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Face the facts: whites, not blacks, create jobs

Last Monday, a black man called Iman Rappetti on Power FM, to express his anguished observation that jobs in South Africa are created by white people, and that we black people don't create jobs.

The poor man was chopped to pieces by angry black callers who recommended history lectures with which the supposedly ignorant caller must familiarise himself before "insulting" black people.

It is a typical response whenever someone dares to suggest that black people need to do some self-introspection. You are quickly reminded of what white people have done to us blacks.

The logic is that black people in South Africa cannot, and must not, have a conversation with and about themselves without reference to whites. This is the kind of psychosocial damage we have inflicted upon ourselves as a black nation - the idea that we exist in relation to white people, not as a nation in itself.

To be sure, those who flogged the poor caller on Power FM actually do not hold a relational paradigm of black existence. They are either embarrassed denialists or romantic black nationalists of the relativist type. They are embarrassed by black people's weaknesses, and thus resort to denying the existence of any weaknesses. The idea is that if we openly admit and talk about our folly as a nation, we will give Penny Sparrow reason to shake her tail.

The Power FM floggers are romantic nationalists in that their sense of blackness is that of a people without blemish - a nation whose purity was marred by the arrival of the white man on the African continent.

It is true that white colonialists did a great deal to disrupt African life, but it is false that we Africans were pure before the arrival of the white man. We have never been, and shall never be pure until the end of time.

There are no people anywhere in the world who have ever been pure. The starting point of the European Renaissance was the acknowledgement of the backwardness that had characterised white people in the Middle Ages. It was a call for Europeans to let reason vanquish myth, to let beauty defeat ugliness.

During their own renaissance, white people conversed with themselves without minding outsiders.

Let us now return to the crucified Power FM caller, regardless of abuse by embarrassed black nationalist romantics. The caller is very right.

Since 1994, black people have not established massive factories to create jobs for their own people. Where are they?

The excuse that we have not done so because of white monopoly capital is lame. Study history, and you will learn that, at some point, Afrikaners were exactly where black people are today. They were poor, uneducated, and they lived in rural areas.

At the time, the economy was in the hands of a Judaeo-English monopoly, controlling the entire mining industry in South Africa.

When the Afrikaners took over power, from 1910 onwards, they worked systematically to create their own factories, their own insurance companies, their state-owned companies, to create jobs and wealth for their own people.

The Afrikaners did not waste time lecturing those who pointed out that there was something wrong with the Afrikaner nation. To the contrary, there are tons of studies produced by Afrikaners themselves on the weaknesses of their people - consult literature on the "Poor White Problem" for evidence.

For the past 23 years, black people have been in power, but they are still complaining about white monopoly capital. Ours is a complainant government.

Why have blacks not used state resources, as Afrikaners did it, to produce big black-owned factories that create jobs for their people? Writhe and squirm as you read this column, but please answer the question - without referring to white people. The origin of progress is the acknowledgement of backwardness.

Consult your personal experience, and it will reveal to you that tsotsis in our townships who fancy themselves clever are in real life always surpassed by bookworms who are looked upon as stupid. Tsotsis die early, or languish in jail.

An honest analysis of the past 23 years of black rule will reveal the emergence of a small black middle class. It will also reveal that we have not been building factories.

As you read this, your stomach is probably full of food produced by boers. When a black president promises jobs in parliament he, in truth, expects the jobs to come from white people - never mind the noises about white monopoly capital.

A real African Renaissance will come the day we black people tell each other the uncomfortable truth about ourselves as an independently existent nation. Are we ready?

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