Recent Thoughts March 2018

Above: Cyril Ramaphosa, the new President of the Republic of South Africa.

When the awful, corrupt Jacob Zuma was finally replaced as South African President with Cyril Ramaphosa, I felt at the bottom of my heart that Ramaphosa would ultimately turn out to be disappointing. Disappointment seems to be the rule with leaders in the developing world. My prophecy has been fulfilled very quickly indeed as only five days after assuming office, the new President has declared his government is going to alter the Constitution so that land may be taken from white farmers without compensation.

While I am sympathetic with poverty-stricken black people in Southern Africa that many of these lands were taken from their ancestors, often by force, the matter is complicated by the fact that it is cruel and wrong to forcibly evict people from their homes and take their property. A modern Boer cannot help being born on a farm their family has held for generations upon generations. Not to mention the fact that land redistribution from educated White African farmers with hundreds of years of family experience behind their backs to uneducated inexperienced Black Africans has always ended in a decrease in economic productivity, whether that be in South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe, or elsewhere; in the case of Zimbabwe it resulted in a land known as the “breadbasket of Africa” for its efficient farming becoming a poor, hyperinflated wreck of a country. Therefore, it is really doubtful that land redistribution has a positive effect on Black Africans at all, when in the past its effect has always been for them (sometimes catastrophically) negative.

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It is a very fine thing for the strong to prostrate themselves willingly for the weak. Because they do not have to. That is the whole root and romance of chivalry, especially the chivalry of man towards woman.

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Female attractiveness is largely based on physical beauty, whereas in male attractiveness intelligence often plays a large part. It occurs to me that there is no difference between judging a woman on her physical beauty and a man on his intelligence. On both these things respectively the man and woman in question have little control. For a feminist to complain about being valued largely for her beauty; well, how is that different to how a male professor is valued? He cannot help being intelligent just as the woman cannot help being beautiful.