Mhambi has been redeployed.

Thursday, November 23, 2006

Bok van Berk hijacked by international facists?

Do a search for "Bok van Blerk" the name of the singer of the song De La Rey and see what unsavoury links you get. It seems the hateful flotsam of the global extreme right wing has latched onto the boytjie from Pretoria.

One of the sites claim that the only way South Africa will belong to the Boers is through the removal of the jews and the blacks (some comment on the stupidity of this claim below). Very little will damage long term Afrikaner political interests more than being associated with this lot.

The De la rey song has caused quite a storm in South Africa.

See the dramatic Bok van Blerk video here.

In the meantime Mhambi brings you the lyrics, nicked from one of those sites (All is fair in love and war). I actually had to correct it a bit because the translation I ripped was not too acurate.

Delarey - Bok van Blerk lyrics

On a mountain in the night
We lie in the dark and wait
In the mud and the blood
As rain and streepsak (translation?) clings to me

And my house and my farm were burnt to the ground so they could capture us
But those flames and those fires now burns deep deep within me.

De La Rey, De La Rey can you come and lead the Boers?
De La Rey, De La Rey
General, General we will fall around you as one.
General De La Rey.

The Khakis (The British) that laugh
A handful of us against an massive force
With our backs to the clifs of the mountains
They think its over for us

But the heart of a farmer is deeper and wider, they will come to see
On a horse he comes, the lion of West Transvaal (the monicker given to General De la Rey).

De La Rey, De La Rey can you come and lead the Boers?
De La Rey, De La Rey
General, General we will fall around you as one.
General De La Rey.

Because my wife and my child are in a camp dying,
And the Khakis are walking over a nation that will rise again

De La Rey, De La Rey can you come and lead the Boers?
De La Rey, De La Rey
General, General we will fall around you as one. General De La Rey.




So now your wondering, who is this General De la Rey fellow?

Afrikaners and Jews

It's undoubtly true that there was much resentment amongst Afrikaners when a Jewish community settled in Johannesburg after the discovery of gold. There was also well documented involvement by Jewish and German industrialists in instigating Britain to attack the Zuid-Afrikaanse Republiek (Transvaal).

How anti-Jewish were the Afrikaners? Well for a start some Afrikaners were jewish, the common surname Koen has its origin in the jewish Cohen.

Secondly, when the Afrikaner Nationalsits came to power in 1948 Jewish South Africans endured a period or prosperity and protection they had not had before.

Chris MacGreal wrote an excellent article titled Brothers in arms about the "special relationship" between Jew and Afrikaner.

Anti-semitism lingered, but within a few years of the Nationalists assuming power in 1948, many Jewish South Africans found common purpose with the rest of the white community. "We were white and even though the Afrikaner was no friend of ours, he was still white," says Krausz. "The Jew in South Africa sided with the Afrikaners, not so much out of sympathy, but out of fear sided against the blacks. I came to this country in 1946 and all you could hear from Jews was 'the blacks this and the blacks that'. And I said to them, 'You know, I've heard exactly the same from the Nazis about you.' The laws were reminiscent of the Nuremberg laws. Separate entrances; 'Reserved for whites' here; 'Not for Jews' there."

...


Then Nationalist prime minister Vorster was invited to visit Israel.

At a state banquet, (Yitzhak) Rabin toasted "the ideals shared by Israel and South Africa: the hopes for justice and peaceful coexistence". Both countries, he said, faced "foreign-inspired instability and recklessness".

Vorster, whose army was then overrunning Angola, told his hosts that South Africa and Israel were victims of the enemies of western civilisation. A few months later, the South African government's yearbook characterised the two countries as confronting a single problem: "Israel and South Africa have one thing above all else in common: they are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples."


Shocking, yes. But hardly what these international white supremacists wants to hear.

Vorster's visit laid the ground for a collaboration that transformed the Israel-South Africa axis into a leading weapons developer and a force in the international arms trade. Liel, who headed the Israeli foreign ministry's South Africa desk in the 80s, says that the Israeli security establishment came to believe that the Jewish state may not have survived without the relationship with the Afrikaners.


Well well, the new found darlings of the international extreme right (during the Boer war they were the darlings of the left) helped save the Jewish state. Eat that.

And today after the collapse of the nationalist regime the Jewish community has dwindeld dramatically. The South African economy might be booming, but the jewish community are leaving South Africa.

There is a wider point here. The Afrikaners might have been ideologues, but their politics were primarily driven by practical concerns about their survival. It trumped everything else.

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8 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am a white South African male who just needs to comment on this post.

Everyone should remember that Bok's song De la Rey has got nothing to do with race(ism) or facism. It is about Afrikaner pride. That same pride burning inside a Zulu or a Xhosa or a Sotho or a Venda etc.

The English did exactly the same to black South Africans as they did to white South Africans in the early days.

They wanted our land and our assets. They killed and plundered when South Africans (black and white) resisted.

I am a South African who has the same respect for a brown and a black man as I have for a white man. And an utter disrespect for crime, no matter what the colour.

Bok's song is about what the English did to our women and children. Not about race.

What happened in SA still breaks my heart because I believe that SA can be an amazing country when white and black racists wake up some day.

Don't nail Bok for for just being proud of what he is. His song does not mean any disrespect. It does not make your pride any less.

Let's rather become one nation.

Wessel said...

Hi Carl, thanks for the posting. I hope and think you are right.

In my opinion Afrikaner nationalism did allot of harm to South Africa, but without it, the country would a) not existed within its current borders b) have the prominence it does have today on the world stage c) neither the strong industrial base it has today.

The problem is that there is a tendency in South Africa deny out of hand this crucial contribution by both black and English speaking white South Africans. Often Afrikaners are ostracised and looked down upon. These kinds of attitudes are dangerous because increasingly Afrikaners will seek to return to the safe haven of their indentity and these circumstances is ripe for exploitation by the far right. Escpecially since there are few Afrikaner leaders with vision at the moment and very little reconliiatory gestures from government.

Unfortunately certain members in the ANC proclaim that there are Indians, whites, coloureds and Africans in South Africa, ie that that only black is African and the others not. What Van Zyl Slabbert calls a "racially exclusive Africanism".

This is a major stumbling block to the quest to become one nation.

Their is also a tendency by international racists to imagaine their western racial problems and tranpose them onto South Africa, as if its the same. They have no idea of the complex history and that power and culture is more crucial to understanding SA than just race.

Anonymous said...

Firstly I would like to say
BOK YOU BEAUTY (OF SOOS IN AFRIKAANS JOU BEAUTY).

This song is really inspirational. how funny it seems that when SA held its first democratic elections everyone feared that Afrikaans would start to die a slow death. Yet today, Afrikaans music is stronger than it ever was. why, we have to ask ourselves. simple. Every person in the world belongs to some cultural group, so why let it die.

In actual fact, I am a Khaki (english man, for those of you who doesnt know what it is) and to be honest I think it is disguisting what we did to the Afrikaner.

Look at the history of SA. Through out history there has been some clash between one group of people against another. And now. Well now we have peace and quiet.

I miss SA and that is why my family will be returning shortly. So that one day when my children grow up, they will know where there old man and lady come from, so that they can ensure that our beutiful country SA will remain the leader in Africa, when it comes to leaving in peace and harmony.

VIVA South Africa

Lastly for those of you that have a problem with this song. Zip it, if you dont like it or have a concern with it, zip it

VIVA South Africa
VIVA BOK
YOU BEAUTY

Anonymous said...

DO YOU KNOW WHAT? THIS SONG HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE BOERS THAT WANT DE LA REY TO COME AND LEAD THEM NOW. IT IS A SONG ABOUT THE HISTORY OF OUR COUNTRY. LIKE CARL JACKSON SAID, THE ENLISH DID THE SAME THING TO THE BLACKS. I THINK IF MORE WHITE SOUTH AFRICANS UNDERSTOOD SOTHO, XHOSA, ZULU ETC. WE WOULD BE SHOCKED ABOUT THE LIRYCS OF YOUR NATIVE SONGS!!
BECAUSE THE WORD "LEKGOA" WICH MEANS WHITE MAN, BUT IN BAD TERMS, IS IN EVERY SECOND KWAITO SONG! LEAVE BOK VAN BLERK BE. HE SAID IN HUNDREDS OF INTERVIEWS DE LA REY WASN'T THE ONLY HISTORIC FIGURED THEY LOOKED AT TO MAKE A SONG ABOUT, THEY HAD A FEW OPTIONS AND THEN DECIDED ON DE LA REY. SO LEAVE YOUR RACISM OPINIONS TO YOURSELF!!! I DETECT THAT YOU ARE A RACIST, OTHERWISE YOU WOULDN'T HAVE MADE SUCH A FUSS ABOUT THIS SONG!!!!!!!!!!!

Anonymous said...

Bok van Blerk is NOT A RASCIST! I think you guys are more of a racist than he is!! In our country Racism and discrimination can just come from one side from the whites. But not from the blacks! That is not racism. Who knows what that is??

Wessel said...

Wow there Anonymous 1 and 2, please read the post and all the other posts on this site before you post in such anger. Nobody said he is racist. Mhambi warned that he needs to be careful because he is attracting international far right wing interest.

Anonymous said...

Fact of the matter is that candy coated apartheid goes under the guise of culuralism now. As an ex SADF boykie who did his bit up there in the big A I can tell you that I still have nightmares of the Brutality of Africa, and its all very noble about De La Rey but at the end of the day Africa, including my beloved South Africa is not a place for Europeans and Africa will claim back its own. Afrikaner culture in essence is European not African hence despite beautiful lyrics it is going to be a tough fight which in the long run is unwinnable UNLESS Afrikaners reject their European identity and live by African Ideals. It reminds me of the death scene of Roy Batty in Blade Runner... I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams ... glitter in the dark near Tanhauser Gate. All those ... moments will be lost ... in time, like tears ... in rain. Time ... to die. All our monuments to our westernism (working electrical grids, skyscrapers, infrastructure) will be lost like tears in the rain because it does not belong in Africa... Like tears in the rain...

hans said...

Terwyl ons kak praat...

Anonymous, "Afrikaner" culture is African. (Try to figure out this one by yourself).

We don't have to reject any part of our identity. Anybody of similar opinion should just save themselves a lot of effort and get used to the idea.