Saturday, July 02, 2022

CREDO MUTWA ON SOUTH AFRICAN APARTHEID

Here's what Credo Mutwa wrote about South African Apartheid, according to the article I referenced a few days ago:

Although Credo Mutwa has claimed to have an "unashamedly unpoliticized conscience," his writings in the 1960s clearly reinforced apartheid, a political system that legally excluded all black Africans from citizenship within the Republic of South Africa, but incorporated them as exploitable labor (Friedman 1997). Like the architects of apartheid in the National Party, Mutwa argued that apartheid was not racial discrimination but racial separation that was consistent with divine and natural law. "Discrimination is to distinguish and decide which is best," Mutwa wrote. "Apartheid is to distinguish without deciding which is best." Insisting that Africans in South Africa actually wanted apartheid and were not interested in equal rights, Mutwa declared, "Apartheid is the High Law of the Gods! It is the highest law of nature!" Racial integration, according to Mutwa, "is as abhorrent as extermination." Praising H. F. Verwoerd, who by then had become president of South Africa, Credo Mutwa maintained that the "White men of South Africa are only too right when they wish to preserve their pure bred racial identity. And what is good enough for them is good enough for us, the Bantu. . . . Separate Development... is the clearest hope that the Bantu have thus far had." Under apartheid, Verwoerd's National Party promised to protect independent African homelands from "Communists or militant Bantu rebellion mongers" such as the African National Congress (ANC) (Mutwa 1966: 318, 319, 323). Into the 1980s, Mutwa continued to lend his support to the apartheid regime, even writing the foreword to a book published in 1989 arguing that the United States should not impose sanctions on South Africa. Instead, the U.S. should embrace South Africa and consider making the country its fifty-first state. As he argued in the 1960s, Mutwa insisted that such protection would save Africans from communists, militants, or rebels such as "the ANC terrorists" (Mutwa 1989: 13). Under the apartheid regime of the 1960s or the neo-apartheid regime of the 1980s, Credo Mutwa was only concerned that Africans should be free to preserve their distinctive tribal customs and their traditional way of life.

[source : David Chidester, Credo Mutwa, Zulu Shaman: The Invention and Appropriation of Indigenous
Authenticity in African Folk Religion, Journal for the Study of Religion , 2002, Vol. 15, No. 2 (2002), pp. 65-85]

Wasn't it Credo Mutwa who said that the reptilians bred with humans to produce a master/royal/ruling race?

And this is the guy who claimed he was gang-raped by a bunch of black miners?

Just summat for the icky Ickes to think about.

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