D J Rout

So, here we are. A quarter of a century into this experiment in forcing a white system of government onto a people not culturally ready for it, not socially equipped for it and, it would seem to, let's say, space aliens looking down at Africa, a people biologically unequipped to handle it.

Well, so I'm disposed to say. The truth is, I haven't heard that much about South Africa lately. Australia is a little embarrassed, it seems, by all the white South Africans who got here on grounds of utility and functionality, so the attention now is all focussed on the other parts of Africa, whose denizens we have let in on the basis of succour, some treaties, maintaining a housing shortage and adding value to university degrees by making it hard for Australians to get in.

So, is the future of Australia going to be some kind of vexillological hybrid of Chinese and Aboriginal flag with maybe a crescent moon in the canton so our churches don't get blown up, or will we maintain some link with our heritage by keeping the Union jack up there? Or will we go Canadian and put a gum leaf on a gold background?

Or will we embrace a Caribbean history model, have the white settlers wipe out the indigenous population and then let the imported blacks run the place? Well, that took hundreds of years in the Caribbean, so I wouldn't be around to see it, but perhaps blacks have got better at this sort of crap? Maybe it will only take fifty years? Or, as we have seen in South Africa, twenty-five?

Blacks in South Africa have little economic power, but what does that matter when there;s barely an economy there? An individual black may have neither economic nor political power, but some blacks have one or the other, and a small minority have both. That is not the paradise the perceived wisdom said they would get if they were allowed to run the country, but so what? All over the world, economic and political power is granted to a relative few, and a small portion of that few have both. Everyone seems to be cool with it.

So, I suppose I put these posts up every year not because I'm South African—I'm not—but so people will remember what happened to that country who had that fatal combination: domestic policies we didn't care for, and the vulnerabilities of wanting to be part of a world that didn't want it. Could that happen here?