Mhambi has been redeployed.

Friday, August 17, 2007

BBC gets it wrong on FW


The BBC made a pretty serious mistake in their reporting on the VLok case.

In an aricle titled "South Africa reopens old wounds" they claim:

In South Africa, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was established to try to ease the pain.

Past wrongs could be confessed to and forgiven.

Many refused to attend, including the last white President FW de Klerk.


But De Klerk of course did attend, but he refused to admit that he knew of state sponsored killings. It was the previous President PW Botha that refused to attend.

They go on to say that:

The fighters of South Africa's African National Congress (ANC), Namibia's Swapo and Zimbabwe's Zanu or Zapu did not win the long-predicted and much hoped for military victory.

Their leaders, including Nelson Mandela, Sam Nujoma and Robert Mugabe respectively, agreed on a simple but unspoken compromise: political power would pass into the hands of the majority black population, but whites would be allowed to retain most of their wealth.

And all sides would put the atrocities of the past behind them.

In this they learnt from Angola and Mozambique, where the Portuguese left taking everything they could carry - including any light bulbs that could be unscrewed.


Which is a bit like comparing apples and pairs. One of the main differences in all the countries mentioned bar South Africa, is that they had tiny white populations that described themsleves as Portuguese or English rather than African and who at best were 3rd generation African and probably first. Angola at its height had 350,000 whites, the majority of who arrived after WW2 to 1970. Today there is not even 10,000 whites in Angola. Ditto Mozambique, although their white population was allot smaller. Zimbabwe had a white settlement of 400,00 at its height that was not even 100 years old, now they have less than 40,000. Namibia had 70,000 Afikaners from South Africa with a smattering of Germans. Today they still have about the same.

Compare that to South Africa's 5 million Afrikaners (Africans) who had almost all arrived by 1800.

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1 comment:

Walton said...

ll spotted, and good points.