The message Hofmeyr wasn’t allowed to deliver

Steve Hofmeyr:
“In the north we have a rule to never discuss politics or rugby with anyone South of the Orange River. Your invitation forces me today to lift this embargo – and it will be my pleasure.”
Thank you for the honour of an invite to this historic chamber; a place that still claims that it was established for free speech, but you know you’re going to have to change that soon.
We are a contradiction of terms, because we have no consensual definitions. We don’t have a consensual past and we don’t seem to have much agreement about the future. We do not speak the same language. By “we”, I mean the world at large, you down south and us from the northern-most frontier of the Boerewors curtain.
On the liberal campuses of some American universities they now have 8×8 meter yellow demarcations, called free speech zones. The rest, outside the zone, is the domain of the offensionistas and students sensitive to rhetoric, discourse and opinion. Universities are now a high way of off-ramps and detours for you to avoid the information you can’t stomach.
Apart from this room then, I recall one other libertarian all-things-go-zone and that one was a once-off called The African Roast on Comedy Central, which I quite enjoyed, but which I shall probably never repeat. We have a marked downsizing and cutback in places of this particular freedom. Isn’t it strange that you invited me here to confirm my right-wing bias and thus far I’m defending former liberal tenets like access of information and freedom of expression. How the world has changed. How definitions have altered.
I also accept it as a gesture of kindness that you invited me, and considering our well documented love/hate relationship, today may even be considered a “cease fire” or a “skietstilstand”, temporarily I hope, between myself and the press/radio/television and mainstream media in general. Not because media per se is the enemy, but they certainly can be. The messenger does not deserve to be shot but she certainly deserves to be shot at. And so she will.
I have always wondered, for instance, how editors decide on closing comments on social media platforms or how they choose the placing of letters. Take the latter. If opinions on a given subject is 20 to 1 but you have space to publish only 4 letters. Do you place two of each opinion to objectively state both sides of the argument, but then create the lie (creating consensus, propaganda) that these opinions enjoy 50/50 representation out there OR dare you place three in favour of the majority opinion and then run the risk of being called partial?
Nevertheless, let’s agree at the outset on our mutual grounds here:
1. that we accept that the South African dilemma has always been and still is rather complicated,
2. in different degrees it seems we hold ourselves, our people and our governments accountable for much of it,
3. in different degrees we consider the state of the nation as wanton and precarious, in other words, we do have a problem,
4. in different degrees we decry our national mortality, murder, rape and woeful unemployment rates.
I am highlighting these but you know that we sport an immensity of index-winning deficiencies and flaws. Here are some even you (as media) may not have considered.
Are we not also the country with the
1. most criminal records per election candidate?
2. government most sued by their citizens?
3. highest rate of fraudulent accreditations and doctorates?
4. highest rate of inter-racial crime?
5. highest circumcision mortality rate?
6. largest per capita parliament on the planet?
7. most expensive per population president elect?
8. richest per capita government?
9. government (per income) with the largest consultant-, outsourcing- and legal fees in the world?
10. most 21st century race-based laws in history?
11. with one of the biggest declines in press freedom, dropping four places.
12. highest politician (victim) murder rate on earth?
13. highest police (victim) murder rate on earth?14. highest cops-in-cahoots-with-criminals rate?15. highest toddler rape rate on earth?
16. highest granny-rape rate on earth?
17. highest pre-matric fall-out figure?
18. lowest matric pass-mark requirement?19.country most likely to burn people, books and places of learning?
20. highest farm murder rate on earth?
21. the comfiest presidential family per national unemployment rate?
22. highest non-acquaintance rape rate per earth?
23. most protest actions per day in the world?24. most unimpeachable state leader in modern history?
25. most attacked, raped and murdered emergency services anywhere in world?
26. the country with the most asylum seekers in the world?
27. highest (poisoned) guard dog tally ever?
I just threw that last one in. You and I may have considered all these but our real common ground here is merely DIFFERING DEGREES of emphasis. You and I know the problems, but we accredit them differing degrees of gravity. That’s a rather good start.
But I’d like to get to the things what we certainly disagree on. Isn’t that why I am here.
These 14 points are debates on their own; most of them I’ll summarise in a sentence or two.
1. I do believe South Africa was, as strange as it may sound now, a white minority sovereign state, that did distinguish between citizens and subjects, taxpayers and non-taxpayers and that any act to undermine the protection of their minority sovereign state, was treason and will be regarded as treason, today, in any other country. I believe what FW de Klerk did was inevitable for most, but apostasy for many.
2. I do believe in more than three or four definitions of Apartheid and that we relentlessly debate pass each other and always will if we fail to establish consensual definitions for abstract things like separateness, equality, unity, racism, transformation, eradication of poverty, hate speech, free speech, etc.
3. I do not believe we would have had a new South Africa if the 1992 referendum included that we would have more anarchy, more racism, more preferential procurement against our children and more bloodshed after surrendering sovereignty. This is important not because I want to turn the process around, but you do need this morning a measure of my compliance with the new South African experiment of transformation, and there you have it.
4. I do not believe we would have had a new South Africa if the 1992 referendum included that the promise of power sharing would be a hoax and would be replaced by forfeiture of autonomy, replaced by punishment and a decolonisation of Africa which I see as ethnic cleansing, at most, and expedient bigotry, at least.
5. I do believe that the old SA was unsustainable and the new SA inevitable and for me even preferable as a partnership of mutual sacrifices and therefor a break-even point and a grand new start for everybody. I have since scribbled that on my stomach.
6. I still hold fast to many liberal notions like that of free speech, just to have, today, my vocabulary criminalised when I enter the discourse on race and politics, a very frustrating and old church fascist law our deputy-minister Jeffrey’s is now rooting for. A law that will soon render this entire speech unlawful.
7. I believe that, in certain places of peril, generalisation is the wonderful half-truth of innocent pattern recognition and, in South Africa, too often your only survival. There is case to be made for generalisation around these parts.
8. I believe the race card is now a weapon used to bludgeon opposition into silence and admission. But, like the poor, we will always have race with us, we will distinguish between races for as long as cultural backgrounds and collective habits predominantly fall in along racial or ethnic lines and for as long as they differ. This could be forever, therefor a great claim for purposes of entitlement. Race will be the gift that keeps on giving and gives for as longs as progressive antiracism-ists expect from me who has supressed no-one, to compensate those were never supressed, for claims that can’t be quantified.
9. I believe 21st century reparations and race peddling gave us inferior schools and welfare dependency that have vilified the black family when they needed it least. And we don’t have a Kevin Jackson, a Burgess Owens, a Larry Elder and a Jason Riley in South Africa – black men who slap away the white hand of patronisation, who insist on true equality before God and the law, but NEVER as a manufactured outcome. It is time to deprogram the national freak show, and I can hardly wait for the first black South African man or woman, to put up their hand and say, thank you, but no thank you.
10. I believe we are trying to bury the dangers of black violence by saying things like Black Lives Matter, Blacks Can’t Be Racist and then failing to publish crimes along racial lines as they do worldwide. The countries of our (white) European descent sport a 2/100 000 murder rate. South Africa, apart from being the rape capital of the world, also sports a 33/100 000 murder rate; so don’t mind me if I tend toward paranoia when farm murders occur at 5 times the national average (more than 150/100 000) which is already 5 times the world average and 15 times the European average. You can make me go away if you prove these trends wrong or present me with the fact that whites are responsible for these statistics and that therefor black appeasement and white punishment is generally justified.
11. I am not sorry at all if I believe that these staggering rates are genocidal. I am not sorry at all that I said that my people simply are not used to these levels of rape, by others, on us. Everybody is free to determine their own tolerance and threshold to these brutalities. The common answer I get is that whites are murdered less than others (as if that satisfies our new threshold) or that we are all victims. Yes, this we know, but are we all perpetrators? We will never know. The point here is, if I’m wrong, and we overreact, we will solve it, and if you as a liberal are right and we under react, you will get the statistic you deserve. Which is the hardly-bearable status quo.
12. I do not believe the socio-economic excuse for crime and barbarism simply because I know too many poverty-stricken nations that do not do this, not even under duress. My tribe, almost extinguished after the Anglo-Boer War, is one of them.
13. I believe that as “diversity and multiculturalism” are how those who have declared war on the West sell their ethnic cleansing, “transformation, equality and decolonisation” is our code for the same practice.
14. I am not sorry if I believe we will never solve our problems, because it has become politically incorrect to pin point it by highlighting key areas of concern, like race. There are black folk out there today who firmly believe that whites are responsible for this stupefying murder statistic because deputy-minister Jeffreys made a speech at the UN underlining white-on-black crime, without a single statistic. Can someone in my life-time furnish me with the white-on-black-rape statistic so that I can start fixing my people, because you know I will. When my black compatriots demanded that the white race step up and search their souls and vote YES for a new South African nirvana, I stood in front of the queue. Now that we need the same confession from other groups, for their collective contributions to alarming phenomena out there, we are called racist. We therefore cannot be fixed.
Nothing of this is what I had in mind when I, against the warnings of my peers and people, naively visualised the new South Africa as the best possible prospect for this country. Nothing of this patronisation of my fellow South Africans – because they are black – is what I had in mind as equality. Not one single warning of those grumpy old National Party leaders did not turn out to be prophetic and we still wonder how it is possible that everyone is not feeling at one with the New South African franchise, simonye, kumbaya, halleluja. Ke nako! It’s our turn to show the world…well..what? Decolonised education? Economic triumphs? All round trustworthiness? A racist-free society?
Europe and America are today torn between those who’d will separation, those who’d rather build walls, draw lines, fence borders and close gates and then those on the other side who still doubt this separateness. They struggle with the question of why? Why do we want a wall? Why do they not want a wall? Whose fault is it that they, who want to build a wall, have to consider these wall-building measures? When I suggested that blacks could be the architects of this distrust too, I was nationally crucified and internationally boycotted. I wasn’t proven wrong; I was just a damned ol’dumbass who should be punished proper. When I asked the court to protect my opinion, my business interests and business partners, the court conceded immediately and then did a strange thing; they punished me 25 days later for my request to ask for protection, to cling on to our constitution and the right to not agree, the right be protected. I would never take my guitar to court but Conrad Koch took his puppet, and what did we learn? We learned that 20 minutes on Carte Blanche still cannot launch a career. But will someone explain to me the free speech justice of that bizarre outcome?
And bizarre it is. The ANC’s 2016 RacismMustFall campaign was a campaign you endorsed by, ironically, upholding the racist policies of preferential procurement, quotas, affirmative action, representivity and BEE. All race-based laws, effectively. The Black Lives Matter campaign, only after murdering an astonishing number of state police, had to confront the true statistic that, in the US, pro rata, more whites were being killed by the police than blacks. United States police admit today to their hesitation to shooting black perpetrators, compared to white offenders who can be gunned down without any serious backlash. And how does the entertainment media dramatize this non-racists racism? In four seasons of Criminal Minds, almost a hundred episodes, and that’s when I stopped watching, only two murderers were found to be non-white. South African marketing television is a roll out campaign of ads that show stupid, hapless whites who can’t drive, can’t save, can’t dress, can’t dance, can’t Bluetooth, can’t speak English properly and can’t achieve. It is a running mockery in my family that when you establish in any Hollywood crime story four possible culprits, you easily eliminate the black contenders, because it simply cannot be them and it certainly will not be them, will it? Black lives matter is the end of the unravelling of mystery plots, storylines and screenplays.
Max du Preez cries that the assault on whiteness has now turned into an assault on whites. In what world and on what continent and in what country does he live to think that twenty-year old students with rocks and petrol bombs will distinguish between the two? Ours is the most violent country because liberals, Main Stream Media, Hollywood and progressive wishful thinkers, spent decades legitimising the assault on whiteness. White blood therefor must and will flow. It is “legitimised”, afterall.
Maybe by virtue of my work as entertainer and activist I see too much of South Africa. Maybe all this close contact with the public in three shows per week for 30 years is getting to me. At my notorious signing sessions, every night, I meet them in their thousands. Farmers who start crying because they couldn’t protect their family. Mothers whispering in my ear: don’t look, they say, myself and my daughter standing behind you, are statistics. Then she cries. Every night, over and over, for three decades I witness this unprecedented confrontation my people and generation have with rape and murder. Yeah, the “legitimised assault” on folk like me, is probably getting to me.
I feel like judge Mabel. You see one too many cases with identical features, you recognise the pattern, you know you are not allowed to but you can’t but say something and I’ve become the go-to-guy for white despair. So, when after decades of this I claim that I can for the life of me not find any white kids scaling the fences if black families and raping their grandmothers, I was literally destroyed by the press. I am pretty sure that my career would have been destroyed by now but for the actual gravity of the assault on my people and other South Africans and this undeniable shame which is South Africa – which will not go away by getting rid of me, nor by legitimising hate.
We are a facade of the values that bought us international favour and a fraud for those donations we received under the banners of model democracies and fairness – but the mask has dropped. The world now knows that we couldn’t improve on Apartheid education, (no, I didn’t say that, a Zulu king did, Mamphele Ramphele did, and Julius Malema and Desmond Tutu have said as much) and we probably never will improve on that classical benchmark of teaching criteria. The world now knows that we are enforcing on our country an extra 114 race laws Apartheid style. But the world knows too that what they are essentially doing out there right now is desperately employing nothing less than the separation measures of the previous regime of this country. Don’t wave identity politics goodbye just yet.
*
I accept that by now you are asking: who do you think you are? The answer to that is, a well-travelled nobody. A citizen. A concerned member of a gatvol minority. That should be enough. You may ask: what do you want? Or as Gareth Cliff asked: What exactly have you and “your people” lost? How much time do we have? We have lost sovereignty. Nothing is as expensive as that. We have lost life expectancy, the murder and rape rate of the countries of our ancestors, our status as global competitor and jewel of the continent. We, specifically, have lost our right to self-determine our high standards of education, our mother tongue in schools and universities and other higher-function departments. An Afrikaans language board recently admitted to corresponding with each other in English.
We lost functionality of infrastructure, hospitals and services and we have almost forgotten our global index achievements. And we have lost lives and not merely to mass immigration, but to one of the highest and most brutal murder rates on the planet. Minorities, go first, as you know.
What do I want right now? Well, not much. I want a democracy, with four or five equally strong opposition parties vying for rule. For now, I don’t care who rules. I do care that one overweight, one-party state wrecks a good land with good people. I want the truth because I am old enough now to hear it. I do not want to be told that our biggest concern is racism and reparations, when it clearly is not and I want the space to articulate my concerns. A little freedom of speech will do.
Racism is a tool. It’s a distraction. It’s trusty because it’s been around forever. Boers and Brits called each other races. And races will be around for ever and the act of distinguishing between things, like races, will be around forever. Because pigmentation matters? No, not all, but as Antje Krog said, “kleur kom nie alleen nie”. We have races and races differ. In a good way. We can change everything but the myth that people do not differ. Genders differ. People differ. Individually and collectively. Because I still find that quite beautiful, I find the progressive attempt to homogenise the planet, deplorable.
Racism is handy because it ensures media reaction and material gains. It guarantees sympathy and therefor compensation, discount, freebees and donations. Why solve school behavioural codes internally if you can scream “racism”, burn down the place and make the evening news? First prize for the selfie-generation, instant fame.
But it’s a dud.
Unless they show a meaningful attempt to criminalise everybody who has been branded a racist, the insult will increasingly become a hollow and weightless one. Girls High, San Suici, the ANCYL, the EFF, Dan Retief, FW de Klerk, FW de Klerk Foundation, Leon Louw, Tony Leon, Breyten Breytenbach, Jacob Zuma, 7de Laan, Adriaan Vlok, Multichoice, Gareth Cliff, Penny Sparrow, Ferial Haffajee, Andrew Barnes, Chris Hart, Zapiro, Max du Preez, Zelda le Grange, Adriaan Basson, Jonathan Jansen, Eusebius McKaiser, Julius Malema, Conrad Koch, the Soweto looters, the KZN xenofobes, Dewani’s judge, Alister Sparks, Helen Zille, Faith Mutanbi, the ANC, DA, UCT, US, Pukke, Wits, Tuks, Kovsies, Heyneke Meyer, Nazir Paulsen, Theunissen, Quaba, myself and many more, have all been called racist in the last years. It is also my list of racists that Chester Missing chose NOT to react to. Until, off course, and as you heard, he himself made the list. It’s my karma list of folk who have loved to call me racist, but couldn’t stay off the list themselves. It’s a list of punishment without proof, trial by media. It’s a list created by the media to show the gravity of racism as South Africa’s biggest concern, but it had the opposite effect. Racism is not our biggest concern. It’s a ruse, a red herring, a charade and a parade of doublespeak.
A recent Afrobarometer opinion poll showed that 71% of respondents believe that unemployment is the largest problem the government should address. Then housing and crime (both 27%), followed by education (22%), poverty (19%) and corruption (17%). Sorry, no racism! The Institute of Race Relations found that only 4.7% of South Africans considered racism and xenophobia a pressing problem. In an hour long (Radio) 702 visit to pre-election Tembisa, where citizens aired their most pressing and immediate concerns, not a single person mentioned racism, South Africa’s “biggest” problem.

* South Africa is built on a strong foundation of multiple lies.
I’d like to help you get to the bottom of the problem, but there is an embargo on the vocabularies of people like me. Thirty years ago, as a young drama student, I began fighting for the right of all races and genders and gays to be heard at our then young Afrikaans arts festivals. Those kids have grown up to serve on the very committees and radio stations that ban me from them today.
How do we raise concerns if media and government have done everything to criminalise our lexicon, how do you read the symptoms of a sick nation if you as media self-impose media restrictions by closing down commentaries when they do not toe the line of what you believe the only allowable ideology is? And how are you different from the old church of right wing nationalists, extremists and fundamentalists when you entertain only “allowable” ideologies? One forgets that we wouldn’t need democracies if everybody agreed on everything. But we have a democracy where you-had-better-agree-with-everyone-else. That’s a contradiction of terms. Solzhenitsyn warned that we all have different capacities, if they are free, they are not equal, and if they are equal, they are not free.
I thank you for hearing me out.”