The error with the doll test.

Some of us have seen this social experiment where kids are told to choose between a black or white doll. And more often than not, the kids choose the white doll. 

What I'd like to emphasize is that these are dolls & while there are many aesthetically unappealing black features, there are aesthetically unappealing white features as well. The human body was designed for function & not aesthetics. What this doll test social experiment shows that we don't notice is kids are impressionable & want to make a choice that will please the adult. The very race of the individual conducting the test pressures the child to make a preconceived choice. 

Also, dolls are manufactured using a universal set of facial features, usually made from European features so naturally a European-looking black doll will look a bit unsettling compared to a doll with features black people would consider aesthetically appealing. If the doll test were reality, in any case, there would be no single white women & an abundance of single black women - which (by watching dating shows) is clearly not the case. 

What to do after Cape Independence...

Cape Republicans / Kaapenars citing why secession from South Africa is necessary. 

After the Western Cape secedes from South Africa, financial institutions regarding banking, insurance, life cover, investments & pensions would need to be allowed to continue their services. I imagine all Eurasian people would migrate to the new country & leave the rest of South Africa black. Barring the few that really, really want to live around black people. 

The proposed Cape Republic flag.

I genuinely believe that the Cape Republic will succeed when separated from black South Africa & would likely join forces with Orania isolates. I even believe that the West would be more than happy to invest in a sovereign Cape Republic state... perhaps to just teach black South Africa a lesson. Ofcourse, the Cape Republic will sooner or later try to destabilise black South Africa but we'll have to simply be prepared. So #FreetheCape , a Eurasian state at the southern most tip of Africa is not a terrible idea because having everyone go to their ancestral homelands would simply be too costly & may be taken as a forced deportation of minorities by a racist black country. 

Black leaders who caused the most damage towards the black cause.

While we celebrate black heroes & black people who contributed positively to the world, we do have evil-doers who may have been celebrated in some corners but on a grander perspective, did tremendous damage to the dignity & livelihoods of the black/African people they affected. These are six of the black leaders that I feel did understated damage to the image, dignity & progress of the black cause. 

Tippu Tipp: Tippu Tip was said to be a notorious slave trader who had a large army which raided slaves all along the Swahili Coast & further inland into the Great Lakes region. He contributed in the continuation of the brutal Zanj slave trade, where Africans would be sent to Arabia to be made eunuchs & ultimately slaves.

Mobutu Sese Seko: This was a leader of the former Belgian Congo after the horrible death of Patrice Lumumba. He was backed by Western powers & plundered the land he renamed Zaïre for his own personal gain.

Jean-Bédel Bokassa: This was a leader of the Central African Republic who wanted to be Napoleon so badly that he renamed Central African Republic to the "Central African Empire" & ordained himself as the "Emperor" in a very lavish ceremony. When the people rebelled against one of his laws regarding school uniform, he arrested them, including children who he was said to have beaten in jail.

Manto Tshabalala-Msimang: This lady was the health minister in South Africa when she denied the existence of AIDS, claiming people simply needed to boost their immune system by eating beetroot among other things. The AIDS disease ended up killing 1,4 million black people in South Africa.

Nzinga-a-Nkuwu (João I): One of the Kongo kings that gave slaves to the Portuguese in exchange for firearms & other traded items. This slave trade led to conflict & turmoil in the Kongo kingdom which the Congo region has never fully recovered from.

Autshumao: He was the leader of the Khoisan tribe called the "Goringhaikona", he helped Jan van Riebeeck & the Dutch settle in the Cochokhoi land of the Cape called ǁHui ǃGaeb (now Cape Town). The Dutch along with the Huguenots & British would later exterminate & rape the Khoisan leading to their near complete extinction from modern South Africa. 

Black stereotypes & their origins.

• Black people are ignorant / uneducated: 

Black people & education has always been a thorny issue because the very Western education we're given almost always clashes with our lived realities. So most black people often dismiss education as unnecessary because they are being given knowledge they will likely not use in the real world of taxes, fluctuating markets, government documents & affidavits. A black African needs to know just six things things; national law, the national language, how to read, how to write, how to count & basic geography of his/her country. The twelve grades Frankish Charlemagne education system the world has adopted is not always ideal for African societies so we may need our own education curriculum to be taught to all African scholars. Education & knowledge systems need to be Africanised so they don't seem so foreign & frightening to educators & students, respectively. This will eliminate the "ignorant", "uneducated" tag from our societies. 

Ignorance is also a matter of perspective, you can't expect a carpenter to know climatology concepts. Likewise, Africans can't be expected to be familiar with Western concepts so the ignorant tag will always apply to someone from a different culture. 

• Black people are loud: 

I think being loud among black people comes from the sense that our existence (since colonisation) has made us lack peace. The most uncolonized places are inherently the places where you find the most peaceful/quieter black people. 

• Black people don't know how to be civil / criminal behaviour: 

This also comes from the fact that our recent existence has been filled with turmoil, so we respect authority less & tend to get in trouble with Western legal systems because of our disdain for the lands we live in. 

• Black people are lazy: 

I think this stereotype depends on what cultures consider lazy. For example, a lot of black people in rural South Africa consider office work "lazy". Whereas in Western society, productivity or laziness depends on the outcome, infrastructure & visible results of your culture & society. So what is lazy is largely cultural. Unemployment in black societies where black youths are found loitering around on the streets may be seen as "lazy" by Westerners who do not consider a failure of governance in black lands a factor as to why youths are unemployed or unwilling to work. You usually get motivated to work for something that works for you in return, when the system you are meant to work for is against you - it feels futile to work for anything in that system/culture. 

• Dark skin & kinky hair: 

Dark skin & kinky hair has nothing to do with any biblical curses or references to hell. The "Curse of Ham" in the bible refers to Hamitic people (ancient Egyptians) & not black people. On the equator where the first homo sapiens lived by, it gets very hot & naturally our bodies adapted to that. Likewise, Nordic people adapted to life with less sun & more cold. The whole of Africa is mostly sunny & hot except mountainous regions, so Africans naturally adapted melanated skin & kinky hair. 

• Stealing Eurasian culture: 

We can't really steal something we are constantly encouraged & forced to adopt. When you're indoctrinated in Western systems, you subconsciously look to Europe as a compass in your life. African spirituality, knowledge systems, sociocultural traits & scripts are undocumented & not understood in detail by the world so are seen as unserious, obscure & unsupported by any serious institution. For example; there is no digitised African version of Wikipedia with the knowledge from the Timbuktu library or even a reputable organisation for any African faith/spiritual belief. 

• Can't govern themselves / Africa poor: 

Whenever Africans govern themselves well, it seems like some foreign power always wants to come in & claim some of that success or disrupt the progress Africans made. It happens so frequently that you almost expect good African governance to constantly be fending off attacks from foreign powers. This is why Africa is seen as poor; wars & destabilising objectives are constantly being funded by outsiders, leaving us almost always on a constant economic & development backfoot. The last few people to promote African sovereignty in economy & agriculture were ripped to shreds (reputational, health & financial ruin), if not killed by foreign powers. We're going to have to defend ourselves against sabotage if we truly want to develop. 

• Living in huts / dirty / smelly: 

I'll be honest; in the heat, it's harder to stay clean. Things rot faster in the heat also. Huts are still basic shelter & provide protection from the elements so are not nothing. Most of Africa has modernized though & adopted modern construction techniques. Most Africans no longer live in huts & deodorant has been introduced to Africa as well since it's invention in 1888. We have adopted modern hygiene methods also. 

• Punctuality: 

I honestly don't know why black people are said to be "never on time" but I guess it depends on the importance of the occasion because I know of black people who are very punctual for things that matter like work & job interviews etc. but come thirty or forty minutes late for events & get-togethers with their friends. I guess it has to do with consequences, if there are no consequences for arriving late - many black people will take their time.

Conclusion: 

We simply need to look at ourselves & compare ourselves to developed lands & ask ourselves what it will take achieve a certain level of development. I feel that if we can feed ourselves, house ourselves & our people as well as express ourselves in our lands fully in our own languages - it would be the best outcome of any situation Africans are in. It would create a generation which has faith in it's land & more eager to comply with national law & national institutions. If we can re-Africanise / decolonise our lands while being fully capable of feeding ourselves & sheltering ourselves, it would be the greatest triumph any African generation before us — since colonisation — has ever achieved. I imagine that these above-mentioned stereotypes can often sound so damning as a young, black individual. Being made to feel responsible for the behaviour of an entire race when it's not the responsibility of any one person but rather the collective responsibility of every member of that race to do an introspection as to whether or not they are contributing towards the hatred other races have towards us. 

A conflict of perspectives...

Now, everyone who lives in South Africa knows that this is firmly an African (black) country. Over 80% of the population is black. If we were to measure race percentages of the South African population by Usonian measures, over 91% of the country would be black. It is an African country by many respects. The most spoken languages are African languages & not French , Portuguese, Spanish, Arabic, Dutch or some English variant. But the problem is the previously advantaged races see themselves as living in a European enclave or some sort of colony within Africa. These are also the people with the biggest voice in the global media & who fund propaganda campaigns overseas making the world think that they are the majority & are "persecuted". As a black person in South Africa, I am honestly more persecuted than white people because nobody cares about us & these previously advantaged people are quick to try stifle our progress using other black people against us. And black people are quick to sell their soul & destroy other black people for some sort of renumeration from this previously advantaged group of people. Let me repeat, BLACK PEOPLE FEEL MORE PERSECUTED IN SOUTH AFRICA THAN WHITE PEOPLE. And this is a simple problem to identify & isolate, we black people in South Africa never made our own systems even if we made most of the country's infrastructure today, it was around white-made structures. So it still feels like an Anglo-Dutch state no matter what black people do. This makes European colonisers still feel entitled to African land. 

Overseas, when they see South African media, they see black people embracing white people & other races... Of course, the races of South Africa get along on surface values like black exploitation & white opulence? But on more foundational values like nationality, ethnicity, non-racialism etc. we do not see eye-to-eye. Non-racialism to many white South Africans is a Western-facing & Western-biased black majority land where whites live in comfort amongst themselves, Indians & coloureds but blacks live far away from them. The suffering of black people in South Africa is caused by two enemies; rich black people who see themselves as special & separate from the black majority & the rich white/corporations who fund them. Overseas, they are shown South Africa from the minority perspective & while black people in South Africa see some sort of magical multiracial land in South Africa on a good day, they see the simple, ugly truth on bad days i. e. a European colony which has invaded African land & persecuted it's people. 

This may be more a vent than a casual opinion blog entry but I felt that it needed to be emphasized that what the black majority believes South Africa to be, what white South Africans believe South Africa to be & what the world thinks South Africa to be are three different things. And I feel it's the prejudiced, more than black or white liberals who see South Africa for what it is. The mess expands to the rest of Africa when you consider what the Berlin Conference brought us. While we are a European colony in outline in South Africa, we are not that much different to other "liberated" African countries who still have colonial puppets in power & "Made in Berlin" borders not ethnic borders.  What makes us different in South Africa is that we just have a population of fascists who seem to have overstayed their welcome by more than two hundred years. 

Hopefully, South African land returns to it's tribal ethnicities & we could do an amicable deportation programme for those who do not want to stay on land under tribal/ethnic African rule. That's the only logical solution for anyone who sees what's coming in the future of South Africa (& Africa). No wars, clean separation of ethnic regions into new countries would save us decades, if not, centuries of turmoil & suffering.

Black faces, white mannerisms.

I was just watching a British guy documenting the history of South African television. And we never mention this even though we unanimously know it, but we have a class of quasi-European black people in South Africa & nobody is addressing this issue decisively. It's not always the people who went to white schools who act white but it's people who have simply embraced the South African system & somehow become quasi-European. We often call them Uncle Toms, Uncle Ruckuses & Aunt Jemimas but we never go in-depth at addressing this problem other than just ridiculing it.

There is a SERIOUS problem with black people embracing foreign/un-African systems & having genuine hatred towards their own kind. 

We can see it in our xenophobic sentiments towards black African immigrants but not so much towards white European immigrants. I know of black people who genuinely dislike black tendencies in South Africa despite over 80% of the country being black. 

This then begs to question, the South African system that these quasi-European black people are embracing has to be non-African at the very least for them to have such a manner towards other black people to uphold this system. 

I mean, I've seen enough media from the African continent to understand that South Africa has too many barriers to entry in some places. There are some things that are still subconsciously reserved for certain races in South Africa even though it is a "liberated" country. 

These quasi-European black people then become gatekeepers of certain activities which are reserved for certain racial groups. For example, there are very few black franchises & banks in South Africa in comparison to white franchises & banks. So 9% of the population has more than six banks while the over 80% black majority has less than three - if that. Yet there are black people actively working at stifling black banks. The richest & most powerful black people in South Africa are often ridiculed while the richest & most powerful white people in South Africa are left untouched from character criticism or ridicule. 

I felt that I had to blog this because we have black people who have never set foot in Europe acting European in South Africa & perhaps other places in Africa also have this type of person. These quasi-European Africans have genuine hatred for other black people for the mere reason that they are opulent or mildly well-off while not being white. 

I imagine there are such black people in other African countries but to a lesser extent than in South Africa. And in South Africa it comes off extra bad because we kept our colonizers, so it ends up looking like some black people are willing to be slaves of South Africa's quasi-European system & actively attacking other black people to uphold a system that is not theirs. This is what I see among many black Americans also, especially from the USA. These black people see themselves as so apart from Africa & Africans that they go as far as threatening death to Africans who reject USA's imperialism. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that such people are really "Not Like Us" even though we have a common origin. They have had Africa, literally, beaten out of them. The language & cultural systems they had while in Africa are completely forgotten to them & southern USA culture has replaced everything they knew from Africa. Virtually making their ancestry British. 

As for me, I did pick up quasi-European mannerisms in some places during the course of my life but I would only hate another black person if they themselves took it upon themselves to be my enemy & not because they are simply black. 

We have a serious problem in black society & we're just laughing it off as "coconuts", "Oreos" & Uncle Ruckuses while the root of the problem is very ominous & destructive towards black people in general. It's funny but it is no laughing matter. 

South Africa is already racially polarised...

A part of me wishes the Cape Republic to secede because while they say they want a non-racial independent Western Cape, we all know they'll be a centre for white South African culture & all it's associated traits. We'd finally see how stark the comparisons between a white South Africa & a black South Africa are. If for reflection alone. We all know that in time, the more Eurocentric Cape Republic would attain more investments & funds from the developed world but there is no reason the eastern half of South Africa couldn't work to alleviate poverty itself.

Personally, I'm not fond of nomadic life. Maybe it's due to just not needing to know foreign places but I've never felt the urge to leave home to a city for whatever reason. I've only considered it due to peer pressure but it's not a "Plan A" for me. It's not because I hate other ethnicities or races more than disliking being away from a familiar base. 

But some seem to thrive on that existence. Only coming home for Easter or Christmas.  

And some of these are the white opportunists & nomads that Cape Independence would serve because east of South Africa is the more populated indigenous black "Bantu" lands. While in the west of South Africa, is the depopulated former KhoiSan lands. If you don't see how this all fits - you need to go back to primary school & do some simple puzzles. There really is no genuine connection between the races of South Africa & living in two separate new federal/autonomous regions could be a great solution. In fact, it's a long overdue solution for South Africa in some respects. Not to say racial unity can never exist in the world but it can only exist peacefully in certain circumstances. It would not be a mass migration initially but it would be more allowing certain cultures room to express themselves on their own terms in their own lands.

We're an abundant commodity.

As black people, sometimes, we tend to overvalue our importance. If you can disappear this very moment & the world will be the same without you - you just don't matter. What we don't understand is that there is no shortage of black people anywhere. As a black male, you are as replaceable as the next black male. So the more you assume you're the main character, the more obnoxious you become & the less needed you & the black race becomes. We need less vanity & more progress. A black person with seventy cars is just as good as a black person with none to other races, we need to wake up to the real global world & see how other races see us.

What will it take to reach a truly non-racial South Africa?

In my world, it's very difficult to ignore race & how it determines people's lives so I don't know what these people claiming we should ignore race are on but let's play along. What would it take to achieve a racially-oblivious South Africa? 

Firstly, we'd need to get rid of mentalities we inherited from Apartheid; we need to see a human being & a person first not his (or her) race & his racial stereotype first. We need to stop looking at black opulence as a negative & stop finding jokes in white poverty. Many of us still chuckle when we see interracial couples in South Africa but we'd need to stop that also. 

But, ultimately, I think any attempt at non-racialism is futile because race is not fiction, it's a biological reality. There'll be mixed-race people who would attempt to promote non-racialism but mixed-race communities themselves are an example that non-racialism fails. I think tradition, heritage & centuries old indigenous customs are more important than any racial experiment in the end. 

I can appreciate what the different races of South Africa bring to the table but we may need to accept that for South Africa to truly work, it may need to federate. Like how oil, water & petrol work in the same motor vehicle but not in the same compartments. Or maybe even separate regions into new countries by race. While nobody is taught to be racist, they learn to be racist the more they experience life in South Africa. 

Even if we did legislate non-racialism into law, one race or the other would eventually strive for supremacy rendering the whole practice unworkable.