ANOTHER ROUND AGAINST THE ROYAL BAFOKENG NATION AT THE MAFIKENG HIGH COURT

On the 26^th August 2010, Bafokeng Land Buyers Association and various other communities forming the Bafokeng ‘tribe’, will once again square up against the Royal Bafokeng Nation at the Mafikeng High Court.

The Mafikeng High Court ordered on the 10^th December 2009, that various communities intending to oppose the Royal Bafokeng Nation’s application for transference and registration of some 61 farms in the RBN’s name, lodge their interest on the matter by the 26^th February 2010.

A number of communities/families from villages forming the Bafokeng ‘tribe’ have since shown an interest to oppose the RBN’s application. The Bafokeng chief has also  instructed his lawyers to allow anyone wishing to oppose, to lodge their answering affidavits with the Court by October 2010. The Bafokeng’s affidavit is over 3000 pages long. It will be contested that the opposing communities will not be able to answer the 3000 pages by October 2010, and that they (the communities) be afforded enough/reasonable time to prepare their answering affidavits.

Transport will leave at Game parking in town at 6:30am. Anyone interested in travelling to the Court on the day may contact Michael Nape on 073 1988 634  

GENERAL MEETING OF THE BAFOKENG LAND BUYERS ASSOCIATION

Bafokeng Land Buyers Association, will hold a general meeting on the 15^th August 2010, 10am, at Thethe High School. The meeting will look at, amongst other things, the adoption of the Constitution.

Anyone interested in claiming and exerting various rights (eg. land, environmental, economic, human rights, etc.) related to the land claims against the Royal Bafokeng Nation is welcome to participate.

The Land Buyers Association is primarily made up of the descendants of the original buyers of the land that forms the Bafokeng Tribal area. Included also are the residents who by custom have been accepted to be part of the communities/makgotla that form the Bafokeng tribe. The Association does not exclude membership of people who have no direct interest in the land claims, but who lives among and outside the Bafokeng, and are incensed by the irresponsible manner in which the Bafokeng administration and the chief run the ‘tribal’ affairs, to the detriment of the poor people, and in violation of the Constitution. An example would be people who are not Bafokeng, but who are concerned by the endorsement by the Bafokeng ‘tribal’ Authority to environmental damages perpetuated by the local mining companies (Impala Platinum, Anglo Platinum, Xstrata and Lonmin) operating in the poor rural villages that forms the Bafokeng ‘tribe’. 

THIS YEAR’S ‘DUMELA PHOKENG’ WAS AN INSULT

The Royal Bafokeng chief had in years preceding 2010, made it his practice that he visited the various makgotla of communities that make up the Bafokeng ‘tribe’. The aim of the visit was mainly to hear concerns raised by various makgotla levelled against the chief and his administration.

This year the chief, ‘for administrative purposes’, decided to club the various makgotla of Chaneng, Robega, Rasimone, Mogono, Ratshwene and Luka into one cluster. He was scheduled to ‘visit’ the clustered communities at Thethe High School at around 10am in April/May.

The proceedings started without him at around 12pm, with various communities pouring their concerns out. When he arrived and ascended the stage, he apologised for being late, and that he will not stay to finish the program as his friend has been admitted to hospital and that he had to fly to see him.

He said that they (him and his administration) did not come to hear concerns, but to tell the subjects what changes have been made in administration. He spoke for less than 15minutes and then left…. for his friend in hospital.

Well, people have said before that the chief and his administration would have long been voted out if it was not for the tribal system. ‘They have been listening to the same complaints for many years and have done absolutely nothing….nothing’, exclaimed Dodo Mekgwe.

An hour or two after he had left the meeting dispersed for the 2010 Fifa World Cup festivities outside the school yard. People were served with a plate of pap and vleis.

‘We are used to preparing food in big pots when there are events such as this. It is an insult to us that a catering company, from we don’t know where, was paid millions of rands, to prepare this poorly cooked meals for us, as if there are no women in Luka’, complained an elderly woman. ‘It is possible that they may have spiced the food with korobela to soften the ‘rebels’, complained another. ‘I have taken mine for the dog at home, I want to see if it will not die or change its ‘bad’ manners after eating the meal’, they all laughed.

BAFOKENG COMMISSION’S REPORTS

The Bafokeng Tribal Authority had in the years 2006/7 instituted a commission of enquiry to establish the heirs to chieftaincies of the various makgotla forming the Bafokeng ‘tribe’, and whose chiefs have passed on.

The reports were presented to the various makgotla in May/June this year, much to the agitation of a number of makgotla. Various makgotla in Chaneng, Luka, Tsitsing, Mogajane, and others cited lack of consultation and poor information collection methods used in drawing up the reports. Some refused the imposition of chiefs on them, citing that the Bafokeng chief wants to impose on them chiefs that are power hungry, greedy, ‘yes-men’ who will not oppose  him in any way. The communities fear that the imposed chiefs will therefore be ‘used’ to stand against communities currently claiming their land from the Bafokeng. ‘They will use their position and influence as chiefs to sway support in favour of the Bafokeng chief, who also pay them monthly salaries’.

THE BAFOKENG 2010 WORLD CUP PARTY HAS COME AND GONE

The first ever African World Cup on African soil, without a single African coach was all a hoax, Blatter’s Party, set up to redicule the African people, and boasting to the world on how Africa is easily colonised, Thusi Rapoo ponders, and remembers the painful struggle, incarceration, and the gruesome death of the young Steven Bantu Biko.

Like the two years leading to the ANC’s 2007 Limpopo Conference when the nation waited in abated breath to the outcome of the Conference’ elections, the communities that form the Bafokeng ‘tribe’ were for the past three years, held under a magical spell, that the 2010 Fifa Wold Cup will usher in hundreds of thousands of wealthy tourists carrying bags of pounds to spend on their dusty rural villages. High on ecstasy, people spend sleepless nights planning, attending workshops, renovating, building, applying for finance, training (as tour operators), stocking,…

Now that the ‘national’ party is over, people nursing a World Cup babalaas, have started to ask….’what happened? What was the World Cup really all about? Where is the legacy?’

Around the Bafokeng, the few local people who got a little something out of the World Cup are the three taverners at Phokeng, and the construction workers who upgraded the Bafokeng stadium to the tune of R200m. Without informed projections and lack of access to finance, the taverners’ stocks were sold out long before their closing times, while the construction workers got four tickets each worth less than R1000 to watch mediocre games. The three hawkers in front of the Phokeng garage next to the stadium were very lucky not to have been kicked out, and had their dilapidated stalls upgraded.

On the flip side, SAB and DSTV must have made bumper sales, while poor taverners in areas located outside Phokeng could not sell their piled up stocks due to the cold winter and the absence of crime-phobic tourists.

Companies from Johannesburg and elsewhere that build and furnished the R327m Bafokeng hotel that accommodated the English team must be laughing all the way to the bank…. with the chief’s money.

In the end, the Bafokeng communities are left with two white elephants (a six star hotel and the stadium) that the communities, with their mining royalty earnings, must still maintain, for the affluent’s pleasures and enjoyment, while the very owners, the poor Bafokeng communities, still go to bed without food.

There is of course a much bigger picture of a huge, incalculable national loss, amounting to billions of rands that even SARS has not been able to account for.

On hindsight, and with Customs’ gates wide open, is it possible that tons of ounces of platinum could have been looted, clandestinely leaving our shores for Europe on the back of FIFA concessions?

Should we be thankful to Blatter for proving beyond reasonable doubt the naivety and sheer indifference of our leaders? Or was Blatter perhaps simply trying to prove that in their sober senses, our leaders can still be compelled to forget their song, their heroes, their struggles, while on the same breath dancing to Marley’s freedom song, and telling liberation stories about Biko’s black consciousness and the 1976 June 16 uprisings.

Blatter gave us Parreira, and the Bafokeng chief is notorious and on record for favouring whites over local ‘Bafokeng’ expertise when making key appointments in the tribal administration.

‘This is now, 2010, we are here, and  Biko is long dead’, so they say.

FIVE CENTURIES IN THE NEVER-ENDING LOOTING OF AFRICA

Adventure and abundant natural resource brought the early European settlers to Africa - and the same goes for many subsequent generations of fortune hunters to this very day.

The benefits that have accrued to the indigenous peoples from the five centuries of rapine since the Portuguese first settled west central Africa are subjects of intense and wide spread debate in modern Africa.   But undoubtedly, one consequence of Europe's lust for wealth has been lives of extreme nastiness, brutality and brevity for countless Africans.

The early Portuguese in Angola set the general tone, exploiting the most obvious resource: African flesh. Some four million Africans were exported as slaves to the Americas. It has been estimated that another nine million died during the march to the coast from the interior and while waiting to be herded on to ships.

Portugal and the Roman Catholic Church, which closely followed the flag, argued that the slave trade was spiritually beneficial.  Both insisted that slaves be baptized before crossing the Atlantic in chains. On the wharfs at Luanda, the Angolan capital, as late as 1870 there could still be seen a marble chair in which the bishop had sat and baptized by boatloads the poor unfortunates.  The Portuguese collected their tax, the clergyman his fee, and the Africans had their introduction to the white man's religion and civilization. There were also vast forests and immense riches waiting to be exploited, with labour provided by such Africans who had not been shipped to Brazil and the US. 

South African Experience

Mineral wealth was the foundation of colonial economies throughout Africa.  Minerals financed South Africa's racial supremacy, first under the British and then the Afrikaners.  Now, under 'globalisation' in the post apartheid era it finances a new 'economic' apartheid of corrupt elites and a destitute majority.
Before the gold rush to Johannesburg there was the diamond rush to Kimberley, in Tswana and Griqua territory, which the British immediately annexed upon realizing there was a diamond pipe which would prove the richest in the world.   The Kimberley diamond pipe is thought to descend nearly 100 miles into the Earth.
Thus began the black labour system that would be the necessary concomitant of European and American exploitation of Africa's mineral riches. 

The British created, in 1872, the pass system that would become the method of white control of black labourers and their families.  The origins of apartheid lay here. Today the migrant worker market is still under the control of the mines, whereby they import large groups of foreign workers to destabilize local communities in order to weaken their unity.

South Africa still has some gold riches, but the great mining companies now have to dig ever deeper and at ever greater expense to reach the lodes. Some mines are so deep that workers at the rock faces wear special waistcoats packed with ice to counteract the heat.  Although safety standards have improved, African miners still die in great numbers.

As South Africa's accessible gold reserves began to dwindle, a new source of immense wealth in the form of platinum has begun to be exploited in another great arc, sweeping 300 miles from west to east, some 50 miles north of Johannesburg along the 'Merensky reef' .

There lies around 90% of the world's known reserves of platinum and related metals such as  palladium, ruthenium, and rhodium (PGMs). The reserves may be enough to sustain current explosive rates of production for less than100 years. 

Open cast mining techniques that would never be allowed in the developed world are being applied in almost every new mine popping up like a disease on the landscape, destroying the best agricultural land and contaminating precious underground water.

The platinum group of metals recently overtook gold as South Africa's biggest mineral earner.  Even so, the value brought to the country as a whole is a tiny fraction of what it should be.
The mineral exploitation has become highly mechanized and automated. It provides more jobs in the rest of the world than it does in South Africa.

The PGMs are scattered amongst various tribal groups whom the exploiters find ever so easy to corrupt with lavish profits for unelected tribal 'chiefs' in exchange for loss of rights and misery for the masses.

This scale of destruction is new to the mining world. The platinum rush is a race against time before the people awaken to the fact that their habitat is being irreversibly destroyed.

Whilst South Africa  has proved a true Eldorado for the rest of the world, the prize for the local majority has been deepening poverty and environmental ruin.

Plunder of Congo

Two thousand miles to the north, the Congo, a million square miles of rich forests, fertile land, abundant water and exquisite wildlife, sat above fabled riches - gold, diamonds, cobalt, oil, uranium, tin and copper.

Belgium 's King Leopold II won control of an area the size of western Europe in1885 and embarked on three decades of plunder from which the Congo has not recovered.  It became a forced labour camp where Leopold's thugs forced people from more than 200 ethnic groups to extract rubber, hardwoods and ivory to build fabulous wealth in Brussels while impoverishing their own  native health.  "We must obtain a slice of this magnificent African cake and diffuse the light of civilization among the natives," Leopold told his backers. 

In reality, wrote Joseph Conrad, the King of the Belgians' activities amounted to "the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience.

Leopold divided the Congo into concessions where task masters shot natives who failed to meet their daily targets.  Soldiers had to cut off the hands and ears of men, women and children they had killed and present them to their commanders who matched them against the number of cartridges issued to ensure no waste.

Roger Casement, British consul for 11 years in the Congo, reported to Whitehall that the population of one region had been cut from 40,000 to 1,000.  Prior to the Belgians' arrival, Congo's population was estimated at 20 million. A 1911 census revealed that only 8.5 m were left.
When Leopold died, a scramble for the Congo's minerals began that has continued to this day and which has resulted in internal wars that in the past two decades have taken four million lives - "wars of poor people against miserable people", as one diplomat put it.  "The heart of darkness" was how Conrad described the Congo. The heart of sadness is more appropriate.

There are dozens of other Congos in Africa; places blessed with immeasurable natural resources and cursed with immense and terrible poverty, problems so complex that they may only be exacerbated by the simplistic political solutions of the well meaning. 

The latest scramble in Africa is for oil.  The reserves, for which Western oil companies pay hundreds of millions of pounds in "signing bonuses" merely for the right to sink exploration wells, may eventually match the Middle East's.  The US expects to import 25% of its oil from Africa within 10 years.  Thanks to oil, Angola's economy is growing at 15% a year, yet the UN says it is the worst place on Earth to be a child.  The discovery of oil in south central Sudan has fuelled the killings in Darfur which humanitarian organizations say amounts to genocide. 

On paper, Africans ought to be thriving, given their continent's vast resources.  But try telling that to slum dwellers and shoeless peasants in the areas peripheral to the mines. 
It's time to stop the pillage.

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