Racism is scoring tries in Bethal

Peter de Wet posted this picture on Instagram, but hastily deleted it.

Peter de Wet posted this picture on Instagram, but hastily deleted it.

Published Feb 26, 2017

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DA leader Mmusi Maimane must lead the charge against Peter de Wet and his cronies to save credibility, writes Imraan Buccus.

Racism rears its head again and like always it’s an ugly sight. This time the offending parties are the rugby lovers of Hoërskool Hoogenhout in Bethal in Mpumalanga led by one Peter de Wet.

No attempt is made to hide the hatred of common human decency and civilised behaviour by the eight trolls pictured in De Wet’s Instagram posting.

He has since deleted the image but not before Twitter posted a screenshot with the plea, “#Dineo we have some customers for you ... @MmusiMaimane please address this sir.”

#Dineo we have some customers for you... @MmusiMaimane please address this sir. pic.twitter.com/DpfiWhZoR2

— Mugisha (@NegusMugisha) February 18, 2017

That single line is loaded with a great deal of cutting political commentary.

Dineo is the weather phenomenon that cut a swathe of destruction through Mozambique very much in the heart of where I sit now.

It was not nearly as devastating as predicted but it hurt.

Just across the border is Bethal, which reached global notoriety in the 1950s when journalists Henry Nxumalo and Ruth First exposed the fact that black prison labour was being used on Bethal’s potato farms.

That led to the great potato boycott which was a potent political weapon in the decade after the Nationalist Party came to power waving the apartheid flag.

De Wet can’t be too far removed from the Bethal farmers whose wealth was built on the backs of chain-ganged black labour. Most of those were imprisoned for petty offences related to those ugly pass laws.

Those sentencing them were the Nazi sympathisers who brought the Nats to power in 1948 and staffed its government and bureaucracy.

That steady diet of racist cornflakes was no doubt fed to De Wet and his racist cohort as they raise Nazi salutes while proudly displaying the old South African flag in their school courtyard.

The second part of the Twitter post addressed to Maimane is more revealing. It demonstrates a widely held perception among black South Africans that Maimane serves as cover for white racists through his leadership of the DA.

Not only does the DA tout baggage from the country’s racist past, it also does far too little to ostracise the racists who travel on its train.

Perhaps the DA in its headlong quest for political power has no interest in putting distance between itself and racist ideology.

Racists are convenient DA voting fodder, funders, and as we have seen with the alt-right movement out of the United States, they serve as an ideological crutch.

The prospect of Trump deploying one of his most potent ideological warriors in Joel Pollak as ambassador to Pretoria caused considerable consternation.

As editor-at-large of the unashamedly right-wing Breibart News, he is a flag bearer of the alt-right movement that now has a firm foothold in the US and threatens to sweep Europe and the Nordic countries in forthcoming elections.

As columnist Shannon Ebrahim unearthed earlier in the week, Pollak has umbilical connections to the DA.

He has been a speech writer for former DA leader Tony Leon and a close family friend of another past leader, Helen Zille (who is again weighing up her leadership options as black leaders Patricia de Lille and Maimane falter with their brief).

As if his connections to the DA couldn’t be any tighter, he is married to political turncoat Rhoda Kadalie’s daughter.

It doesn’t take a brain box to figure that a Pollak or any of the alt-right travellers posted to Pretoria will come with a firm brief to reverse the centre-left platform of the ANC government.

They will not be without troops, for De Wet is just one of an army of fascist sleepers ready to strike.

Racists and fascists all over the world are emboldened by Trump in the White House.

I wonder if it strikes Maimane as slightly off colour that he might be the poster boy of the American racists of the deep south, who rose to infamy by hanging black people from trees?

If Maimane wants to claw back credibility he might consider leading a charge against De Wet and his clan.

Maimane will be wise to heed the lesson that racism is like a cancer: you don’t talk nicely to it.

You cut it out.

Cut them loose, Mmusi.

* Buccus is senior research associate at ASRI, research fellow in the school of social sciences at UKZN and academic director of a university study abroad programme.

** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.

The Sunday Independent

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