The Week That Was

by the Editors

Freshly bombed New Yorkers must have been overjoyed to have London mayor Sadiq Khan arrive in their besieged city to remind them how lucky they are to live in a multi-cultural world where people from all religions and races are free to engage even if that engagement takes the form of bombing the very people who have generously provided sanctuary to them. Mr. Khan reassured his listeners that terror, henceforth, will be part of their lives but they must not take umbrage and celebrate all the blessing bestowed up them by uncontrolled migration. They must open their arms and embrace, with love and affection, all those people, including the ones who want to kill them, because in his view, love conquers hate.

Well, just how well New Yorkers and Americans in general received this admonishment we don’t know, but if Mr. Khan is really serious about spreading this message of peace and goodwill towards all, why not take himself off to Saudi Arabia or Yemen or Iran and deliver the same entreaty to the leaders of the Muslim world. And maybe see if he can have a bit of quality time with the Isis and Al Nusra leadership. They are pretty busy, we know, hacking off the heads of Christians, ‘Khufars’, ‘infidels’ and anyone else they decree violated some tenet of their religion, but surely there is more work to be done there for the Mayor than in the Christian West.

He might also take time out to acknowledge that he, himself, is a shining example of Western commitment to secularism and tolerance. If the Islamic world, from which he hails, was to follow this example, the world would be a happier place, but we sense Mr. Khan may not have a death-wish, so better to keep banging on about the usual subjects and haranguing the usual suspects; that’s the harmless ones who live in London and New York.

Vice-Chancellor Max Price may well go down in history as the man who triggered the onset of anarchy in South Africa. When a small group of excrement-hurling ‘activists’ arrived on his campus to soil a statue of Cecil Rhodes, Mr. Price could barely conceal his delight at this example of youthful political exuberance being played out in a manner that was perfectly understandable. Well, the ‘activists’ have never looked back and today the country’s tertiary education system is, in many instances, a smoking ruin while energetic efforts continue countrywide to destroy it completely. In the face of this carnage law enforcement has been timidly applied, but when a student used a racially offensive word on social media the forces of law and order sprung quickly and forcefully into action.

Adding to the madness is the recent call to ‘decolonise’ education in the belatedly transformed New South Africa. Who will explain to us rather confused ‘settlers’ who are obviously so busy plundering we’ve lost our minds what this involves exactly? Prior, to European settlement, what education system was in place that these ‘transformists’ want to revert to? When we last checked, the written word had not arrived in sub-Saharan Africa at the time the Europeans arrived. Maybe we got that wrong but it would be helpful to have some inkling as to what these people actually intend to replace the institutions with that they are presently burning to the ground.

Deeply ironic that this all started with an attack on Rhodes. He had a dream about rolling out education for all in Africa in a bid to make the continent a better place for all Africans. He did this by ploughing his money into schools and universities and he created the Rhodes Scholarship which eschewed race as a criterion for selection. Rhodes wanted merit to be the lodestar of his legacy. If he’s watching this destruction unfold one wonders if he’s laughing or crying?

While on the subject of merit we note an emergency meeting has been called for all ‘stakeholders’ to attend and address the crisis in South African rugby. We doubt anyone will tackle the fundamental problem and that is teams are no longer picked on merit, they are picked according to political diktat. Everyone knows this but nobody says it, so all concerned must live a lie. Teams cannot compete at top level with this sort of political meddling because players lose confidence and with that team spirit, which is a crucial intangible, dissipates.

Surely it’s time to bury the past and discard the Springbok brand. It belongs in another era when excellence prevailed and players played for pride, love of country and love of the game and money was of no consequence.