What did People of Colour Expect? #BlackMonday Was Always Going To Be Orange White & Blue

Having a wardrobe that has a disproportionately high number of black items is really not an indication of me being in a constant state of mourning, but it might as well be...

I wear black almost every day, except for today; I didn't...  
People here regularly wear black... We have a lot of funerals to attend...

 

 
To me wearing black today would have been equivalent to wearing a flag of Orange White & Blue...
I even kicked off my black sneakers this morning after I accidentally put them on and slipped on a pair of very old dirty white mules instead. At least they used to be white at some point...
I can do that you know... I work from home and had no appointments today so I could wear those dirty old mules...

 

 

I live in a very violent place and even though there is no real gangster activity in my own street, the violence can still spill over at any point in time.
On a daily basis I can clearly hear the gunshots that ring out from other streets in my area and from the adjacent neighbourhoods.

Many of you reading this will know what it is to pray that the gunshots should stop.
Many of you will also know what it is to pray that when suddenly the guns actually do go quiet, that a bigger and more violent gang battle isn't looming in the silence.
What I really do hope is that many more people from all walks of life who do not experience that daily threat of living in a gang infested area and possibly being killed by a stray bullet, or an intended one, actually end up reading this...

 

 

Here where I live on the Cape Flats, the number of innocents being killed in gang violence, the number of children disappearing and turning up dead, usually at the hands of acquaintances, the high number of women being raped and sometimes mutilated by their attackers; non of that nearly get the level of media coverage or the amount of collective outrage from South Africans as when white citizens are the victims of crime. That is a simple fact.

You see... white folk protesting to mourn white farmers slain by murderous robbers is quite acceptable in my book.
White farmers vocalising their very real fear of crime is also acceptable to me.
Doing so under false pretences and expressing their loyalty to the symbols and practices of Apartheid is not acceptable.

 

 

The #BlackMonday organisers belatedly tacking on the idea that they are protesting all crimes and all murders is something I'm not OK with.
This really was about only white farmers being the unfortunate victims of crime and it never was and still is not about any Persons of Colour being victims of crime.
They were clear on their motivation and intentions but after being called out on their selective outrage they changed their tune thus convincing many People of Colour that this was now a broader "more noble" cause.

Managing to dupe so many People of Colour into supporting them is a clear indication of how being able to control a narrative is a staple of white privilege... Much like the attempt to drown out the call of #BlackLiveMatter with the #AllLivesMatter slogan is a strategy to protect the myth of “white innocence in racism” in an American society geared towards white privilege.

 

 

    

Duped & co-opted, many People of Colour wore black in solidarity with those waving Old Apartheid SA Flags thereby endorsing the White Supremacist Agenda that claims a non-existant "white genocide" as its unifying rally call yet very often we are easily made to forget or even kept unaware of the murders of black farm workers at the hands of white farmers as Nigel Branken points out in his op-ed article A Reminder: The Other Side of Farm Murders in South Africa.

Make no mistake... Even after they changed their tune... Today's protest was never about any people of colour being killed or maimed in crimes that grip townships all over the country.
More importantly it was also not merely an outrage at the very real phenomenon of crimes committed specifically against white farmers but it was to cement the false and fabricated notion of a "white genocide"

 

You have to understand that personally I do believe that any one farm murder is one too many... but I also believe that using this terrible crime phenomenon as the basis for advancing the ideals of a white supremacist and separatist movements is despicable and that showing support for the protest ultimately translates into showing support for their racist agenda.

Again... There is nothing wrong with farmers protesting and vocalising their own vulnerability to crime...
However the premise for this march is that there is a "white genocide". This premise uses highly inflated numbers, multiple proven accounts of falsified pictures used to depict murder scenes on fake news websites and a generous helping of the old Apartheid-era “Swart-Gevaar” propaganda.   

 

If you think that in terms of turnout and support the #BlackMonday protests was bigger than anyone expected then you are right...
The reasons that it was so huge is the same reason that conservative white Americans so overwhelmingly supported Trump who was pandering to their fears and constantly controlled the domination of false narratives.
When Trump singled out Mexican immigrants and alleged that they are mostly rapists and murderers, all Hispanic-looking men, even those US citizens who have never been to Mexico, were suddenly percieved as immigrants with a proclivity for raping fragile defenceless white women.
This is the same type of mass white hysteria that creates situations where People of Colour living in South African farming communities are treated as potential farm murderers and are seen as legitimate targets for trigger-happy farmers who 'mistake little boys for monkeys' or as in the case of Coligny has whites trying to justify why the life of a 16 year old can be snuffed out for being accused of stealing sunflower seeds.
 

This is part of a bigger and internationally backed movement that pushes the false narrative of a "mass white victimhood" and "white genocide" as the basis of growing support for white supremacy not only in South Africa but in other parts of the world. White supremacist group in the US, in Europe and even in Australia are boldly and brazenly taking to the streets wearing military style uniforms in marches that have so-called immigrants of various ethnicities being the targets of their rhetoric. In many of those formations expat white South Africans and former Rhodesians play a role.

 

 

OK now some of you are probably gonna say that Ryan has gone off his rocker and has turned into a conspiracy theorist but...

 

The hurtful and offensive symbol that is the Old Apartheid South African Flag that was so unashamedly waving over the "BlackMonday protests today has in fact become an international symbol for white supremacist movements.
Yeah go ahead and call me crazy but do you remember the Charleston, South Carolina Shooting in which nine African-Americans were killed on 17 June 2015 by Columbia, South Carolina born white supremacist Dylann Roof?
An image from his Facebook page depicts Roof wearing a jacket decorated with two emblems that are very popular among American white supremacists: the flag of the former Rhodesia (now known as Zimbabwe) and the flag of apartheid-era South Africa.

 

 

Social media has also been awash with images of a group of white South African expats showing their support for #BlackMonday posing with the old Apartheid South African flag and the old Transvaal flag.

 

Now if you want to continue seeing this as me just blabbering about what might be coincidences, then you are welcome to do so, but...

How can you be a Person of Colour seeing yourself as an ‘enemy of crime’ and yet you support the protest actions under the false pretences of white supremacists who wish and long for the return of a Crime Against Humanity called Apartheid?

 

 

 

If it wasn't clear to you before, then hopefully today's shameless display of the old Apartheid SA flag as well as the burning of the current South African flag on other occasions including the 2012 protest in the image below have given you a glimpse of how the #BlackMonday organisers have used the horrific phenomenon of farmers being brutally attacked and murdered as a springboard to advance their white supremacist racist ideologies.  

 

Hopefully some of you reading this will start understanding that the violent brutality of living on the Cape Flats and in Black and Coloured townships across South Africa itself is based on a real genocide that has been going on for a few centuries. Hopefully some of you will start to understand that the violence in our communities, though it partly continues because we do not stand up to it, is also difficult to curtail because the foundations for it has been laid as part of the Apartheid Spacial Planning and Systemic Depravation so that we would remain constantly at war with ourselves.

 

 

So how has this war which our own are raging against us got anything to do with white people protesting against farm murders?
It is simple really... The war our own are raging against us is as a result of what was done in the name of white South Africans and until they know it, understand it and accept it, then maybe... hopefully... some of them will actually also want to do something about crimes committed against People of Colour but for now...

 

 

The white policeman who was recently convicted on a plea bargain for selling over 2000 guns to gangsters never gets mentioned because police corruption is deemed to something committed by black people...
It also seldom gets mentioned that the high levels of alcohol abuse, the highest levels of Foetal Alcohol Syndrome in the world, the high propensity for drug dependency; none of these are never said to be a result of white farmers conditioning generations of Coloureds or Khoe-San descendants into these dependencies through the Dop-System or that the Apartheid Security Police for at least two generations flooded the Cape Flats with cheap narcotics developed by Doctor Death aka Wouter Basson...  

 

 

Hopefully some of you will get to understand that those wanting to bring back the racial segregation and violent oppression of the Apartheid-era aims to co-opt People of Colour to support their cause, while they who still live off the benefits accrued to them by their colonial forefathers do not give a hoot about the fact that it is that very system of Apartheid that has forced us into ghettos where we are being killed by our own people using guns and bullets supplied by them...

 

I was really hoping not to offend some of you, but I probably did...
If you are a Person of Colour who came out in support of #BlackMonday today, it is quite unfortunate that through a successful campaign of controlling the narrative around who is affected most by crime you have been duped into unwittingly draping an Old Apartheid South African Flag over your shoulders... Hopefully you will get to understand that there are South Africans of all colours including whites who want to work towards real solutions for our collective future but that we can't do that alongside people who have an agenda of preserving their Apartheid-era white privilege.        
If you are white and are still reading this without wanting to lynch me, then you either already understand what the real problem is or if not, then hopefully you will soon get there.