A Zulu Chief Reminisces

The madness that swept America’s great cities in the wake of the death of George Floyd has been estimated to have caused around two billion dollars in damage to property. The loss of life and the hundreds of people injured cannot be valued in mere dollars. Similar outrages have recently occurred in South Africa, albeit for entirely different reasons.

The mass plunder of shops and department  stores by looters has morphed into racial tensions, not between the white “oppressors” and the blacks as portrayed under the Apartheid régime, but between blacks and Indians, and also between the various black tribes. The Indian news programme Gravitas blamed the initial unrest on the former president, Jacob Zuma, but can one man really be held responsible for all this carnage?

Zihogo Maguzumbela Nhleko thinks not, and when the elderly Zulu was interviewed recently, he spoke about the good old days – when white people ran the country! That may sound like a strange endorsement, but the white people, overwhelmingly men, who ran South Africa under Apartheid, were considerably less corrupt than those currently running America. Nhleko said under Apartheid there was no shortage of food because there was no shortage of work, so his people were gainfully employed.

When Nelson Mandela took over, there was a surprisingly smooth transition because the former communist had moderated his views, or perhaps more realistically, Mandela was only ever a communist in name only; the same can probably be said of Xi Jinping. At any rate, Mandela did not significantly change the way the country was governed; there were more blacks in positions of power, while the lifting of sanctions meant tourism and especially investment could boom. Unfortunately, after Mandela’s death in 2013, the ANC were less intent on improving the lives of ordinary blacks than enriching themselves.

Those with long memories may recall a similar situation north of the border. On March 28, 2002, the London Daily Telegraph published an interview with Ian Smith, who had been Prime Minister of Rhodesia from 1964 until 1979. Then 83 years old, Smith told journalist David Blair “Policemen salute me, people shake my hand. I’ve got more black friends than Mugabe”.

Smith’s successor Robert Mugabe ran the country into the ground; his Africanisation of white businesses led to hyper-inflation; he persecuted political opponents, and homosexuals for good measure. Two years after his death, the country is hardly any better off. South Africa is already well along a similar road to ruin. But, and it is a big but, if men like Zihogo Maguzumbela Nhleko are willing to form alliances with the country’s remaining whites, as he has suggested, the so-called Rainbow Nation just might be pulled back from the brink.