engine, diesel, electric, petrol, what have you. Just, I mean, tool manufacture with like lathes and stuff like that, it's this enormously integrated course. And kids from there, they get poached by international companies with like starting salaries of like 120,000 rand a month. They're starting salaries, you know, they're doing pretty good for themselves.

So they show themselves as very capable of replacing existing infrastructure that's being eaten up by black economic empowerment and catered deployment and so on. It's a question of acceleration. Yes, on the positive side of things, would a future independent Cape Town nation look something like Singapore, maybe, as a commercial city, or what would its economic and day-to-day life look like? Or is that not the concern? Well, that's interesting. So, we've got, most of the economy is actually service-based, and then there's a, so the big ones are service economies, service, yeah, services, and then agriculture, and tourism, tourism is very big. But there's some other very odd little details. So like we've got, we have the only nuclear power plant on the continent here in the province,

but we also have deposits of uranium. We also have offshore gas deposits. So there should be some energy autonomy. Additionally, there has been prospected, but not mined the largest and purest deposit of rare earth elements on the planet in Steenkamskraal. I mean, it's rock deposit. It's like, okay, so usually rare earth elements come in like sandy deposits where there's like one part in a hundred or whatever. And it's very expensive and tricky to mine out and very environmentally damaging. But the stuff at Steenkamskraal is rock deposits of one part in 10, sometimes a little bit more than that. And so mining it out would involve little to no damage in situ, and you'd be able to control a lot more of the leeching damage and things like that. Yeah, it's very, very nice.

Do you expect the South Africa central government to resist this, or even with violence, resist this somehow if this goes through? I think that's a possibility, but I don't think it's gonna be anything like massive military mobilization. It's probably going to be an example kind of thing that they'd get up to is something they did recently when the international spotlight was on them for Julius Malema's big rally up in Johannesburg. So the police chief, Becky Trelle, got in touch with the taxi cartels down in the Cape. And while it cannot be proved that that this was a result of his coordination. What happened next was there was a massive strike by the taxis against the local bylaws. So they shut down the city center. But the Democratic Alliance has learned to play hardball recently.

And basically they used the sort of modicum of local policing that they have to basically tell them to sod off and didn't cave to any of their demands at all, which is lovely to see. And they've even gone as far as to obtain, in terms of like learning to play hardball, the liberals are starting to learn to be sensible now. They've even gone as far as in Pretoria, they managed to get an interdict against any further government employee strikes indefinitely. I mean, something that, you know, would be inconceivable even last year. Yes, no, this... So there's stuff that these people are capable of doing when the pressure's on. Yes, no, this is very interesting. Well, one final question regarding independence. I asked, I remember asking a long time ago a friend why this doesn't happen.

This was some 15 years ago, and his answer was, because, well, nobody wants to abandon the vast wealth that South Africa has in its interior. It sounds like the dysfunction has gotten so bad. Most people in Cape Town are willing to do that. But what will become of South Africa's immense natural wealth resources? It'll just be looted by Russia, India and China. But if America wants to get their hands on it, there's a very simple thing they can do. look where the ports are that you can do exporting from the RAN mines. There's the Sishen-Sulbana line that does a lot of mining ore. There's Cape Town that doesn't do as much ore anymore but used to be very important. Then there's Durban and then there's Maputo in Mozambique.

America already has a military presence in Mozambique because of the Cabo Delgado conflict with ISIS. And then there's, of course, CAPE independence, which will be cheap and easy. I mean, if the United States just gives a diplomatic rubber stamp, we recognize you, and then that's over. The other one that would take out of Durban is if you support Zulu independence, which shouldn't be too hard. I mean, the Zulu king is American-educated, and the IFP are currently going through a leadership restructuring at the moment. I mean, look, Zulu independence would be very violent, very violent, but it's achievable. If the United States wanted to secure those resources, they could blockade the whole of South Africa by getting the cooperation of Mozambique and independent Zululand and an

independent Cape. And they could basically just tell the South African government, you will make sure that the minerals flow on the international market at reasonable prices. Yes. Well, that's very interesting. I could see many... Could do that in two years. Yes, this could go in many interesting ways, I think. I mean, Russia, China, they are acting on the African continent through mercenary groups like Wagner, which is why I hear even Barlow has restarted executive outcomes with blessing of the United States. And he's pushing this kind of black African nationalism for the purpose of countering China and Russia meddling. That's what I hear. I could also hope maybe that in this situation of chaos, if it's a question of small, private military contractor organizations,

there are many frogs with such abilities, maybe numbering in the hundreds of thousands, and maybe they too can put a hand on these resources. But I'm fantasizing now. I'm sorry, Robert, I shouldn't fantasize. This is very interesting. No, not at all. I mean, look, the thing is that there's a sort of time horizon on all of this because our state finances are completely unmanageable. No matter how many times we try and cut, now look, Minister of Finance is the only, that's the only department where they don't do catered deployment, at least until now. Now they're speculating about it. But so far, those guys have been actually fairly sound. Just to remind the... And they've been keeping a limit. To remind the audience, catered deployment is when they replace capable public servants

with party apparatchiks who are corrupt and idiotic, essentially, right? Okay, sorry to interrupt. Yeah, exactly. And so they've royally screwed up every single department in the country. Everything is dysfunctional. But the Ministry of Finance and the Reserve Bank are still relatively good. I mean, you look at our inflation figures, we're doing better than most of the First World, you know. Yes. well, not most, but a significant portion of the first book, anyway. So we're doing okay keeping a lid on this, but we can't actually keep the budget down. So the budget keeps increasing at a faster rate than actual sort of economic growth rates every single year. And our debt servicing costs are rising also at a very significant clip.

and I mean if you do, I mean like I've played around with like very, very crude, and when I say very crude I mean put it together on Excel in sort of a couple of hours kind of crude. I've done a couple of like these crude analysis of how long it would take for us to get to debt default or hyperinflation looking at you know like Bernholtz's ratio and shit like that, And, you know, the likelihood is that the worst case scenario is we will have to default by 2028 from a reasonable worst case scenario. I mean, there are worst case scenarios and that, but within a reasonable window, somewhere between 2028 and 2035, we're likely to default on our national debt. And I mean, I think a lot of the commentators kind of realize this.

So somewhere between then, now and then, we have to figure out a way of saving our skins. And it's not going to come through any kind of national unity government. It's just not going to happen. So, yeah, so it's a session it is, one way or another. Yes, Robert, I've been keeping you for a while, but in closing let's end on a lighter note. You mentioned tourism, and I have an older friend, he is a genuine artist and schizophrenic, but very entertaining. He now boasts to be the most popular playboy in Nairobi, but the first time he came to Africa was through Cape Town. He, I don't know what age he was, he was quite, he was not a young man anymore, and he say that he was jaded, but as soon as he saw Table Mountain, even from the airplane, his heart started pounding

in his chest because it's such, I think I have not, I don't know Cape Town, but I've heard along with Rio de Janeiro, they're the two most beautiful settings for a city in the world. There are many charms about South Africa people In closing, do you want to talk about that, or perhaps about the wonderful rustic South African food? You have a wonderful grill and barbecue tradition. And now the entire world knows about biltong. I am on a cutting diet now, and I am obsessed with thinking about biltong all day. Do you want to tell the audience about this? to tell the audience about this. Oh shit okay I mean like biltong it comes from the Dutch word meaning bille is like your the thigh muscles and a tong is literally a tongue so it's like if you

take a single muscle out of the thigh of some animal and then hang it up to dry with spices and the typical spices are a specific mix of pepper coriander and sometimes clove And this particular spice mix is also used in the traditional sausage, which is burevos. Now burevos is one of those few things, just means farmer's sausage, right? But unusually in South Africa, we have very few of these, but it's a protected sort of consumer item. So if you buy burevos, you know that you're not getting an adulterated sausage if it says the word burevos. You're getting meat, you're getting straight mincemeat in the package. That's it. And the sort of barbecue tradition over here is called braai. I'm a typical Englishman. I use a wieberket or braai with sort of briquette coals

because I like to be able to control the heat and do sort of direct and indirect heat cooking and things like that. But Afrikaners will look down on me. down on me, my wife thinks that I'm, you know, incredibly degenerate. Only sort of, only a wood brie and then you have to use hardwoods of, you know, certain kinds of hardwoods to cook over. And yes, it's a very big thing. There's much dispute and everyone will claim that they know best how to brie. There's even a whole thing of like for dessert, you do toasted sandwiches on the fire, and that is an art that many people will, if you can't do this, you are notoriously screwed. I mean, doing a toasted sandwich over an open fire is, I can tell you something that many people will screw up. But this is a big deal over here. Here in the cape,

you have sort of some Malaysian dishes that have made their way through in various hybridized ways. But in Durban, there's a curry tradition, and this I enjoy a great amount. I have lots of family from Durban who, and I am obsessed with curries, and I keep several curry cookbooks, and I have a hand spice grinder that used to be, well, it used to be my grandmother's coffee grinder, but I use it for spices, because I insist never buy pre-mixed spices, always buy whole spices and grind them by hand. You know this it's Indian curry or it's Malay style curry. Ah, yes, yes. And the Malay style curry that you get here, the big one is called Babouti, which is like a mincemeat dish. Now, most people, most people sort of make a very crude version of it. But if you want to do it traditionally,

you must start by browning a mixture of grated apples and onions. And you season it not with bay leaves, but with lemon leaves. There are little details like this that will be nice. You are making me very hungry. Oh, it's gorgeous, it's gorgeous. But yeah, I'm very lucky. I live in a very peaceful part of the country and I don't have, we don't have problems with armed hijackings where I live. We don't have, you know, armed house breakers, like, you know, firearm house breakings or anything. It's still a country where you can chase, it's still a part of the country where you can chase away a burglar with a big stick or a machete and live to tell the tale. Yes, and it's a major wine producer still. Yes, my family have been in the wine business for hundreds of years.

My cousin, who lives just outside the town over here, they've been producing a small batch of wines since the 17th century. Yeah, I must confess, I'm not a big sort of wine connoisseur and so occasionally my cousin likes praying tricks on me. The first time I went over there to taste the wine that they'd produced, I was I think 18 or 19. And my cousin says to me, what kind of wine would you like? And I said, anything but Cabernet, because I don't like Cabernet. He hands me a bottle. I mean, hands me a glass. And I touch him and say, oh, actually, that's pretty nice. And then he turns around and says, this one is a Cabernet. So, yeah, this kind of thing. Yes, I did not know your family were wine producers. You know, my mother's side, that's what they were. They were vineyard donors.

Of course, this is the best people, the vineyard donors, yes. But slow pace of life, yeah. Robert, I've been keeping you for a while. This has been, I think for me, one of the most interesting political and historical shows I've done. And I hope someday to come to your country and your new country, hopefully your independent country, and enjoy barbecue and wine with you. It would be a pleasure. Yes, I hope so, and you are welcome back on show anytime you want, but I wish you luck and power. I think you will be of new country, very power. Yes, I hope this. Thank you very much. Very good. Yes, very good, Robert. All the best, and yes, luck and power, and you will win. Very good. Until next time, Bap out!