By Mike Smith
7th of May 2010
It is today not un-common to find White people who lived through Apartheid in South Africa who have never set foot in a black or coloured township. Most whites never lost anything in a township and never saw the need to go to there. Besides it was dangerous, and the further they could stay away from blacks the better.
People commute from Somerset-West, Strand or Gordon’s Bay along the N2 highway to Cape Town for years every day, but they never ever turns off into the townships south of Cape Town International Airport (D.F. Malan Airport) to have a look. All they see are the slums of Cross-Roads, Langa and Nyanga and it scares them away...
Most whites do not even know the coloured township of Mitchel’s Plain. They do not know the bad areas such as Tafelsig, Lentegeur or the posh areas such as Woodlands or Strandfontein.
If they could see the millionaires houses of Athlone, they would fall on their backs.
The image that most whites of South Africa have about a township is what they have seen on television, in papers or magazines.
I myself was about 19 years old and a conscript when I first set foot in Gugulethu, Cape Town. I can remember how surprised I was at how good the houses looked in certain parts...all the sports facilities and other amenities were not what I have seen on TV. We were only shown the worst parts...the Squatter Camps.
Actually the word “Township” is today confused with the word “Squatter Camp”, but we are not allowed to use the un-PC term of “Squatter Camp” anymore, it is now called, “Informal Settlements”...
Nevertheless, a black township in South Africa has different sections just like any other town around the world. It has rich areas where educated blacks and black businessmen live in millionaires villas, it has the middle class areas and it has...well the squatter camps.
The problem is that the media always only show us the poor, squatter camp areas. Whites of South Africa and the world are kept ignorant by the media. We are not allowed to see that there are literally millions of extremely well-off blacks in South Africa who live in fairly good areas, on par with whites or well-off coloureds.
The lies about the townships are numerous, but the most common one is that blacks were forced to live there under extreme poverty conditions and were denied the same amenities as whites had.
Well, in the previous section of this series I pointed out that all the black tribes were given their own countries to live in where they traditionally settled. Nobody forced them to come to white cities. But blacks streamed in their thousand towards the white cities and set up squatter camps around the outskirts of these white areas, because they knew that whites were giving them work, but also, because they knew whites were very charitable and always gave them free clothes, food, etc.
This is quite ironic, because on the one hand the whites are painted as evil racists and blacks selectively believe this when they want to, but when blacks are truly honest with themselves, they will realise that whites always gave them lots of stuff...for free. It has always been like that in South Africa and will probably be like that for a long time to come, because South African whites are compassionate, charitable and good people.
Nevertheless when these squatter camps became too large and/or a health risk due to the unhygienic practices of blacks, whites would build them proper houses with proper sewage systems, health clinics, schools, churches, roads with electric illumination, sports facilities and many more. This is how the townships came about. Basically built by white taxpayer money...
Now I know there will be some people not convinced that these townships were actually quite well kitted out. So let us take an example...let us take the most well known township of South Africa, called Soweto, but the same can be said of just about any black township in South Africa.
At the hight of Apartheid in 1978 Soweto had 115 Football fields, 3 Rugby fields, 4 athletic tracks, 11 Cricket fields, 2 Golf courses, 47 Tennis courts, 7 swimming pools built to Olympic standards, 5 Bowling alleys, 81 Netball fields, 39 children play parks, and countless civic halls, movie houses and clubhouses.
In addition to this, Soweto had 300 churches, 365 schools, 2 Technical Colleges, 8 clinics, 63 child day care centres, 11 Post Offices, and its own fruit and vegetable market.
There were 2300 registered companies that belonged to black businessmen, about 1000 private taxi companies. 3% of the 50,000 vehicle owners in 1978 were Mercedes Benz owners. Soweto alone had more cars, taxis, schools, churches and sport facilities than most independent countries in Africa. The Blacks of South Africa had more private vehicles than the entire white population of the USSR at the time.
Today Soweto has modern shopping malls like, Dobsonville Shopping Centre. In 2005 the Protea Gardens Mall opened. This was followed by the Baramall Shopping Centre and the Jabulani Shopping complex and the Maponya Mall. Experts say that Soweto has as much as 25% oversupply of retail space.
The Canadian Medical Doctor, Dr Kenneth Walker wrote about Soweto, (I freely translate from “Verrat an Südafrika”, Klaus Vaque, 1987,pg 41)
“In Soweto I saw many homes that costs about $100,000 (1978) and that had a BMW in the driveway. All houses are single storey. Many are recently painted. Many had flowerpots in the windows and lawn in the front. Only 2% were shacks. If I had the choice to live in Soweto or in the apartment dwellings or “Projects” of New York, Chicago, or Detroit where there is so much crime, then I would not hesitate for one moment and choose Soweto.”
The biggest hospital in the world, Baragwanath with 3200 beds and at its peak almost 8000 staff had 23 operation theatres fitted out with the most modern medical equipment that existed in the world. Blacks were treated here, operated on...at full state costs to the white-taxpayers for unlimited periods. The budget of this hospital was and is higher than the yearly budget of most small member states of the United Nations.
Next door to Baragwanath is the St. John’s Eye Clinic. The clinic is world famous for the treatment of Glaucoma, Cataracts, traumatic eye injuries and rare tropical diseases. All built and maintained by white taxpayer’s money.
Baragwanath in 1978 employed 450 medical doctors in full-time service. It treated 112 000 in-patients and 1.62 million out-patients per year. The children and infant death rate with 34.8 per 1000 was lower than Harlem in New York.
In 1982 alone, this hospital performed 898 heart operations of world quality.
Ironically...90% of the blood donors for this hospital were whites, who donated blood free of charge, totally voluntarily...to save black lives. (Quoted from The Citizen, 2 April 1987).
In my time at school and as a student, the Red Cross or St Johns Ambulance would come to our white schools, universities, colleges and even our workplaces to solicit for blood donations. All we got was a cup of tea and some biscuits. Regular blood donors would get a lapel pin and would wear it proudly at work or university.
Today the blacks want the whites to apologise for “the evils” of Apartheid. They want compensation. They have been compensated R30,000 each after the TRC , but it is not enough... they want more, they want blood...but we have already given them our blood. We already saved millions of black lives with our blood donations during Apartheid. How do you put a price on our blood that we donated? How do you put a price on black lives saved by white blood?
As you can see dear reader, the blacks of South Africa are eternally indebted to us whites...not the other way around. We owe them nothing, they owe us... big time.
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