iafrica.com reader Dave Tait believes that racism in South Africa will not be eradicated until sizeable political and economic changes have been made.

I am an old South African, born before the second world of a mother born in Scotland in 1900. I grew up in Brakpan, an Afrikaans "Hartland" at the time.

As a kid, there was a lot of hatred around, generated, not by us as children but by older people, parents and grandparents who were still smouldering from the Boer War when farms were burnt to the ground, women and children incarcerated and starved, many to death. Those who survived still wore the scars of this and it was visited on the children.

Strangely, I not only had lots of fights (at least one after every rugby match between the local Afrikaans and English primary schools), I also had some very close Afrikaans friends. A most confusing time for all of us, made worse by the World War and people taking sides against Germany. My Grandmother was German and my other Granny was a Scott!

In the fifties, I studied engineering at Wits and hitchhiked across Southern Africa in the process. I hitched to Northern Rhodesia (Nchanga Mine), to Kariba (under construction) and to many places elsewhere. Not once did I run into any trouble, with local people of any race, nationality or religious belief.

Communism in a 'capitalist' society

I was appalled by the emergence of the Nationalist Party and its treatment of people who were not 'European'. I watched in horror as South Africa proclaimed itself a capitalist country while visiting the most repressive "communist" system with vigour on the black and other people of colour. (In a capitalist society the people own property and the means of production, under communism the State owns the property and means of production).

Black people could not own property, or run their own business. They could not even live where they wanted to, and they kept on getting the message from the government that South Africa was a capitalist country. Communists were persecuted, prosecuted and jailed. The ANC, fighting for its freedom were labelled "communists" by the Nationalist government. No wonder we today have minister calling each other "Comrades" and people in the street believing that communism and socialism mean freedom.

Having travelled the world down the years, there is not a better country from every aspect (except one) to live in. We have everything here.

The exception again is politics. In recent history, it divided the English, Jews and Afrikaners after the Boer War; it divided Blacks, Coloureds and Whites during Nationalist party rule; and now it is dividing rich from poor and crushing everyone?s freedom (the very thing the ANC fought nearly a hundred years for) under the ANC government.

As a child I learned that toys from the Far East were 'Japanese Junk'. Workers were "exploited", paid low wages and made to work long hours. How terrible! Best radios, cameras, cars and motorbikes came from Europe and the USA.

What the West failed to appreciate was that the exploited 'toy-makers' were gaining skills by having jobs, and gaining them fast. Very quickly (in about 15 to 20 years) we were getting excellent cameras, cars, bikes, TV sets etc. from Japan and the people were wealthy. The same is happening today in China. The Chinese are getting rich quickly, again through labour being exploited initially. Skills are increasing rapidly and so are incomes.

Unfortunately, we have the most draconian labour and black empowerment laws that have driven skills out of the country and prevented the people who most need skills and an income from getting them. Government cannot help the poor by raiding the coffers of the rich. All that happens is that the rich either leave or stop production.

Desperation leads to crime

I happen to live in a house, surrounded by electric fences, electronic alarms, dogs and paid security companies. I have been dumped upside down in the gutter in the city for my wallet and cell phone; held up at gun point at my front gate and robbed; had my one son beaten over the head with a hammer and every member of my family (over 30 of us including grandchildren) have been attacked in one way or another.

All the attackers have been black, and many of us have been traumatised in the process. To blame all this on people just because they are black is ridiculous. We have millions of people ? almost all black ? living in abject poverty and they cannot get jobs because of our draconian labour laws.

Do the 'haves' expect these people to lie down quietly and die in the gutters or starve to death? Because they won?t. The upshot is an enormous amount of petty crime. Our stuff gets stolen so they can feed themselves. This is not because black people are natural criminals, because they are not. They are driven to it by 'last resort'. Many of the real thugs in this country dealing in stolen cars, drugs, white collar crime, etc. are not black. They often use desperate black people to do their dirty work and they do it for them out of desperation. Some young blacks even commit atrocities like murder and rape in the process, not because they learned to hate white people first hand under Apartheid but because they learned it from their parents just as Afrikaans children learned to hate the English in the 1930's.

Draconian labour laws

To solve this, we do not need a larger and more fearsome police force. We need freedom to associate with each other without government interference, draconian labour laws and without black empowerment laws.

I have yet to see large numbers of poor people who have been empowered into wealth. There are, however, many black people, both in and out of government, who had good educations, or who served high up in the 'struggle' and who have been made 'mega rich', not because they worked their way up the tree for it, but because they have been "empowered" into it.

We need the Government to give up its 'Black Empowerment' ideals that are creating a massive rift between rich and poor and to get out of the way with their draconian labour laws that only entrench those who already have jobs so that people without jobs can be "exploited" into skills and wealth.

Our trouble, and that of most countries in the world, is that it is the 'workers' that keep the fat cats in government in power. Antagonise them and you lose your job. What a catastrophe for the real poor.

It's a tragedy that in Africa, where traditionally the usual form of government was 'elders' or 'wise men' who got together to sort out differences and who otherwise left people alone to deal and trade with each other as they pleased has been replaced with the present system.

Finally, it's about time we put the issue of race in its proper perspective. When we say African, Indian, Chinese, European, etc. what this brings to mind is the typical 'look' of the person. It is a visual image that says nothing else about the person. Nationality is often confused with this. I am a South African National. My 'look' is European or 'White'. With your eyes closed, many voices would deceive you completely as it would depend where the person learned to speak and many people speak several languages. Let?s keep the rainbow shining and keep fighting for our freedom that the 'Freedom Fighters' seem to have lost sight of now that they are in power.

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