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07/03/2008, 19:00 Jura Joined on 28/11/2005 Posts 714 Re: Moving to France from South Africa Yes Quillan the 'whites' gave Africa back to the 'indigenous' population...just as they should have...and look what they are doing now to their own people. The fact is that Africa was always a tribal civilisation;  pre-white settlement it was always subject to tribal rule/law. It always has been. It was fine for them to spear their people 200 years ago...but to do such things to women and childen today, and with machetes...? But that's okay...because they rule themselves now, right? If parts of the world had been left to develop under 'indigenous populations' we would have a very primitive planet today indeed. Are you English? bear in mind that the true indigenous English are now living in Wales and Scotland.    Report

08/03/2008, 7:29 raindog Joined on 26/09/2007 HERAULT Posts 761 Re: Moving to France from South Africa I thought that was the Britons? sociability is just a big smile and a big smile is nothing but teeth    Report

08/03/2008, 10:28 Quillan Joined on 23/08/2004 Forum Moderator Posts 3,576 Re: Moving to France from South Africa  Jura wrote: Yes Quillan the 'whites' gave Africa back to the 'indigenous' population...just as they should have people.  Exactly and quite right too.  Jura wrote: The fact is that Africa was always a tribal civilisation;  pre-white settlement it was always subject to tribal rule/law. It always has been. It was fine for them to spear their people 200 years ago...but to do such things to women and children today, and with machetes...? But that's okay...because they rule themselves now, right? Not it's not right by our standards but then that's our standards not theirs. Would you think it right that the current president went to the UK (or France as you are living here I believe) and told them how to run their country or if you went exactly the same way as the British in SA to enforce his way of doing things. We might consider it uncivilised and not right by our standards but it's nothing to do with us what they do in their own country. You will be saying it was right to invade Iraq next and perhaps we should consider China and sort them out, after all they murder female babies there most of the time. But again that's another issue and we wouldn't because they can fight back on an equal standing and we might loose.  Jura wrote: If parts of the world had been left to develop under 'indigenous populations' we would have a very primitive planet today indeed. Are you English? bear in mind that the true indigenous English are now living in Wales and Scotland. Does not work I am afraid. Yes the English are a bastardised race and it's happened over a 1000 years or more starting with the Romans but then they have integrated, married (or a bit of the old rape and pillage with the Vikings etc) so they are now a right old mix. The issue, unfortunately, is that it's easier to spot when the parents are of two different colours and the whites in SA made little or no attempt to integrate with the native population. Lets get some current statistics from the SA government website shall we.... SA Population is 47.9M. Africans are in the majority at just over 38-million, making up 79.6% of the total population. The white population is estimated at 4.3-million (9.1%), the coloured population (that's mixed race as you know) at 4.2-million (8.9%) and the Indian/Asian population at just short of 1.2-million (2.5%). These figures were produced in mid 2007 (source - http://www.southafrica.info/ess_info/sa_glance/demographics/population.htm ) if you want to know about the UK then look at http://www.statistics.gov.uk/census2001/profiles/commentaries/ethnicity.asp These statistics don't take in to account the mixing of European 'invaders' over hundreds of years. Also the word 'race' in the context of what we are talking about and keeping in simple (I can give you the long description if you wish) is European, African and Asian. So the French, Germans, Spanish, Russians (with the exception of Mongolians who are defined as Asian) etc are part of the same race. Europeans and African are of different races. For a better definition try "Definition of Race" in Google. (My sources are public domain and not copyrighted.)   http://www.chambresdhote.com    Report

08/03/2008, 18:18 Jura Joined on 28/11/2005 Posts 714 Re: Moving to France from South Africa Okay, fine. I accept your comments as you are obviously comfortable with what is being done to innocent women and children there, and all in the name of it being 'their' continent. Trouble is 'their' continent does not belong to the people themselves, only to the murderous Idi Amin-type dictators that the West does not tolerate anywhere else in the world, but this only holds it seems in oil producing nations. Africa does not contribute in this respect so why bother with them? What white nation these days is going to try and interfere with a black nation? But you say we should do nothing because it is 'nothing to do with us'...? No-one bothers the Chinese for obvious reasons. I cannot believe the way you think. We are all human beings. Cold blooded murder of the population by it's leaders should never be condoned/accepted as 'cultural'. I cannot be bothered with the rest of what you have written re the English.    Report

08/03/2008, 18:55 Quillan Joined on 23/08/2004 Forum Moderator Posts 3,576 Re: Moving to France from South Africa This is old style colonial politics, perhaps we should send a gun boat over a sort the nasty black chappies out . You are right, we are all human beings and by our standards we think these things are abhorrent but that's by our standards. You can't go round forcing your standards on other countries and in particular races, you have no right and it's wrong. What makes us think our standards are right anyway, its a very deap question I know. An area I do agree with you on is that if you were to force your standards on other counties it should at least be even handed. I am not so much thinking of oil but the arms trade (another nasty area) and my thoughts immediately go to the middle east where the UK have let a certain country (well the one we know about) get away with murder and civil rights infringements because they will cancel arms deals worth billions if the UK gets involved. Even France has and had problems in the past with it's old colonial territories, the most famous of which must be Vietnam where they used ex Nazi SS troops who were assimilated in to the Foreign Legion after WW2. They had more success there than France and America put together but the price was so high they were quickly removed. The UK also have (and may still do) supply torture instruments to African countries (I'm thinking of Plessey which no longer exists) that were and still are run by dictators. We also allow UK nationals to be tortured in Guantanamo Bay. I don't think this allows us to interfere just from a morality point of view. If you want to police the world hen you have to be whitter than white, metaphorically speaking with no skeletons in your closet. Is it right that 80% or a counties population be told what to do by 9% of the population? Why can't you be bothered with the English bit, is it because you never knew? http://www.chambresdhote.com    Report

08/03/2008, 19:07 Jura Joined on 28/11/2005 Posts 714 Re: Moving to France from South Africa No it is not that I know nothing about the English; it matters not where the English come from but rather where they are allowing themselves to be led these days. My OH is studying English history with the OU...I know enough already believe me. But then I suppose they have something in common with the unfortunate African people...their Govt's care not a fig about their people.    Report

09/03/2008, 11:16 CJR Joined on 09/03/2008 Posts 3 Re: Moving to France from South Africa Let me quote some population statistics which indicate that the blacks could not have suffered too much in South Africa before they took over running the country in 1994.    In 1900 : Whites   1.5 million, Blacks 4.5 million , Coloureds and Indians 1 million  (Approx). Oxford History of SA Volume 2.  If it were not for western medicine  the blacks would not have been able to experience the population growth that has happened since then in South Africa. The white population in South Africa have achieved a lot in spite of their numbers being so much fewer than the blacks. I know that as a Chartered Accountant when I lived in South Africa,  the banking and computer technology sector was far superior to that of the UK. For example a cheque cleared in one day in the 1970s.  Also, I had online access to banking information in 1981. Standards of financial reporting were far superior. This  8.9% white population you talk about have, created the 'power house of Africa'.  This is slowly being destroyed. You talk about the policing problems of the world , in my opinion the rule we follow is : -Smaller or weaker than us? -Any advantage in it? -Is it Politically Correct?  and, otherwise don't bother!!         Is this hypocritcal or what? You mentioned that we should not impose our standards on others-   well it's necessary we do -  think of Nuremburg 1946, the Hague Int'l. Court - quite a few nasties have been there recently. And the UN, ineffectual it is, has soldiers in many countries, but we let Mugabe et al get away with genocide.  More policing is needed, not less. CJR    Report

09/03/2008, 14:14 Quillan Joined on 23/08/2004 Forum Moderator Posts 3,576 Re: Moving to France from South Africa I would like to know where the Oxford History of SA (pt2) that you quoted got it's facts from. I ask this because if you visit the archives of the university of Port Elizabeth you will see the first documented census results which were gathered (very loosely) in 1911 and published in 1912. The validity of the census is called in to question by modern historians because firstly any group of less than 100o was not counted, only 83 cities and towns were included and the counting was done by people literally counting people. The SA specialist on this matter is a chap called A. J. Christopher and a quick google will get you the correct information you require. Your comments on health are interesting. I read just now on the SA Health website that blacks reaching 50 will continue on to outlive whites as they get older and that whilst the mortality rate of black babies has improved it has decreased for whites. I would like to know how many, or the proportion, of your clients were black (not coloured) and how many were white or do I assume they were all white. You have mentioned banking and in particular online banking back in the early 1980's, I wonder what the proportion percentages between white and black there was in those using such services. I don't think many blacks could have afforded a computer for online banking back then. In fact I doubt many even had a bank account. In fact I think all these services and benefits were for the whites only, prove me wrong. We are now seeing the 'price' that the blacks have had o pay for the 8.9% whites used to create the 'power house of Africa'. Yes I do mention standards and I do believe we should not force them on others, it is dictatorial and no better than the Nazi's. Also, if you go around continuously sorting out other peoples problems they will continue to make the same mistakes and constantly rely on others to sort them out. You mention Mugabe, I don't like him at all, he has bought his country to it's knees and then some. True if they found oil there tomorrow the Americans would be in there like a shot (the UN is just an American glove puppet). It's for the people to rise in Zimbabwe and throw out the dictator like other countries have done otherwise they will learn nothing and make the same mistakes again. One hopes that by the time Mugabe goes the whole population will understand this. Of course he will win the next election on the 29th March and it will be fixed yet again (he won't allow any external invidulators yet again) but this may be the last straw as far as the people are concerned. The question is with Mugabe is how is he staying in power, he can't do it on his own, people have to support him, who are they and why. Well I think the reluctance of the other African states and the west to get involved holds the answer. In particular the west because now nothing is being produced there at all due to economic viability and the horrendous inflation. Everything has to be imported and you don't have to look far to see who is supplying the goods and food and who gains financially. Money and greed yet again. And finally, don't hold the Europeans up as an example, we are just as bad as you say the Africans are. We practice genocide (Yugoslavia), we let people die of starvation when we have plenty (there should be no need for charities to raise money for food the western governments should just give it and distribute it for free). We allow people to die in the UK because the government won't pay for the drugs to save them. We did nothing to stop the 6M Jews, gypsies, mental patients and political activists from the holocaust. Putting them on trial at Nuremberg did not help those that died. For these and many others reasons we are not the ones to go round telling people how to run their county, we are no better.   http://www.chambresdhote.com    Report

10/03/2008, 6:58 CJR Joined on 09/03/2008 Posts 3 Re: Moving to France from South Africa The comments below of a Journalist are self evident of what is what is happening on the ground right now in South Africa.. I do not accept  any of your interpretations on Africa , you clearly have your head in the sand. At one stage you lived in the country and have a superficial knowledge about South Africa and Africa in general. In just 14 years the South African economy is being destroyed not by the whites but by the blacks running the economy of South Africa. They inherited a vibrant and strong economy and it has only taken 14 years to ruin this. Not unusual in Africa. You can not blame the whites for what is clearly a combination of greed , corruption  and incompetence. I still have family in South Africa and my brother is a Company Director with a  South African and Australian company in  the Mining Industry. South Africa used to lead the world in the mining industry, however because of the uncertainties, corruption  and violence in the country most of the leading academics have left. A friend of ours a retired professor in Economic History from the University of Watersrand  ( An Oxford University Academic) regulary writes to us about what is going on in South Africa. His views are entirely objective  and  based on academic research  on the South African Economy. Quote from the Sunday Herald - A liberal South African Paper Wounded Nation 9 February 2008 The lights are literally and figuratively going out all over South Africa as crime, corruption and mismanagement push the rainbow country towards becoming another failed African state. By Fred Bridgland in Johannesburg 11:50pm Saturday 9th February 2008 AFTER bathing in the warm, fuzzy glow of the Mandela years, South Africans today are deeply demoralised people. The lights are going out in homes, mines, factories and shopping malls as the national power authority, Eskom - suffering from mismanagement, lack of foresight, a failure to maintain power stations and a flight of skilled engineers to other countries - implements rolling power cuts that plunge towns and cities into daily chaos. Major industrial projects are on hold. The only healthy enterprise now worth being involved in is the sale of small diesel generators to powerless households but even this business has run out of supplies and spare parts from China. The currency, the rand, has entered freefall. Crime, much of it gratuitously violent, is rampant, and the national police chief faces trial for corruption and defeating the ends of justice as a result of his alleged deals with a local mafia kingpin and dealer in hard drugs. Newly elected African National Congress (ANC) leader Jacob Zuma, the state president-in-waiting, narrowly escaped being jailed for raping an HIV-positive woman last year, and faces trial later this year for soliciting and accepting bribes in connection with South Africa's shady multi-billion-pound arms deal with British, German and French weapons manufacturers. One local newspaper columnist suggests that Zuma has done for South Africa's international image what Borat has done for Kazakhstan. ANC leaders in 2008 still speak in the spiritually dead jargon they learned in exile in pre-1989 Moscow, East Berlin and Sofia while promiscuously embracing capitalist icons - Mercedes 4x4s, Hugo Boss suits, Bruno Magli shoes and Louis Vuitton bags which they swing, packed with money passed to them under countless tables - as they wing their way to their houses in the south of France. It all adds up to a hydra-headed crisis of huge proportions - a perfect storm as the Rainbow Nation slides off the end of the rainbow and descends in the direction of the massed ranks of failed African states. Eskom has warned foreign investors with millions to sink into big industrial and mining projects: we don't want you here until at least 2013, when new power stations will be built. In the first month of this year, the rand fell 12% against the world's major currencies and foreign investors sold off more than £600 million worth of South African stocks, the biggest sell-off for more than seven years. "There will be further outflows this month, because there won't be any news that will convince investors the local growth picture is going to change for the better," said Rudi van der Merwe, a fund manager at South Africa's Standard Bank. Commenting on the massive power cuts, Trevor Gaunt, professor of electrical engineering at the University of Cape Town, who warned the government eight years ago of the impending crisis, said: "The damage is huge, and now South Africa looks just like the rest of Africa. Maybe it will take 20 years to recover." The power cuts have hit the country's platinum, gold, manganese and high-quality export coal mines particularly hard, with no production on some days and only 40% to 60% on others. "The shutdown of the mining industry is an extraordinary, unprecedented event," said Anton Eberhard, a leading energy expert and professor of business studies at the University of Cape Town. "That's a powerful message, massively damaging to South Africa's reputation for new investment. Our country was built on the mines." To examine how the country, widely hailed as Africa's last best chance, arrived at this parlous state, the particular troubles engulfing the Scorpions (the popular name of the National Prosecuting Authority) offers a useful starting point. The elite unit, modelled on America's FBI and operating in close co-operation with Britain's Serious Fraud Office (SFO), is one of the big successes of post-apartheid South Africa. An independent institution, separate from the slipshod South African Police Service, the Scorpions enjoy massive public support. The unit's edict is to focus on people "who commit and profit from organised crime", and it has been hugely successful in carrying out its mandate. It has pursued and pinned down thousands of high-profile and complex networks of national and international corporate and public fraudsters. Drug kingpins, smugglers and racketeers have felt the Scorpions' sting. A major gang that smuggle platinum, South Africa's biggest foreign exchange earner, to a corrupt English smelting plant has been bust as the result of a huge joint operation between the SFO and the Scorpions. But the Scorpions, whose top men were trained by Scotland Yard, have been too successful for their own good. The ANC government never anticipated the crack crimebusters would take their constitutional independence seriously and investigate the top ranks of the former liberation movement itself. The Scorpions have probed into, and successfully prosecuted, ANC MPs who falsified their parliamentary expenses. They secured a jail sentence for the ANC's chief whip, who took bribes from the German weapons manufacturer that sold frigates and submarines to the South African Defence Force. They sent to jail for 15 years a businessman who paid hundreds of bribes to then state vice-president Jacob Zuma in connection with the arms deal. Zuma was found by the judge to have a corrupt relationship with the businessman, and now the Scorpions have charged Zuma himself with fraud, corruption, tax evasion, racketeering and defeating the ends of justice. His trial will begin in August. The Scorpions last month charged Jackie Selebi, the national police chief, a close friend of state president Thabo Mbeki, with corruption and defeating the ends of justice. Commissioner Selebi, who infamously called a white police sergeant a "f***ing chimpanzee" when she failed to recognise him during an unannounced visit to her Pretoria station, has stepped down pending his trial. But now both wings of the venomously divided ANC - ANC-Mbeki and ANC-Zuma - want the Scorpions crushed, ideally by June this year. The message this will send to the outside world is that South Africa's rulers want only certain categories of crime investigated, while leaving government ministers and other politicians free to stuff their already heavily lined pockets. No good reason for emasculating the Scorpions has been put forward. "That's because there isn't one," said Peter Bruce, editor of the influential Business Day, South Africa's equivalent of, and part-owned by, The Financial Times, in his weekly column. "The Scorpions are being killed off because they investigate too much corruption that involves ANC leaders. It is as simple and ugly as that," he added. The demise of the Scorpions can only exacerbate South Africa's out-of-control crime situation, ranked for its scale and violence only behind Colombia. Everyone has friends and acquaintances who have had guns held to their heads by gangsters, who also blow up ATM machines and hijack security trucks, sawing off their roofs to get at the cash. In the past few days my next-door neighbour, John Matshikiza, a distinguished actor who trained at the Royal Shakespeare Company and is the son of the composer of the South African musical King Kong, had been violently attacked, and friends visiting from Zimbabwe had their car stolen outside my front window in broad daylight. My friends flew home to Zimbabwe without their car and the tinned food supplies they had bought to help withstand their country's dire political and food crisis and 27,000% inflation. Matshikiza, a former member of the Glasgow Citizens Theatre company, was held up by three gunmen as he drove his car into his garage late at night. He gave them his car keys, wallet, cellphone and luxury watch and begged them not to harm his partner, who was inside the house. As one gunman drove the car away, the other two beat Matshikiza unconscious with broken bottles, and now his head is so comprehensively stitched that it looks like a map of the London Underground. These assaults were personal, but mild compared with much commonplace crime. Last week, for example, 18-year-old Razelle Botha, who passed all her A-levels with marks of more than 90% and was about to train as a doctor, returned home with her father, Professor Willem Botha, founder of the geophysics department at the University of Pretoria, from buying pizzas for the family. Inside the house, armed gunmen confronted them. They shot Professor Botha in the leg and pumped bullets into Razelle. One severed her spine. Now she is fighting for her life and will never walk again, and may never become a doctor. The gunmen stole a laptop computer and a camera. Feeding the perfect storm are the two centres of ANC power in the country at the moment. On the one hand, there is the ANC in parliament, led by President Mbeki, who last Friday gave a state-of-the-nation address and apologised to the country for the power crisis. Mbeki made only the briefest of mentions of the national Aids crisis, with more than six million people HIV-positive. He did not address the Scorpions crisis. The collapsing public hospital system, under his eccentric health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, an alcoholic who recently jumped the public queue for a liver transplant, received no attention. And the name Jacob Zuma did not pass his lips. Last December Mbeki and Zuma stood against each other for the leadership of the ANC at the party's five-yearly electoral congress. Mbeki, who cannot stand again as state president beyond next year's parliamentary and presidential elections, hoped to remain the power behind the throne of a new state president of his choosing. Zuma, a Zulu populist with some 20 children by various wives and mistresses, hoped to prove that last year's rape case, and the trial he faces this year for corruption and other charges, were part of a plot by Mbeki to use state institutions to discredit him. Mbeki assumed that the notion of Zuma assuming next year the mantle worn by Nelson Mandela as South Africa's first black state president would be so appalling to delegates, a deeply sad and precipitous decline, that his own re-election as ANC leader was a shoo-in. But Mbeki completely miscalculated his own unpopularity - his perceived arrogance, failure to solve health and crime problems, his failure to deliver to the poor - and he lost. Now Zuma insists that he is the leader of the country and ANC MPs in parliament must take its orders from him, while Mbeki soldiers on until next year as state president, ordering MPs to toe his line. Greatly understated, it is a mess. Its scale will be dramatically illustrated if South Africa's hosting of the 2010 World Cup is withdrawn by Fifa, the world football body. Already South African premier league football evening games are being played after midnight because power for floodlights cannot be guaranteed before that time. Justice Malala, one of the country's top newspaper columnists, has called on Fifa to end the agony quickly. "I don't want South Africa to host the football World Cup because there is no culture of responsibility in this country," he wrote in Johannesburg's bestselling Sunday Times. "The most outrageous behaviour and incompetence is glossed over. No-one is fired. I have had enough of this nonsense, of keeping quiet and ignoring the fact that the train is about to run us over. "It is increasingly clear that our leaders are incapable of making a success of it. Scrap the thing and give it to Australia, Germany or whoever will spare us the ignominy of watching things fall apart here - football tourists being held up and shot, the lights going out, while our politicians tell us everything is all right."    Report

10/03/2008, 8:41 Quillan Joined on 23/08/2004 Forum Moderator Posts 3,576 Re: Moving to France from South Africa You never answered my questions about your clients  ethnic background and who used the wonderful banking system that you described so I must assume I was correct in that it was only for the benefit of the whites. Everything that was done by the whites was for the benefit of the whites and it they that prospered. If SA whites had integrated with the blacks and educated them to the same standards as themselves instead of segregating them and using them as cheap labour the blacks would have been better equipped to take power. Your quite right the current leaders have no idea how to run the country but then who's fault is that. How much preparation with regards to educating them etc was done before the free elections and handover of power, very little if any. If you look at India and the way things were done there, allowing Indians to play an active part in the administration, then you can see a totally different outcome. Don't get me wrong, the whites (more to the point the British) did some terrible things there as well but it was handled differently and India is becoming a world economic power in is own right. It's like putting a 1000 children in a chocolate factory and walking away, they will simply gorge themselves till they are sick with no idea how to continue production. Then the previous owners can put their hands up and say "nothing to do with us" and walk away denying any further responsibility. Just like the white South Africans, they refuse to take any responsibility for their past and the current state of the country. It will take a complete generation of black South Africans before things improve then not by much and then it will takes years for things to return to anything like they were. You reap what you sow in life and that is what is happening now in SA.   http://www.chambresdhote.com    Report

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