Just because something occurs once does not make it a universal truth.
A sample of one, statostically is woth squat.

Yes, we know we are of different race – and why should we be reminded of that – especially by people of the other race, white?

We don’t need that.

Who hired him by the way?

Or maybe we should have ignored what he said in the first place and not have given it much attention as it had received over the past 2 or 3 weeks.

I, however, accept his apology although I think his whole article was not meant for me, but for somebody I do not know!

Pierre, I laways find your writing very fascinating. You are one of the people that inspired me to keep on writing on my blog. WELL DONE!

Take a look at Jacob Dlamini’s swipe at Bullard in the Sunday Independent today (“White SA’s Pride is Misplaced,” p. 7.)

Dlamini is a very thoughtful columnist. His sophistication sometimes puts Bullard to shame. Yet today, Dlamini responds to Bullard by spinning a tall tale about a pre-colonial “transportation network.” He rhetorically asks: “[H]ow do you think Africans transported ivory and gold mined in the lowveld and
today’s Zimbabwe to the Mozambican coast for trade with east India, Omanis, the Chinese and Indians in pre-colonial times?”

But it is just absurd to compare the system of roads, bridges and rail constructed in the 19th Century with a pre-colonial “transportation network” — one that operated without the benefit of the wheel. Yet anyone who dares point that out runs the risk of being dismissed as another Bullard.

To indulge Dlamini’s flights of fancy is itself a patronising racism. Bullard depicts “tribal” Africans as simple-minded children. Yet, when liberals panders to Africanist mythology, they too treat blacks as infants. (Don’t tell the kids Santa does not exist, lest we damage their fragile dreams and hopes.) If the white chattering class does not challenge people like Dlamini and Mangu when they are plainly talking rubbish, they are in effect refusing to black writers seriously. That is liberal racism more insidious than anything Bullard is guilty of.

For there is nothing racist in noticing that, on any index of science, technology and economic development, sub-Saharan Africa lagged behind Europe. No more does it insults whites to point out that Europe was stone age backwater for 4000 years, while civilizations flourished in North Africa, Sumeria, Persia and China. Anyone who thinks that Europe’s subsequent ascendancy reflects white racial superiority, or that Africa’s having falling behind demonstrates blacks’ inherent inferiority, is indeed a racist, and an abject idiot to boot.

The Nazis felt the need to need to invent stories about an ancient Aryan civilization, fearing that to admit that their ancestors huddled in caves while non-European civilization flowered would be a grievous attack upon the dignity of the white “race.” Is it inevitable that Africa’s renaissance be bolstered by equally ahistoric inventions?

M

And good – an orderly changeover of tong master to boot.

Michael, that made me laugh. Seriously though, who are you, what do you do?

I have to commend you on your comments which are consistently articulate and often offer fresh and deeper perspectives.

But there are enormous damagers attached to thus damning ideas by association. I offer two example.

Suppose I pen a passionate and damning article, showing that drug companies are amoral monsters, whose R&D programs are shaped entirely by the profits motive, have a sordid history of subjecting the poor and helpless to involuntary clinical trials, and which routinely bribe the FDA to approve toxic products. Yet I know this kind of talk lends credibility to the quacks and denialist, both aboard and in SA, who are guilty of what some call a genocide (the vast majority of the victims of which are black.)

Take another example: A writer criticize Britain’s colonial legacy in Zimbabwe, and highlights the fact that Britain reneges on some of its Lancaster House commitments. But he knows exactly who speaks very much the same language, albeit with different and darker motives …

You are correct that the “meaning” of discourse is shaped by its context, and that the responsible speaker should always be aware that the context of speech determines its consequences. But does that mean that critics of drug companies, and of Britain, must shut up, because what they say will be quoted, or give comfort to, monsters in our midst?

Should Marx have kept his argument that British colonialism was a progressive force in India to himself, because he knew that his words could be picked up by avaricious capitalists whose only motive was to bleed India dry. (Or indeed that his words will one day be quoted by myself to defend Bullard’s drivel?)

Michael, you are correct that Bullard spoke about an imaginary place and was purporting to make an anthropological point. My argument is that such a point is never made or understood in the abstract, but in the context of our lived reality in which the kind of “anthropological” assumptions neatly dovetail with the prejudices of present day South Africa about race. It is therefore not possible to distinguish these two things – especially not in the context of a newspaper column. The one becomes the other. That he could not see this, seems to demonstrate to me that he has no clue of how black people experience racism and how it must feel to be on the receiving end of this powerful, voracious, arrogant culture that is ready to assume that because of the colour of your skin you are little more than a lazy savage freshly come down from the trees. If white South Africans had been subjected to this kin of thing, we would have been grabbing for our guns.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vq2SOmwzjUU&NR

I challenge you to provide some proof or quantitative analysis of these chats. Otherwise you are just an asslicker white apologist.