Эдвин Кэмерон назвал движение AfriForum этнической угрозой и осудил идею массовой эмиграции белых из ЮАР

Transcript of an extract of the interview between Mbuyiseni Ndlozi and Edwin Cameron, on the African Renaissance Podcast. Mbuyiseni Ndlozi: Maybe, Judge, the last part is the conservative white groups that I’d like to talk to you about. Maybe I’ll pose the question as broadly as possible about AfriForum’s campaign. Apparently, white people are very, very scared here in South Africa. I don’t know you are white and they feel there’s a genocide such that there’s a refugee programme to the US. That mobilisation, what measure would you put to the assault on the constitutional project of nation building in South Africa? Edwin Cameron: I would go back one step and say that AfriForum is an ethnicist movement. It’s directed at white Afrikaners. And I would…. I grew up Afrikaans. My first language, my mother tongue is Afrikaans. My secondary and primary language is English like it is for so many of us. I think your PhD thesis was in English. Ndlozi: Yes, of course. So, his podcast is in English. Both not our first languages. Cameron: Exactly. So I would just say a caution about ethnicist movements. And I see that just yesterday, the day before we recording this podcast, there’s been a meeting between March and March, which many people accuse of also being ethnically based and AfriForum. So I would start there by saying that ethnically based movements in our country are a great danger. And as a white person, I’m white. I do feel scared because of the levels of crime and the levels of violence and the levels of robbery, but I don’t feel scared as a white person. And I think it’s a, it’s a, it’s a infamous lie that there’s a white genocide in South Africa. There’s a legitimate debate about all crime figures, the murder rate, the farm murder rate. But it’s quite clear that the white genocide lie, the myth has been seized upon for domestic white male purposes in the United States outside our country. Ndlozi: Would you have, I mean, if you had like, if you were a patriarch, wife, killed children and all of that, what would have been your message? What should white people’s view of AfriForum really be? If you were to say, I was in the constitutional court and you’re talking to your children, they’ve got all these feelings. I argue it’s terrifying in the townships. For township folk, you were talking about the Cape Flats. It’s terrifying. So, but we agree, but there seems to be this case that there is nonetheless an experience of this crime from white people racially. And when the mobilisation by AfriForum takes root, what would have been your counter argument to your kith and kin now? We talk differently when it comes to the people that we sort of love. Hypothetically, I mean, at an abstract level, yes, the argument makes sense, but what would have been your counter argument to an African, African’s mobilisation by AfriForum of your family? Cameron: I would make an emotional appeal. I think one of the powerful strands, it wasn’t necessarily a dominant strand, which is that the Afrikaners feel their own roots in our country. And this is a dangerous thing for me to say, especially on Dr. Mbuyiseni Ndlozi’s podcast. But I think there was an organic connection between whites and blacks, which there isn’t, for example, in Palestine, where the Jewish settlers on the West Bank and the Jewish state has never had that. There are 1.6 million Palestinians inside the state of Israel, but there hasn’t been the same connection, which is not to deny the depravities and atrocities of apartheid, but you see many families which are cross-racial families. So it’s a complex history and it’s a complex history that is sourced in the fact that the Afrikaners also claim to be rooted in the land. So my emotional appeal is don’t throw away your claim to South Africa, your claim to dignity together with everyone else in South Africa in the preamble. You’ve got to explain why it’s that dangerous. Well, to go back to saying the organic connection, because I think it is complex. You had a racial hierarchy. I grew up, I benefited from a racial hierarchy. I went to a whites-only school that gave me the big break from my poverty and my broken family and from the children home I’d attended before. I went to a whites-only university. At the time, I got the Rhodes Scholarship the year before Professor Loyisa Nongxa. Professor Nongxa was the first black African Rhodes Scholar a year or two after I was elected. So I’ve had all of those privileges. So it’s dangerous because it risks sentimentalising what was fundamentally a noxious hierarchical relationship. But I’m saying to you and I’m begging your podcast viewers and listeners … to say that the hierarchical relationships between white and black were much more complex. There was an organic interconnection in many households on many farms, which doesn’t detract from the horrors that were committed at others. Ndlozi: There is something to be said about this is the reason Nelson Mandela … I thought that was going to be a reference. Because that is a very strong view of Madiba. So Madiba used to say because their being Afrikaner rests on the premise that they’ve got nowhere else, that they are rooted here. It would be much easier to make a deal with them than it would be with a sort of British population, which, you know, is always holding a second passport in case things get bad. Cameron: More like the Kenya Highlands. Yes. The white settlement of Kenya, which was a recent one. Ndlozi: But isn’t AfriForum’s greatest assault then to that particular identity? Isn’t it that what it really did is the greatest self-humiliation? Like they can no longer, in true Afrikaner terms, they are shameful. They should be ashamed because the premise of an Afrikaner is my blood is in this country. And by 94, the commitment was equality. Let’s build an equal society. But for us in particular as Afrikaners, because we have nowhere to go. And the pride of Afrikanerdom comes out of that. So the entire refugee programme, if Mandela woke up, he would be shocked that there are Afrikaners, you know, who have sort of shifted that particular premise. So you’re calling it organic. But it is a sense in a way what Madiba meant in a way that. I don’t know the average Afrikaner today. Are you saying that is no longer there? Because AfriForum has over 300,000 members. Cameron: I wouldn’t say that. And that’s why they’re building that university. Because they’re rooted here. So I would say this. I’m not here to speak for AfriForum. I don’t. But I want to say that they deny that they have ever propagated the white genocide myth. I don’t know where they stand on this ludicrous, ludicrous, contemptible Trump programme of white resettlement, which is playing to his own white male [domestic base]. Ndlozi: No, Judge. Please do. Cameron: Does Afriforum support that? Ndlozi: Please do suspend for a while the genocide question. I mean, they deny it obviously. We know they did. We’re talking about the refugees. The refugees programme. It is something that they sort of welcomed. Cameron: Well, I think that you make a legitimate point. Ndlozi: And facilitated, as it were, the planes. Cameron: I didn’t follow that. I would then call that a grave mistake. Because I think that the people who accepted that bogus refugee status, the bogus resettlement, because of this white genocide, because that was Trump’s premise in granting them. I would say that they were desperately misled. And I personally feel sorry for them. Because I think they are uprooted. They got the adaptations in an alien land. And they’re not going to be welcomed as they think they’re going to be welcomed. So my answer to your question is that that was a terrible mistake.