At the core of the arguments for secession of the Western Cape is racism, nothing else.
It is arrogance of the highest order. To think that we agreed through negotiations to a quasi-federal system in terms of the provinces, only to now be confronted with this insensitive nonsense of secession? How dare you?
This is premised on two fallacies, namely, the Western Cape is a well-governed province unlike the other provinces and is able to stand on its own as an independent economic powerhouse. Really? Let’s debunk both these myths.
On the one hand, Cape Town remains the crime capital of South Africa, with the most murders taking place in this city, but the murders, drugs, rapes and thefts happen on the Cape Flats, far removed from the lush suburbs of Sea Point, Bantry Bay and Camps Bay.
The fact that transport infrastructure does not work for the majority of people in Cape Town does not resonate with the minority white folks. Let’s build a really good rapid transit system but let’s ensure it’s in the Bloubergstrand-Milnerton area and we will say it’s coming to the Mitchells Plain-Khayelitsha side of town. But alas, it’s been years already and still nothing.
The railway lines coming from these areas are also not a priority, but the DA is doing so well for the majority of our people. The apartheid spatial morphology remains intact and we see it daily in the City’s treatment of the homeless and the poor.
As for the Western Cape’s economic prowess, these stats might for now be impressive but it’s premised on the overall performance of the rest of the country and the policy orientation of the national government. The only reason why the province always looks so good statistically is because the province historically was disproportionately funded as compared to other regions in the country.
Allow me to elaborate: because of the obvious “divide-and-rule” tactics of the apartheid government, they spent proportionally more on a so-called coloured national than on the rest of the native folks in the country. Meaning educational and health facilities in the Western Cape received disproportionately more money than other regions in the country.
Hence, infrastructurally, schools, universities, roads, hospitals and much more were and still are better than the rest of the country — all of which the DA claims is their doing since taking office in the early 2000s. Such utter opportunism is what informs these claims that all is well in Cape Town and that the DA is supposedly governing so well over the years. What utter claptrap.
The DA promised to appoint the children’s commissioner — which is mandatory in terms of the provincial Constitution — in 2009. It took 11 years before they did so after relentless pressure from the ANC and civil society. Even now the DA is underfunding the commissioner and not ensuring her independence.
The provincial Constitution provides for the compulsory appointment of an environmental commissioner too. They have defied the Constitution and have not allowed the legislature to nominate one.
The DA has promised to release provincial and municipal land for integrated social housing and reverse apartheid spatial planning, but after 12 years of the DA government in the province and 14 years in the city they have not used any land they own for inner-city social housing.
The DA promised to place learners in our schools, but over 30,000 learners were not placed. They run the provincial education department and yet returned R400-million to the provincial treasury, unspent.
The DA promised to act without fear or favour against errant DA councillors and MPs, yet there’s clearly different standards for some. MEC Bonginkosi Madikizela was summarily suspended after allegedly falsifying his CV and is now out of office. Yet Mayco member JP Smith and Saldanha Mayor Marius Koen, who face similar allegations, remain in office. Why? This is surely nothing but racism. One set of rules for black DA members and another for white members. But we govern in the WC, so much so that we should seek secession from Mzansi.
The DA promised service delivery for all and a focus on poor communities. Yet sewage flows in the streets of many black townships, council roads in many communities are in a shocking state of repair. Since the DA’s Day Zero campaign during the drought, water tariffs were massively hiked and remain exorbitant and are hitting working- and middle-class families very hard.
The DA in the city has chosen to sell municipal land to the highest bidder, instead of using this land for affordable housing. This has deepened the housing crisis. But we don’t want to talk about these uncomfortable truths, do we?
The DA promised to clean up and upgrade the Mitchells Plain town centre but the situation has worsened with crime, grime and corruption impacting on the lives of small traders and ordinary people. It is clear, they simply don’t care.
If anything, Cape Town is the quintessential tale of two cities, two economies, and indeed two worlds. Rich and white versus poor and black. But independence is what you argue for premised on these two myths.
I see social media abuzz with both the billionaire Rob Hersov’s rhetoric around a plan for the Western Cape to secede from the rest of South Africa, as well as AfriForum’s Constitutional Court application for the referendum laws to be changed, supposedly for the secession plan to be tested with the citizenry of the province. I am very aware of the systematic migration over the years of many whites to the Western Cape informed in part by retirement options, but also supposedly because the province is so well managed under the leadership of the Democratic Alliance. Continue lying to yourselves.
The influx of many black Africans, particularly from the Eastern Cape seeking opportunities in the Western Cape, remains a very scary thing for the DA-led province, I would imagine if the Western Cape should get their way and secede, the borders to black South Africans will be shut. Wouldn’t want the riff-raff to enter our pristine country, or as Rob Hersov says, our second Rwanda.
The history of the Western Cape is integrally part of South Africa and now some arrogant white people want to claim it as their own. Still wanting to just take, take and take as has been their nature in the history of our country. The slave history of the Western Cape should remind us all of the inextricable bond between the Cape and the rest of our country.
Do you know that when in 1652 the Dutch established the Cape Colony, the Cape began to be the recipient of enslaved persons from elsewhere in Africa and from India, Southeast Asia and China? It is this aspect of the European-driven slavery epoch which is often subject to misrepresentation and the full story is rarely told.
According to my good friend, Patric Tariq Mellet, also left out of this story is the slavery story that continued beyond the 1834 Emancipation Day story, both in the Cape Colony and the slavery system in the post-1838 Boer Republics and the cross-border slave-trading by Boers through Mozambique.
The full story begs to be told as it is on the foundations of slavery that colonialism flourished, racist ideology was built, and segregation and apartheid was built. And according to Helen Zille, colonialism for which we should be thankful for. We cannot even begin to hope that we will defeat racism in South Africa without understanding slavery in South Africa.
We need to first look at the size and shape of Cape slavery as many think that slavery was just a numerically small thing. From 1652 until the beginning of the European rape, genocide, conquest and land grabs in the Eastern Cape, there were more enslaved people in the Cape Colony than any other group, European and Khoe. The latter, which once were numerically strong, had by 1795 endured ethnocide, forced removals, genocide, disease fatalities by smallpox and been put to flight as refugees taking sanctuary at the Kai Gariep.
From 1652 to 1806 there were 63,000 first-generation African and Asian slaves brought to the Cape and between 1806 until the arrivals of the last “Prize Slaves” aka “Liberated Africans” in the 1860s there were another 15,000 first-generation, mainly African slaves, bringing the total number of first-generation slaves in the Cape to around 78,000.
Cape slaves were brought to the Cape Colony from Africa and Madagascar (47,300); from India, Sri Lanka, West Bengal and Bangladesh (17,200); and from Southeast Asia (13,500) — totalling 78,000. Post-1838 the Boer Voortrekkers did slave raiding, slave trading and kept slaves to develop farms in the new Boer territories too after they left the Cape in 1836. These latter figures are impossible to relate to. In 1904 there were 385,000 descendants of enslaved persons and other migrants of colour and 92,000 Khoe people of various groups.
The children and successive generations of grandchildren were also born into slavery as Cape Creole slaves. While some slaves were given toponyms denoting the areas from which they were captured or exported, others were given a range of other names including the names of months in the year. A number of prominent liberation fighters had names such as September, February and April.
Such is our rich history in the Western Cape and with one foul swoop, some of you think you can simply take it away from us, deny it from us — never gonna happen.
Never! DM