By: Mary Mostert, Analyst, Banner of Liberty (www.bannerofliberty.com)
January 8, 2004
On my Christmas visit to Wisconsin, which seemed plagued by computer crashes and other technological difficulties, I had an opportunity, thanks to a granddaughter, April, to spend a day teaching a few facts about Africa in a school that seems to be sort of a laboratory for multi-culturalism. The teacher had asked if any students had an "African" ancestor and my blond granddaughter, knowing that her great-grandfather and most of my brothers and my sister were born in South Africa raised her hand. The young teacher, seizing a teaching moment, invited me to spend the day in his 7th grade Social Studies class to talk to his four classes about Africa.
This was the best Christmas present I could have gotten. The ignorance about the continent of Africa and its people has bugged me my entire life. It started when, in elementary school, I tried in vain to teach one of my teachers that "Africa" was not a country, but was a continent. She never seemed to undertand what I was talking about. In her mind it was a country inhabited entirely with black people who were all one "race."
This ignorance over the years has now morphed into adoption of the use of the term "African-American" and the make-believe holiday called Kwanzaa, invented by an American who claims it is an African cultural thing. As an activist in the 1940s and 1950s in the Race Relations movement, I specifically objected to the labeling of people as "colored" or "Negro" or, later, "blacks." The whole point, I thought, of the 1964 Civil Rights Bill was to end racial segregation and labeling.
Then the liberal Democrats, seemingly determined to keep racial labeling alive, came up with what President John F. Kennedy called "affirmative action" in his executive order that created the term. We have gone, in a mere 40 years, from occasional labeling of people as "Negro" or "colored" on job applications to kindergarten children being asked what their ethnic label is. Labels in the census have moved from "white" and "black" to about a dozen different labels that somehow or other provide special treatment to people whom claim to be a "minority."
Now I'm being told by grandchildren in several states, that some of the kids with dark complexions (some of them, in fact, lighter in hue than I am) when reprimanded are quick to accuse the teacher of "picking on them" because of their skin color. The teachers then quickly back off.
With each class of 7th graders, I first asked them what they thought of when they thought of Africa. The most common thought mentioned was that it was "hot" or there were "animals" — often mentioning specific animals. One black boy said that he thought of "tigers" when he thought of Africa, and of course I had to tell him tigers don't live in Africa. He was sure I was wrong until another black kid convinced him that tigers live in Asia.
Many children thought of "black people" or "poor people" when they thought of Africa and none seemed to realize there were modern cities in Africa. They were astonished when I showed them pictures of Cape Town, which my ancestors began building in 1652 and not even the teacher knew that, in 1652, there were no black people living in the area that is now the Cape. The people who did live there, and who, according to modern DNA testing, had lived there for 30,000 years were the Bushmen (now called the San) and the Hottentots (later labelled the Khoikhoi). They are a small, brown people and are not kin to the black Bantu tribes that migrated into Southern Africa in the 18th century and who now constitute the majority of the people in South Africa today.
The language of the Bushmen and the cattle owning Hottentots is not one of the 11 "official" languages of South Africa protected by the new South African Constitution adopted in the mid-1990s. The 11 official languages were introduced to Southern Africa by people who migrated from Central Africa and Europe. None of the official languages are from either the natives of South Africa or the slaves who were brought in from Asia in the 17th and 18th centuries. The new 1995 South African Constitution declared all eleven languages, Sepedi, Sesotho, Setswana, siSwati, Tshivenda, Xitsonga, Afrikaans, English, isiNdebele, isiXhosa and isiZul, "the official languages of the Republic."
This is multi-culturalism run amuck and will take South Africa bacwards.
One of the things I pointed out to the students was the problems faced when there is no unity of purpose or language. On the continent of Africa there are more than 1000 languages spoken. Although 51% of the world's population live in Asia while only 13% of the world's population live in Africa. I asked the students why they thought that had happened. Some thought it was because Africans were poorer than Asians. Only, of course, nothing matches the poverty in some areas of Asia. I pointed out that, if they represented a class in a public school in South Africa there might be 11 different languages spoken in the class.
What would happen in a class where there were 11 languages spoken "We wouldn't understand each other," a number of children said. And, I said, when people don't understand each other, what often happens? In every class someone would say, and it was almost always a boy, "They would start fighting." Right. That's sort of the history of Africa not only today, but for as long as we have records about Africa.
When I was living in South Africa in 1991-1992 I visited a Zulu "cultural" exhibit where tourists flocked to see traditional war dances performed by teen-aged Zulus in front of traditional round thatched huts. After the dance, when the audience had left, I peaked in to see what the teenagers were doing in the native hut. They were all seated on the dirt floor intently watching an America movie on television.
Since the movie was, of course, in English, the language they need to learn if they want to become an engineer or a doctor or a scientist, the TV show was far more important for their own personal future than learning the war chants of their ancestors.
While it may be fun to look back and learn about things that happened to our ancestors, school should be about acquiring the tools the students will need in their future — which includes today learning good communication skills needed to acquire knowledge. There are no engineering or medical schools or drivers' license tests given in Ebonics or Zulu even in South Africa.
To comment: Mary@bannerofliberty.com