Danie, Cape Town:
After 1994, when modern South Africa became what some call a democracy, the will, whims, and folk customs of the black majority became the order of the day—in law and in fact.
Recently, when I was a post-operative patient in an ultra-modern coastal hospital in South Africa, lying immobilized in a web of tubes, with ice-cold oxygen hissing into my nostrils, I shared the spacious ward with three black patients.
One afternoon as I dozed off, I was startled by clouds of acrid smoke rising from the floor next to me. There, squatted next to my neighbor’s bed, was a grotesque semi-naked figure, festooned in rattling cowry shells, with shriveled eagle talons and tortoise shells, dried snakes and feathers strung around his scrawny neck, a starkly white painted face, arms and legs covered in red and blue ochre smears, a jockstrap pulled tight between his wasted thighs.
I reached for the nurses’ bell, and minutes later the black supervisor arrived.
I had a litany of complaints: violating sterility, general unhygienic practice, anthrax from dead wild animals, stench, danger of open fires near oxygen tanks, rampant bacteria. . . .
The supervisor archly reminded me that “traditional medicine” was now officially legalized. Witchdoctors (now called healers) routinely called on and treated their patients in well-equipped first-world facilities.
My complaint was dismissed as “racist and unconstitutional.”
That was the moment I graduated from being a long-suffering, silent, liberal-minded white South African to a firm believer in racial reality.
Patrick R:
I have always been passionate about basketball, a sport dominated by blacks. ...
To be a respectable Republican or libertarian you must believe that all significant Black-White behavioral differences are caused by liberal Democrats like Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi, even in the darkest most remote backwater of the Congo. If we only had enough Ronald Reagans in office, inner-city Blacks would be Eagle Scouts arm wrestling each other over who will get to help the next little old lady across the street.
Posts
