A Look at the "Good Old Days"

When I wrote my little epitaph for P.W. Botha, I suspected at the time that some cockroach would show up sooner or later to peddle the usual nonsense about how good things were in "those days", before those evil blacks began to run the country into the ground (all statistics to the contrary be damned). Rather than waste energy on a lengthy rebuttal which will have no effect on such idiots anyway, I offer here instead a link to this excerpt from the New York Times (use this link if you have a login) which gives a little flavor of what life was like in those halcyon days which certain malignant little worms look back on with fondness.

REVEREND FRANK CHIKANE, a twenty-six-year-old pastor, was standing naked on the fourth floor of the Krugersdorp police station. His head hung down limply; dried blood was caked in dark brown clumps in his hair and on his face. He had been standing continuously for over forty hours in a room furnished only with steel chairs and a table, his hands chained to a heating pipe behind him.

Ten brawny white policemen surrounded the cleric, each taking turns savaging him. It was sport to them. One kicked him hard in the testicles, roaring with laughter as the slight young man shrieked in pain. Another slammed him in the ribs with a cricket bat. Occasionally the policemen knocked him to the ground and all piled on. Smashing. Crushing. Breaking. Cutting. There was blood everywhere. During a break in the assault, Chikane looked up and recognized the man supervising his torture: he was a deacon in the white branch of his church, a fellow born-again Christian.

Chikane (pronounced chi-KAH-nee) was new in town. He had been sent by his church, the Apostolic Faith Mission, to minister to a congregation in Kagiso, the black township outside Krugersdorp, on the outskirts of Johannesburg. One week after he took up his new post in June 1976, the Soweto uprising began. Protests spread like a veld fire through every township in Johannesburg. Within days, every government building, liquor store, bar, and shop in Kagiso had been burned to the ground. The protests were an angry catharsis for local residents, an explosion of pent-up rage against apartheid.

The police clamped down on the township and many community leaders suddenly vanished. The families turned to their new minister to intervene with the authorities. Rev. Chikane suddenly found himself in a war situation. He retained lawyers to confront the police, demanding to know the whereabouts of people who had presumably been detained. Within a year, the police had had enough of this cheeky minister. Local police had free rein to detain and harass activists of their choosing. Now it was Chikane's turn to "disappear."

In the middle of the night on June 6, 1977, Chikane heard the dreaded banging on his front door. Flashlights shone into his bedroom and armored police vehicles surrounded the church manse where he lived. Several policemen dragged him half-dressed out of his house and threw him in the back of a pale yellow pickup truck, the "squad car" of the South African Police. The assault began with slaps and punches. That was just a warm-up.

Back at the Krugersdorp police station, a team of interrogators set to work on Chikane in earnest. They were strapping Afrikaner men from the platteland. Most of them were junior security policemen trying to impress their bosses, and each other. But they had never encountered a prisoner quite like Chikane. They responded to his intransigence with unchecked brutality.

"Where do you get your orders from?" demanded one of the men as he yanked Chikane's head back by his hair.

"I follow the word of God," replied the pastor. He cried out as another policeman slammed him in the ribs with a wooden broomstick.

"Tell us where the communists are hiding!" bellowed another cop.

"I don't know any communists. People are protesting against apartheid—they don't need communists to tell them they are being oppressed." Nothing the police tried seemed to work. They hung him upside down and beat him back and forth like a punching bag until Chikane lost consciousness. They forced him to hold contorted positions with his feet chained together, burned him with cigarettes, and suffocated him under water until he nearly passed out. They offered him money to inform for them. The young cleric gave them nothing.

After six weeks of torture, Chikane could barely walk. The Krugersdorp cops decided to subject him to a final all-out torture to break him. Maybe he would survive it, maybe not.

Chikane was dragged out of his cell and dumped in a room full of police. The white church deacon yanked the pastor to his feet by his ears and ordered him to stand. For the next fifty hours blows rained down on him. Teams of interrogators came and went in eight-hour shifts, beating him twenty-four hours a day. They had abandoned all restraint and were just venting their fury against this insolent kaffir. Every time he would crumble they would yank him back to his feet. Pieces of his hair, skin, and teeth lay around him on the floor.

After forty-eight hours, a large mustachioed policeman who was particularly sadistic said nonchalantly to the prisoner, "You can tell us who your communist friends are Chikane, or you can die here slowly but surely." Peering up through his swollen eyes, Chikane somehow mustered the wherewithal to reply.

"If I die now, I will be with the Lord. This is gain for me and for the Kingdom." The young clergyman spoke haltingly; every word was a struggle. "But if you let me live I will still live for Christ, and I will continue to challenge your evil apartheid system."

"So you are choosing to die?" bellowed the agitated interrogator, the muscles in his neck straining with anger.

"No, you must choose whether to kill me or let me live. And if you kill me, you must face the Lord on the Day of Judgment."

The cop flew at him in a rage. For over two days, they had failed to break him. He punched Chikane and slammed his knee into his ribs. The young pastor could only whimper; he was numb to all but the most severe pain by now. Secretly, Chikane thought to himself that if he were going to die, the faster the better.

After fifty hours of nonstop torture, his interrogators gave up. They drove him to a prison in nearby Rustenburg, dumped his limp body in a cell, and forgot about him. Chikane could barely move. His jailers laughed at him, saying he had "danced" to some "good music."

A few days after he'd arrived in the jail, Chikane asked a guard for a Bible. The request was denied. "`Dit maak jou 'n terroris," the jailer replied, slamming the steel bars on the wounded cleric. "It makes you a terrorist."

After six months of solitary confinement, Chikane was released. No charges were ever filed.

This wasn't Chikane's first encounter with apartheid brutality, not by a long shot. Take the following passage:

Frank Chikane was not quite sixteen. It was a warm summer day and he was strolling down the street to visit a friend. Roads in Soweto were rutted dirt thoroughfares shared by pedestrians, farm animals, trucks, cars, and horse-drawn carts. Around him lay the Soweto landscape of mile upon mile of identical four-room "matchbox" houses. Often the only distinguishing feature between houses was the number that the authorities had crudely painted on each door.

Frank was sauntering absentmindedly and didn't notice the white Ford sedan pull up alongside him. Inside were three white policemen. Frank had already grown accustomed to playing cat-and-mouse when he spotted the police. Blacks must begin carrying a dompas at age sixteen, and teenagers were routinely stopped to ascertain their age. If they didn't have a dompas, they would be arrested and held until their parents arrived with a birth certificate to prove they didn't need a pass.

"Good morning meneer [sir]," said the nervous boy, careful to look down as he spoke. The three white men in police uniforms emerged from the car and approached him menacingly.

"Meneer?" leered a strapping fellow with a bushy mustache. "Did you say meneer?" His neck muscles tightened as he stepped closer to the boy.

"Cheeky kaffir—you call me baas!" Chikane was not sufficiently practiced in dealing with whites to understand the fine points of slave parlance. He had been taught to address white adults as meneer. But that might imply you were equals. Whites insisted that blacks address them as baas (boss) in perpetual acknowledgment of their mastery.

The portly man suddenly buried his fist in Chikane's solar plexus. The slight boy was lifted up in the air by the blow. He felt a sharp pain as he landed on hard ground, and he could taste the dust as it hung limply around his head. He gasped for breath, straining for wind against the spasm in his abdomen. He thought he was suffocating. The policeman grabbed his white shirt and yanked him forward.

"Let's see your dompas, kaffir!" he snapped.

The young man was flustered. "Yes, baas," he mumbled between gasps as he searched his pockets. "I have the papers ... somewhere."

Chikane was still fumbling when the next blow slammed into his temple, followed by another in his jaw. He was crying now, shrieking helplessly between sobs. He was on the ground, scrambling away, trying desperately to avoid the men. But there were three of them, and they formed a circle around him. One of the other policemen kicked him in the groin, causing Chikane to let out a high-pitched scream.

"Please, baas. I have it somewhere, my baas," he sputtered. Blood ran in deep crimson streaks from his nose and down his white school shirt. But they were on him again, picking him up and throwing him back down onto the hard dirt.

"I'll give you the papers, baas," wailed the frightened teenager. He was too old to be a boy, too young to be a man. He lay crumpled on the ground, praying that they would spare him.

Reverend Chikane was one of the luckier victims, of course, in as far as he lived to tell his tale, unlike several thousands of others within South Africa, let alone the millions of Africans whose lives were wrecked in apartheid South Africa's destabilization campaigns. Routine brutality and humiliation, torture, kidnapping, assassinations, even international terrorism: this was the reality of life for the millions of South Africans who weren't lucky to be born with light enough skin to enjoy the pleasures of life in that paradise of National Party rule, the other side of the coin to the photogenic, "crime free" picture painted by idiots who never had to see the misery underlying their prosperity, thanks to "influx control" deportation measures which kept 80% of the population cooped up in 20% of the country's most marginal land. To hear these racist vermin tell it, you wouldn't know that South Africa had always suffered from a sky-high crime rate, thanks to a police force which never learnt to give a damn about crime as long as it took place between nonwhites. If anything, the country's crime rate is lower today than it has been in many decades, with the big difference being that the victims of said crimes are now spread between people of all colors, including insolent white racists who are given an outsized megaphone for their cries of victimhood by fellow sympathizers abroad.

The ANC under Thabo Mbeki has made some tremendous mistakes, no doubt about it, especially in dealing with the AIDS epidemic and the overmighty trade unions, but compared to what went before, the party remains an epitome of good government and forbearance: it is especially to be commended for its restraint with regards to the many criminals and fellow travellers who only discovered a concern for the welfare of their country as a whole once their own unjustly garnered, state-protected privileges came under assault: not even the United States showed as much mercy in its treatment of its former Japanese and German enemies after World War 2. Of course, the last people to show an inkling of appreciation for this unprecedented good fortune are the scum who spend all their time whining about South Africa going to the dogs under the rule of the "ignorant" blacks who their apartheid paradise had worked so systematically to miseducate ...

Comments

[Steve Edwards]

The astonishing resolve of this Chikane fellow is almost enough in itself to re-stoke my erstwhile theism for a couple of weeks or so - is he still alive and active?

[Abiola]

Not only is he still alive, but he even paid a condolence visit recently to Botha's widow.

http://www.news24.com/News24/South_Africa/News/0,,2-7-1442_2023894,00.html

South Africa is extremely fortunate to have men with such superhuman powers of forgiveness in office.

[Steve Edwards]

Unbelievable. The man is a saint. Being of a Robespierrist bent, I simply don't think I could have resisted exacting sweet revenge were I in his position.