OUT TO LUNCH

Whether you’ve watched his YouTube videos over the years or not, it would be a hard hearted person who didn’t feel just a smidgen of sympathy for the recently suspended DA and sworn in member of parliament Renaldo Gouws. After only a week too which ranks him along with Des van Rooyen as another ‘two minute noodle’ politician. Not something you would want on your CV but as far as Des is concerned it seems of no consequence because he’s back again for another try.

There are, of course, lots of hard hearted persons around (particularly in the Wokist media) who have been bathing in pure undiluted schadenfreude these past few weeks. ‘Haha serves him right. Never could stand the man. How can he use the dreaded K and N words in a video? Teehee… guess who won’t be getting a ludicrously well paid job in parliament with all the perks now? He’s going to be on the Eastern Cape scrap heap and good riddance’. 

Much of this schadenfreude stems from the fact that most of us don’t suddenly find ourselves earning over a million rand a year to represent the people. In fact, jobs paying even three quarters of that are hard to find, particularly in the Eastern Cape, so I suppose it’s natural that journalists who may well be unemployed within the next twelve months should work up a froth about Renaldo Gouws.___STEADY_PAYWALL___

However, in Gouws’s defence I would suggest that he has suffered cruelly from the tired old lefty tactic of being taken out of context. This is a classic gambit with the race baiters and, believe me, I’ve been there many times before. The trick is to take a small segment of what is written or said out of context and blow it out of all proportion.

I had this problem with the column that got me sacked from the Sunday Times back in 2008 when it still sold 550 000 copies a week (as against the 97 000 it claims these days). I had written the sentence “... simple tribesmen graze their cattle, blissfully unaware that beneath them lies one of the richest gold seams in the world”.

Shock horror… I was on the radio the morning after my sacking (11th April 2008) talking to somebody called Redi Direko on Talk Radio 702 and being accused of ‘extreme racism’ because the use of the adjective ‘simple’ implied that all blacks were as thick as mince. I protested in vain that the word ‘simple’ in the English language in this context clearly meant uncomplicated and modest. However, this didn’t really suit my inquisitor’s narrative so I gave up in frustration and put the phone down.

Renaldo’s ‘racist’ online rant from March 2010, dug up by social media archaeologists, is pretty heavy going but its message is clear. Well, it is if you are allowed to view the whole thing and not the more damning excerpts that Iqbal Surve’s apology for a news service coughed up on social media last month.

Gouws is understandably angry that death threats have been publicly made by political figures against white people and, predominantly, Afrikaners. His anger is palpable but his message in the video is perfectly clear. He is quite clearly stating that calling for the killing of k’s and n’s is hugely offensive and completely wrong. So why is it fine to call for the killing of white people?

Renaldo Gouws’s political future does seem to hang in the balance and it’s quite possible that the DA bow to pressure from the online mob and decide that the anger and the intemperate language language used in the video make it difficult to allow him to sit as a representative in parliament. This would be a great shame because he seems to have been a very dedicated and effective councillor in Nelson Mandela Bay since 2019. He has strong opinions, isn’t afraid to express them and is prepared to stand up to the bullies and thugs whose vision of South Africa is more 15th century than it is 21st Century.

If Gouws is given the boot then it is only fair that various other members of the National Assembly in other parties are also shown the door. No names but you all know who I mean. Anything less would be an act of racism.

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Following the Renaldo Gouws affair plenty of people posted stuff on social media to show how wicked and racist white people really are. I can’t be bothered with Facebook, Instagram, Reddit or Tik Tok so I am only able to spew bile on X (formerly Twitter).

After their Gouws story, IOL gleefully featured a video of white students from 2012 that someone had decided to dig up. The 2012 video shows white students at the University of Pretoria blacking their faces because of the perceived skewed admissions policy for the veterinary science course which favoured black students over allegedly better qualified whites.

Obviously it helped the case for the race grifters that these ‘blacked up’ students were members of AfriForum Youth and that one of them happens to be Ian Cameron who has also been admitted as a DA member of parliament.

The reaction on X was huge so I posted a picture of near naked Eastern Cape initiates covered from head to toe in what I have been told is white clay with the simple caption “So What?” The response was amazing.

The tweet (sorry, can’t get used to calling it an X) was viewed 150 000 times which virtually ensures my future career as an ‘influencer’. Many of the responses took me to task for disrespecting isiXhosa culture to which I replied that I had made no comment about isiXhosa culture but had nearly juxtaposed pictures of young white people with blackened faces and young black people with whitened bodies. So what?

The hostile tweets kept coming so I thought I would honestly admit that, while not intentionally disrespecting isXhosa culture, I did find the tradition of covering your body in white pigmentation while awaiting the possibility of a botched circumcision in freezing winter weather with only a blanket to cover you more than a little absurd. But I’m sure many Xhosas find the idea of my monarch attending a Trooping the Colour ceremony in a gold coach with attendant soldiers standing in the pouring rain playing musical instruments equally absurd. So let’s call it a cultural draw shall we?

I did spend a bit of time researching the proud tradition of Ulwaluko and discovered that the contemplation of it can’t be much fun for the initiates. Already this year there have been eight deaths as reported in the media and since 1995 (according to Wikipedia) there have been just under one thousand. In addition to the deaths though are the many dreadful injuries and infection resulting from dodgy initiation schools and unqualified people attempting to perform circumcisions which frequently go horribly wrong. The victims often suffer from depression and some commit suicide after the ritual that is supposed to turn them from boys into men does the precise opposite.