Dr. Karin Morrow is a general practitioner in Durban, South Africa. She described on Twitter the recent violent rioting and looting that has destabilized and terrified the whole country. The pretext for the protests that became an insurgency was the arrest of the former president of South Africa, Jacob Zuma. According to AP, at least 215 people have died in “the unrest”.

We quote her account as edited by the South African journalist David Bullard:

Friday July 9th  

This was the day the planned anarchy began. Apart from the torching of trucks at the Mooi River Toll plaza there were burning tyres in the Durban CBD [Central Business District],  blocked streets and sugar cane fields set alight. All this was celebrated on Twitter by Dudu Zuma Sabudla whom I reported, as did many others, but no action was taken. KZN [KwaZulu-Natal] premier Sihle Zikalala didn’t help matters by siding with [former President] Zuma and demanding a presidential pardon. That would have encouraged the looters no end. Our mayor remained invisible.

Saturday July 10th

A brief lull and there were predictions that the N3 [freeway] would be cleared but truckers were warned to be wary. Not a word from our leaders. In the evening a black patient of mine messaged me saying she had heard that the whole of KZN was going to be shut down next week and could she get her prescription now and make an appointment for a month end consultation. I told her I lived in a bubble and hadn’t heard this and jokingly suggested that she should offer her services as ‘intel’ to Pres Ramaphosa.

Sunday July 11^th 

This was the start of the real chaos, which was to become a daily occurrence during the week. Co-ordinated simultaneous looting and arson attacks were launched on various buildings including a liquor warehouse in Pinetown. Gunfire rang out that night along with shouting and screaming from Mayville/Cato Crest which is 2km as the crow flies from where I live. Frenzied WhatsApp messages went out asking what was going on?

Monday July 12^th 

The frenzy of last night was explained this morning with photos of the gutted small business district of Mayville. Businesses were set alight and the police shot at. But things were about to get much worse. Today was to be Durban’s apocalypse. Warehouses, shopping centres, liquor outlets, factories, schools, storage units, pharmacies, water reservoirs all attacked and most destroyed. Even a blood bank was destroyed. The lack of chronic medication is going to be a major problem in the coming days and weeks.

Meanwhile, silence from our Premier and mayor and the eThekwini Twitter site had temporarily shut down.

I watched mobs of looters surge over the ridge and down into my suburb of Glenwood to strip the local shopping centres. Davenport Centre and Berea Centre along with smaller shops along the way were all smashed and looted. The looters returned up the hill towards the informal settlement and the university residence pushing trolleys of stolen goods, carrying bags on their heads, pulling crates of beer along the road and one even carrying a typist’s office chair.

I drove up to collect my elderly parents who live close to the settlement. The roads were barely passable, strewn with rubbish and broken glass with looters still weaving their way home with their spoils.

I drove past my local Woolies [Woolworths] which had been smashed and emptied. I saw my first police in several days.

The air was acrid with the many fires burning and fine ash rained down as we heard constant gunfire in the distance.

Our local community finally realised that nobody was coming to protect our lives and our homes so civilian volunteers gathered at a central point and patrols were set up for the night and the following day. These would be termed “vigilante militias” by smug woke journos and academics sitting in nice safe Cape Town.

That evening we watched Pres Ramaphosa’s underwhelming address to the nation as the looting of the Queensmead Mall in Umbilo unfolded on the screen behind him….and not a policeman to be seen.

Tuesday July 13^th 

The destruction has spread to the large warehouses like Massmart and other buildings in what used to be the business district but is now a war zone. There are aerial shots of long queues of cars, many of them upper end of the market vehicles, all waiting to load up and transport stolen goods. So much for this being all about the starving unemployed just trying to survive. Durban residents started with the clean up process of their suburbs and it was uplifting to see how good people could come together in times of adversity. Our political leaders were still conspicuous by their absence apart from the DA’s [Democratic Alliance] John Steenhuisen (a Durban man) who gave some very welcome support on the ground to traumatised residents. By contrast, the EFF’s [Economic Freedom Fighters] Julius Malema was using social media to tell his followers to cause more mayhem.

There are food and fuel shortages and medicines are difficult to come by. Long queues are forming and decent citizens are patiently standing in those long queues and shopping for those who are unable to do so. There’s no fighting…..I guess traumatised people who have been under attack become rather docile. Some even managed to crack a few jokes to keep spirits up.

My phone has been pinging all day with patients who need new prescriptions to take to an unlooted pharmacy if they are lucky enough to find one.

Finally, the day takes its toll and I break down with the first (and I hope last) anxiety attack of my life triggered by watching yet more TV coverage of my home province being destroyed. I collapse in a sobbing heap, feel hopeless and can’t move. My family honestly believe I am dying because I can generally cope with most situations. I take the same tranquilisers I prescribe to patients who suffer anxiety attacks and they seem to help. 

Thursday July 15^th 

Sporadic looting and arson has continued while the community continues to clean up and queue for what little food is left in the neighbourhood. There’s anger at the lack of adequate police presence and the Premier was chased away from Ballito, north of Durban, when he appeared and ordered residents to remove their barricades. The SANDF [South African National Defence Force] finally arrived which was a welcome sight but far too little too late. In other news, dead fish and crayfish [large lobsters] are washing up on  beaches having been poisoned by the spillage from a burnt out chemical factory. So we now have a toxic ocean to add to our toxic land.

Friday July 16th

My first day back at the surgery this week and my receptionist came in. She lives on the Bluff which managed to repel repeated attempts by looting hordes thanks to a well armed community militia. Very busy issuing new prescriptions but our COVID vaccine roll out has ground to a halt. Is there even any vaccine left in KZN?

Durbanites are strong people but this week we have been severely traumatised. Apart from the ever present threat of COVID there will almost certainly be a wave of stress related illnesses that will hit us. There may be an uneasy calm now but, but as with any post traumatic stress disorder, there is a huge anticipatory anxiety. If it happened once with such impunity and ease it can surely happen again. The question is…… when?

In the early 1990s, the free world cheered as Russia threw off a Communist regime, and equally exultantly as South Africa fell under a Communist regime.

South Africa is mineral rich, and the world invests in its economy and buys what it has to sell. South Africa needs this to continue. So the Communist government, led at first by Nelson Mandela – the terrorist hailed as a hero by the free world – lets it do so. To the outer world South Africa is a thriving capitalist state.

But internally, it is a decaying Communist disaster.

Daniel Greenfield, the American journalist who knows more about South Africa than most South Africans do, writes at his website Sultan Knish:

Nearly 150 years after electricity came to South Africa, the country is in the dark. The blackouts can strike at any time and then lights, hot water and even major industries vanish into the darkness.

Storing perishable food in the fridge has become a gamble. The meat you buy today may be inedible tomorrow if the rolling blackout arrives and lasts long enough to destroy all the food you cooked.

With rolling blackouts that can last for as long as twelve hours, South Africans have grown used to eating by candlelight and heating water the old-fashioned way. Those who can afford it have been stocking up on generators. But the demand is so high that it can take a month to even obtain a generator.

It’s not just homes and small businesses. Factories and mines are struggling to maintain the country’s industrial base when power can vanish for the entire workday. Traffic lights run off the same power grid and when it goes into “load-shedding” mode, the roads become a snarled maze of honking cars.

South Africa is out of power. The load-shedding blackouts are a last-ditch effort to avert a national blackout that will send the entire country spiraling into a deeper and more enduring darkness.

At the center of the disaster is Eskom: South Africa’s state-owned power company … [which] had many scandals over the years, but its dysfunction reached epic proportions under the ANC. The African National Congress still carries a mythical luster in the United States due to the Mandela name, but it has thoroughly alienated both the country’s white population and its black middle class.

Key figures in the ANC, including Nelson Mandela, were members of South Africa’s Communist party. And under ANC rule, Eskom, the largest state-owned enterprise in South Africa, suffered massive thefts. Earlier this year, a government investigations unit tried to track down $9.6 billion in stolen Eskom funds.

And that may only be the tip of a melting iceberg. …

Eskom is dominated by the Union of Metalworkers which has its own political movement, the Socialist Revolutionary Workers’ Party, founded due to ANC proposals to break up Eskom. The SRWP is a Marxist-Leninist movement whose manifesto calls for abolishing private property ownership.

“We will nationalize the land and place it under the control of a worker state,” its national chair, Comrade Irwin Jim, the general secretary of the Union of Metalworkers, declared. “Under a Socialist government, no one will own land, therefore allowing for the worker-controlled state to decide how land is allocated, farmed and used.”  

Considering how well South Africa has done with state and worker control over electricity, giving the SRWP control over all the land would lead to famine and the deaths of millions. …

South Africa’s power supply is in the hands of Marxists who are fighting the more moderate Marxists. The SRWP doesn’t care if Eskom’s debts bankrupt South Africa or its blackouts leave the country in the dark.

The ANC [government] knows that it if it doesn’t find a way to keep the power on, it will lose the middle class.

The Marxist SRWP is fighting to maintain Eskom’s failing coal plants while the ANC has proposed bringing in private companies to supply renewable energy. The power struggle puts South Africa in the unique position of being the only country where the Left is fighting against solar and wind power.

That’s because the comrades of the Union of Metalworkers fear losing control if solar power comes in.

The ANC tried to cope with power problems by building two huge coal plants. Medupi and Kusile instead became hugely expensive boondoggles that continually break down because of overuse, staff incompetence and poor planning. Eskom’s engineers and brass were unqualified ANC cronies brought in through affirmative action, and were incapable of managing a project of this scale. The power plants that were meant to provide for South Africa’s future are rated as being only 40% reliable.

While the SRWP is calling for massive investments in Eskom, there’s no more money left. A $5 billion bailout hasn’t helped. The only remaining hope for the failing socialist utility is huge loan from China. …

The ANC is fighting to retain political power against even more radically Marxist movements, chiefly the  SRWP and the Economic Freedom Fighters, led by the firebrand Julius Malema who wants to kill all the Whites.

To cling on to power the government is dealing with the discontent of the tens of millions who are unemployed, ill housed and ill fed, in true Communist style with “a program of nationalization, redistribution and socialist terror”.

Daniel Greenfield concludes his article by pointing to the lesson the South Africa descent into darkness teaches:

Socialism promises everything and instead takes everything leaving you in the dark. Socialism doesn’t work. Like South Africa’s power plants, it’s only a matter of time until it breaks down.

The South African government has announced that it will take away land owned by white farmers without compensating them for their loss.

Take from them what they legally own. Take all they have. Seize it. Steal it from them. Leave them and their families and dependents destitute.

And the British government, (wo)manned by incompetent women led by an incompetent woman, says that’s just fine.

Here’s one of the stupid women using her unearned power to do irreparable harm on a vast scale:

Breitbart London has seen a letter written by Harriet Baldwin MP, Minister of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), to Sir Paul Beresford MP, who enquired what the government’s stance on the policy [of expropriating land owned by white farmers without compensation] was on behalf of a concerned constituent.

“The British government understands the need for land reform in South Africa”, Baldwin asserted, adding that they “welcomed” promises from President Cyril Ramaphosa that “the process of land [re]distribution would be orderly within South African laws” and be carried out “without negatively affecting economic growth, agricultural production and food security”.

In a follow-up email to the constituent from the Africa Department (Central and Southern) of the FCO, also seen by Breitbart London and confirmed as “reflect[ing] Government policy on this issue” by the FCO newsdesk, the department confirms Theresa May is satisfied with having been told that “[the] process would be taken forward on a multi-party basis, through Parliament, and… within the bounds of the Constitution and carefully designed so as to avoid damaging food security or deterring investment”.

Oh, that’s okay then. The theft will be legal!

The theft will be legal?

Oh, and “carefully designed”. No damage to “food security” is likely to occur because of “careful design”. And don’t worry if you’re thinking of investing money in South Africa; these soothing words should keep you from feeling “deterred”.

That the ANC government intends to make the seizure of white-owned farms without the owners being compensated legal, through parliamentary fiat and constitutional amendments, says nothing about the justness of the policy, however — and while Ramaphosa might insist he can confiscate land without “deterring investment” the national currency took an immediate hit when the policy was announced.

Minister Baldwin and the FCO Africa Department also dismissed the constituent’s concerns that white farmers, who own a majority of land being put to use for agriculture in South Africa but only a little over a fifth of land overall, were being deliberately targeted in racist attacks.

Many white farmers, including British nationals, have been brutally attacked and sometimes murdered on their homesteads, often following a prolonged period of torture — indeed, by some measures farming in South Africa is the most dangerous occupation in the world outside an active war zone.

Only white farmers attacked. Attacked only by blacks.

But Baldwin and the FCO bureaucrats played down the phenomenon, claiming: “Attacks on farmers are generally opportunistic and on the whole not based on racial grounds.”

In the same way, you see, taking land from white owners and giving it gratis to black owners has nothing to do with race.

How stupid and gullible can even a British female Member of Parliament be?

… Many observers believe the result of the land expropriation without compensation policy the ANC is pursuing — allegedly in response to electoral pressure from Julius Malema’s black nationalist Economic Freedom Fighters party — will be an exodus of the country’s white minority, followed by a collapse in agricultural production and the wider economy.

As happened in Zimbabwe “when  Marxist kleptocrat Robert Mugabe seized white-owned farms … and allowed violent mobs to forcibly eject and often kill the former occupants”, so turning the “Breadbasket of Africa” into a barren wasteland of a country needing to import food while having no money to pay for it.  

Who is the Snake alluded to in our heading – in recollection of the song President Trump has recited more than once in his rally speeches? The Snake the silly women ruling Britain are clasping to their collective bosom?

The creature with a forked tongue? Its name is Cyril Ramaphosa. Or the Government of South Africa.

Following on from yesterday’s post immediately below –

Newsweek reports:

More than 12,000 people have signed a petition asking President Donald Trump to let white people in South Africa emigrate to the U.S. amid a vote by the country’s parliament favoring a motion that could see South Africa’s constitution amended to allow for land to be stripped from owners without any compensation.

The motion … has once again stoked fears among the country’s white farmers of a violent and disastrous land redistribution akin to that which crippled Zimbabwe in the 2000s.

The online petition calls on Trump to “take the steps necessary to initiate an emergency immigration plan allowing white Boers to come to the United States.” Boer is the term used to describe South Africans of Dutch, German or Huguenot descent, who are also commonly referred to as Afrikaners.

The petition suggests that Trump should stop admitting refugees from Somalia and the Middle East, claiming they “cannot be properly vetted”,  and allow white South Africans into the country instead.

Other sources add: “White South Africans can be easily vetted and also possess skills that make them compatible with our [Western] culture and civilization.”

A similar petition, calling on European Union President Jean-Claude Juncker, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and British Prime Minister Theresa May to allow white South Africans into EU countries, has gained nearly 17,000 signatures.

If those 17,000 who seek asylum in Europe or Britain are granted it, their doom at the hands of Third World barbarians will only be postponed.

According to another source (change.org):

The white South African population currently faces ethnic cleansing and persecutions at the hands of the ANC government, the EFF [Economic Freedom Fighters, the revolutionary political party led by Julius Malema who has threatened the genocide of white South Africans], and various individual anti-white aggressors. Over 4000 white farmers have been brutally murdered, [with the attacks] often including torture and rape and mutilation. Many white South Africans today live in poverty and squalor as a consequence of the ANC government’s Black Economic Empowerment policy which shuts whites out of the labour pool.

That is what the liberals of the Western world – who all but worshipped Nelson Mandela the Communist terrorist leader – have brought about.

The communist government of South Africa seems now to be following the Zimbabwe model. If so, the resulting economic ruin of the country will have repercussions throughout the world. South Africa is mineral-rich. It is one of the world’s biggest producers and exporters of gold. Stock-markets everywhere – including the US – will be hit. Anyone who is concerned about the state of the US economy will be wise to watch what is happening in South Africa.

(Hat-tip for the first information about the petition to our valued commenter, liz)

When Zimbabwe was Rhodesia, it was a land of plenty. All citizens, black and white, benefited from the skill and labor of whites and blacks on the white-owned farms. (Note: the country had no apartheid laws.) Then, with the dynamic aid of socialist Britain, it fell under the dictatorship of communist Robert Mugabe. He sent gangs of “veterans” – ie. murderers – to seize farms owned by whites. The farmers, their families, their black servants were slaughtered. Often they were tortured first. For the fun of it. And the land became unproductive.

Now, South Africa …

Our Facebook summary of a Daily Mail article tells the story:

White South African farmers will have their land confiscated after a landslide vote in parliament. The motion was brought by the murderous radical Julius Malema, but the policy was also a key factor in the new president Cyril Ramaphosa’s platform after he took over from Jacob Zuma in February. It passed by 241 votes to 83. In 2016, Malema told his supporters he was “not calling for the slaughter of white people – at least for now”. Freedom Front Plus party leader Pieter Groenewald said the decision to strip white farmers of their land would cause “unforeseen consequences that is not in the interest of South Africa”. The deputy chief executive of the civil rights group Afriforum said the motion was a violation of agreements made at the end of apartheid.

A few facts:

Many of the white farmer families have owned their farms for hundreds of years. In many cases it is all they have. Now it is to be taken from them without compensation.

They did not “steal” it from any of the Bantu tribes, who came overland from the north and encountered white settlers arriving by sea at about the same time. The only native people of South Africa were the Khoikhoi (or Bushmen). The Bantu were not farmers but herdsmen.

Large areas of the land already redistributed by the ANC government to black owners – 2.8 million hectares [1 hectare = just under 2 and a half acres], for which the government paid R20.5bn – are today under-utilized or fallow.

Ilana Mercer – South African born libertarian – writes at Townhall, pointing out that this legalized crime of expropriation has long been foreseeable:

Up until, or on the day, a predictable calamity unfolds in South Africa, you still find Western media insisting that,

* No, there’s no racial component to the butchering of thousands of white rural folks in ways that would make Shaka Zulu proud.
* No, the mutilated, tortured bodies of Boer and British men, women and children aren’t evidence of racial hatred, but a mere artifact of good old crime. No hate crimes. No crimes against humanity. Move along. Let the carnage play on.

And the latest:

To listen to leftist, counterfactual, ahistoric pabulum served up by most in media, a decision by South Africa’s Parliament to smooth the way for an expropriation without compensation of private property came out of … nowhere.

It just so happened — pure fluke! — that the permanently entrenched, racialist parties in parliament used their thumping majorities to vote for legalizing state theft from a politically powerless minority. Didn’t see that coming!

And still they beat on breast: How did the mythical land of Nelson Mandela turn into Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness?

How did that country’s vaunted constitution yield to “the horror, the horror” of land theft?

Easily, even seamlessly — as I’ve been warning since the 2011 publication of  Into the cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa, which provided the analytical edifice for what’s unfolding. …

One of Cyril Ramaphosa’s presidential campaign promises was to finally get down to the business of the people: stealing private property. Since replacing Jacob Zuma as president, Ramaphosa has openly endeavored to speed up the transfer of land from white to black owners after his inauguration two weeks ago. Yet, this inherently aggressive, coercive act was studiously finessed by the news cartel. Before Ramaphosa, Zuma too had “called on parliament to change South Africa’s Constitution to allow the expropriation of white-owned land without compensation”. 

Unlike so many celebrity journos involved, both men know that said constitution is no bulwark against state expropriation. Or against any “public” or private violence, for that matter. As a protector of individual rights to life, liberty and property, the thing is worse than useless — a wordy and worthless document.

Take Section 12 of this progressive constitution. It enshrines the “Freedom and Security of the Person”. Isn’t it comforting to know that in a country where almost everyone knows someone who has been raped, robbed, hijacked, murdered, or all of the above, the individual has a right to live free of all those forms of violence?

Here’s the rub: Nowhere does the South African Constitution state whether its beneficiaries may defend their most precious of rights. Recounted in Into The Cannibal’s Pot is example after example of innocent victims of crime punished and prosecuted by those who swore to uphold the constitution. These victims are punished for merely and minimally defending their so-called constitutionally enshrined rights.

The African National Congress (ANC) has always, not suddenly, disregarded the importance of private property, public order and the remedial value of punitive justice. …

The ANC under its leader Nelson Mandela was, and the ANC remains, essentially a communist party. It made concessions to capitalism because its leaders were persuaded that the economic consequences for the country if it did not would be catastrophic. Now, it seems, such a catastrophe looks less forbidding to them.

As for equality before the law: The South African Bill of Rights is contemptuous of it. It enshrines group rights and allows for compensatory and distributive “justice”.

In other words, it is all for “social justice” which is not just at all.

The state’s confiscatory powers may be used to redress “past injustices”. “To promote the achievement of equality; legislative and other measures designed to protect or advance persons, or categories of persons, disadvantaged by unfair discrimination may be taken.”

The Constitution already allows a good deal of mischief in the name of the “greater good”, land expropriation included. Thus the Expropriation Bill of 2008: It’s the precursor to the current land expropriation process. Where, pray tell, was the news cartel when it was floated as an impetus for land nationalization?

With the 2008 Bill, the dominant ruling party had empowered itself — and “any organ of state, at any level of government” — to take ownership and possession of property “simply by giving notice to the expropriated owner”. The state would make the “final” determination of the compensation due, subject only to a limited form of court review. Both movable and immovable property has always been up for grabs — “livestock and farming implements, residential homes, business premises and equipment, patents, and shares”. The 2008 Bill was temporarily shelved before the 2009 elections, but not forgotten. It led naturally to talk about nationalization.

In March 2010, a plan was tabled in Parliament for turning “all productive land into a national asset leased to farmers”.  Such sentiments are hardly new. True to a promise made in Mandela’s 1955 communistic Freedom Charter, the ANC has already nationalized the “mineral wealth beneath the soil” and the water rights. …

The result of nationalizing water rights: the Cape peninsula, one of the most fertile regions of the entire planet, full of vineyards, famous fruit farms, nature reserves where a vast variety of wild flora has flourished, is now afflicted with drought. The City of Cape Town itself is running out of drinking water!

Israeli experts, who can turn a desert into a garden, offered to come and solve the water problem, but the ANC-led authorities refused because they hate the Jews. Because “Palestine”. (See the Reuters report here.)

Note: More Jews were imprisoned and died for the cause of black liberation in South Africa than any other “white demographic”.

All along had the entrenchment of a property clause in the South African Constitution angered judicial activists, who conflate the protection of private property with the entrenchment of white privilege. Their fears were overblown. Back then, I wagered that nationalization would necessitate but a minor tweak to the Constitution, since the latter already allows all the mischief mentioned. …

Since the dawn of “freedom” in South Africa, commercial farmers, mostly white, have been terrorized and threatened with land claims. As if this were not bad enough, they can now expect nationalization.

In case Zimbabwe is a distant memory, the nationalization of South Africa’s farms will increase unemployment in the agricultural sector, and with it, rural poverty. That will guarantee mass migration to the cities, with all the attendant problems which this exodus poses. Also, it will undermine South Africa’s ability to meet its food needs and deter investment in the country.

There will also be much blood spilt. Famine and Death will stalk the land. As many an example of communist rule attests.

But Communists never have to say “sorry”.