I don’t really follow the crime stories in the media, what they call in French “les faits divers”. Then my eye fell on this woman’s face. Her name is Kelly Smith, English name. But in South Africa we call her “Coloured” which is just a term; don’t read too much into it. Like many Coloured people she has drug problems. A thing called “tik”; I don’t even know exactly what it means, but it is highly addictive, and so on.
The point is: she is on a murder charge in a town called Saldanha Bay, on the Atlantic Coast of South Africa. Allegedly, she sold her 6-year old daughter, Joshlin Smith, to a “sangoma” which is a female witch doctor, usually a black woman. You could google some stuff about that. Liberals will tell you that sangomas are just “traditional healers”, working with herbal potions and the like. But this is where it gets dark: sangomas, or at least some of them, also deal in human body parts. One of our many odious “apartheid laws” forbade that practice, as well as “sniffing out witches” which usually leads to the killing of the witch. You can google this law, the Witchcraft Suppression Act, 1957. Bad white people who suppress African culture, you would say.
Kelly Smith’s daughter, although Coloured, had blonde hair like her mother and could pass for white. That would probably make her more valuable for a sangoma. During the trial a sum of R20 000 (roughly $1000) was mentioned.
What kind of mother sells her daughter to a witch doctor for body parts?
In our language there are hundreds of words for distinguishing between races and ethnic groups. After all, we have lived in this part of the world for almost 400 years. We have seen everything, experienced everything, researched everything, written about everything. Our people have compiled dictionaries in African languages and gone very deeply into the nuances of an alien, non-Western culture.
Of course, other Westerners, liberals, journalists, professors, know better than us. They are just more intelligent, I suppose. It is almost a truism in English to just call us “dumb”. We have not internalised the platitudes and the moralism of the wokist West. However, what makes the Afrikaans language and culture so interesting is that it occupies the margin, if you like (shades of postmodern philosophy!) of where Europe and Africa meets. Here and there, our creative authors have ventured into that no man’s land where the two worlds meet.
In one of my favourite Afrikaans novels a curious woman from Europe strays into a witch doctor’s hut and discovers, yes, some human body parts. Shocked, she rushes out of the hut. The Afrikaner’s time has come. You have given us some moral sermons, on high from your pulpit… “the cant of English pastors”, to quote Vladimir Lenin who also had some interesting things to say abut Boers.
From now on, we will start educating you, in turn. You will discover the Calvinist quest for the good that underlies our thinking but also the profound insights that we have developed about this continent. We only need to start translating some of our classic books and sell them on the internet to a world-wide audience who is finally looking for answers to the problem that is euphemistically called “multiculturalism”. “The horror! The horror!” You already know that phrase from Joseph Conrad. But there is a lot more to it.
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