Although readers under 50 are probably unaware of it, the 1981 Springbok rugby tour of NZ was hugely controversial and saw big protests on the streets against it. The issue was simple — the South African government’s granting special rights and privileges to a minority of the country’s population based on their bloodlines was morally wrong. This included legislative power by the minority over the majority.
Nine years later in 1990 as South Africa descended into violence and turmoil, the government decided Apartheid had to end.
There is an old saying — “those who fail to learn from the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them“
Clearly PM Jacinda has learned nothing from the lessons of history. See this article by Muriel Newman, and a guest post by Ross Meurant.
–Geoffrey, Eva and Roger, editors
I well remember being an active member of the Auckland protest- and in doing so having the priviledge of walking at the side of a Holocaust survivor- who spoke of many paralells between the evil of each regime.
Wake up New Zealand – and take a stand- before we are a politically driven divided people living within a framework of ‘separate development’.
There is no parallel between NZ and SA.
1. The Maoris pleaded for years for Britain to establish law. The Afrikaner did not ask for or need British intervention.
2. The Afrikaners were indigenous to the region.
3. The Nationalists took government in a popular reaction to the way Smuts put down the workers revolt on the Rand in 1922, when they resisted mine owners’ attempts to use Black scab labour.
4. The Afrikaners, having defeated British imperialism, spent decades contending with an axis of plutocracy and communism.
5. The result of ending the Afrikaners’ rule was the globalization and privatization of SA’s resources and utilities, which became the official ANC policy.
6. Plutocracy won and Blacks and whites have equality of destitution. Harry Oppenheimer explained that apartheid was a barrier to creating a ‘vast new consuming public’, where the different peoples are melded into one nebulous mass to feed the economic treadmill.
Afrikaners aren’t indigenous to the region. Their forebears only arrived in the area in the 17th and 18th centuries.
The first nation indigenous groups are considered to be the San and Khoekhoe peoples.
https://www.iwgia.org/en/