Note the politically correct headline. The original was Redhouse and Kleptocracy.
The evil Apartheid regime handed over a country which was functioning pretty well to the benefit mainly of the minority, to the liberation movements which have brought the nation to the brink of “failed state” status for the benefit of a very much smaller minority.
This is not the place to record the decline and fall of South Africa, I don’t have enough terabytes to do the subject justice.
So let’s concentrate on the good times!
Number One! 27th April 1994. The amazing election during which, for the first time ever, black, brown, yellow and white South Africans took their places in queues of voters peacefully trundling through the voting booths. As a volunteer official in St Agnes Church Hall, Swartkops, it was a moving experience to see the happiness on the faces of people who had never been able to vote before, and to feel the sense of relief that the prophets of doom and bloodshed were proved wrong.
In May that year, Queen Elizabeth II and President Mitterand of France officially opened the Channel Tunnel between England and France, at a cost of 16 Billion Sterling in today’s money, well over budget. Believe it or not, the first plan for such a tunnel was drawn up by a Frenchman in 1802!
Number Two! 24th June 1995. The Springboks beat the New Zealand 15-12 in the Final of the Rugby World Cup, played at Ellis Park in Johannesburg. A drop goal in extra time by flyhalf Joel Stransky did the trick. For the second time in two years the nation stood united.
In Europe, NATO bombed the Bosnian Serbs back to the negotiating table. Peace gradually broke out.
In 1996 Dolly the sheep became the first successfully cloned mammal, the Taliban took over Afghanistan, and Bafana Banana actually won the Africa Cup of Nations! Its been a downhill slide for our football since then.
Now there is a long gap until 2007 during which the ANC denigrated from a liberation movement with international backing into one of the modern world’s most obnoxious packs of plunderers. Their version of governance is well described as “state capture”.
In 1997, Princess Diana of Wales died in a car accident in Paris, and the sound barrier was broken on land.
USA President Bill Clinton was impeached in 1998 and Google was founded. Who could have foreseen that Google would become the go to place to find out just about anything! A famine in North Korea killed an estimated 2.5 million people. The municipality handed over the library to the Village and it has provided a valuable service ever since, thanks to the volunteers who run the show.
The following year the world population hit six billion and the Euro currency was introduced.
The first day of the 21st century and the 3rd millennium was celebrated worldwide on New Year’s Day 2000, even though according to the calendar it was a year early.
In 2001, Wikipedia was launched, the first iPod was introduced and the September 11 attacks on the twin towers in New York horrified the watching world. Less than a month later, the USA and the UK invaded Afghanistan and kicked out the Taliban.
In 2002 Queen Elizabeth celebrated fifty years as monarch of sixteen countries and Brazil won the football world cup.
The USA invaded Iraq to get rid of Saddam Hussein in 2003, starting an eight-year war. Although it doesn’t seem to have stopped yet? The very last VW Beetle came off the production line in Mexico and the Concorde made its last supersonic flight.
On the sporting front, South Africa managed to misread the Duckworth-Lewis method of scoring for shortened games and got bundled out in the group stages of the tournament they hosted. Since then the word “chokers” sticks to the team like poo to a baby’s blanket.
Facebook was born in 2004 and the Redhouse Yacht Club celebrated its Centenary with a major regatta and very enjoyable dinner.
The Boxing Day Tsunami happened in the Indian Ocean, leading to a quarter million deaths. The outgoing tide reversed in the Swartkops River and Port Elizabeth harbour looked like a washing machine in action.
In 2005, YouTube was founded, Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf of Mexico and 80 000 died in an earthquake in Kashmir.
Italy won the football world cup in 2006 and Pluto was downgraded from a proper planet to a dwarf planet. You just can’t get away from these rating agencies, can you Cyril?
Number 3! 20th October 2007. The Springboks beat England 15-6 in Paris. For the third time in thirteen years South Africa became one nation, united in pride and happiness.
Elsewhere, the iPhone appeared, and the sub-prime financial crisis engulfed the world.
The following year signalled the start of the Great Recession as stock markets fell dramatically.
In 2009, Bitcoin was introduced, and the world’s tallest skyscraper was completed in Dubai.
Number 4! The 2010 FIFA World Cup was held in South Africa. It was a very happy time and the rugby-mad country loyally supported the games. Let’s forget about the corruption surrounding the event, this is SA. Port Elizabeth scored the best-looking stadium of them all.
Haiti lost 230 000 people in an earthquake, Greece defaulted on its debts, Ireland endured a financial crisis, and the iPad and Instagram were launched.
2011 was a hectic year. An earthquake devastated Christchurch, New Zealand, the Arab Spring revolts upset North Africa and the Middle East, a 9.0 earthquake off the coast of Japan triggered a killer tsunami and a nuclear power plant meltdown, China’s Danyang–Kunshan Grand Bridge, the world’s longest, opened for traffic, the world population hit seven billion, two very nasty people got their just reward, Osama bin Laden shot dead by US Navy Seals and Muammer Gaddafi dying in a ditch in Libya, all of this topped off by the fairy-tale wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton. Whew!
In 2012 the Higgs Boson was discovered. Sorry they lost it in the first place. A mad fellow called Felix Baumgartner jump out of a helium balloon and fell 39km to land safely after breaking the sound barrier. Nutter! Queen Elizabeth II celebrated sixty years on the throne.
The following year, a rock with a mass of about 13000 tons, and 20m in diameter, entered the atmosphere over Russia and exploded with a force thirty times that of the Hiroshima atom bomb. 1500 people were injured by flying glass as windows imploded, many more had to change their underpants.
2014 was not a happy year for the aviation industry. Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared without trace. The little evidence available points to its final resting place being in the Indian Ocean west of Australia. Air Malaysia also lost Flight 17, shot down over the Ukraine, an Indonesian plane came down in the Java Sea, and an Algerian plane crashed in Mali. On the ground, the evil ISIS movement began its reign of terror in Iraq.
China ended its 25-year “one child per family” policy in 2015. It didn’t make much difference because the cost of living in China doesn’t lend itself to having lots of children. Liquid water was found on Mars, no reports of whisky as yet. Climate change became a major topic of discussion worldwide, but not much meaningful action has resulted.
In 2016, the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, sparking the biggest internal uproar since World War II. In an episode which properly belongs in the Mad Magazine, Americans voted in Donald Trump as president of the USA.
Mother Nature began to fight back against mankind in 2017. Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria devastated parts of the USA, Centra America and the Caribbean. Thousands died. Then Mexico was struck by two earthquakes which killed 350 people. ISIS was declared defeated and Mad Bob Mugabe was finally ousted from power in Zimbabwe. The first known interstellar object, named ‘Oumuamua, which means “first distant messenger” in Hawaiian, wandered into the solar system.
In 2018, the first monkeys were cloned, and there were reports of genetically cloned humans in China. I wouldn’t have thought they were short of people. The worst disgrace ever to have been elected to office in South Africa, Jacob Zuma, was forced to resign. Earthquakes and tsunamis caused thousands of deaths in the East. France won the football world cup in Russia.
Number 5! 2nd November 2019. Against all the odds, South Africa beat England 32-12 in probably the greatest victory of the modern era. Led by Siya Kolisi and coached by Rassie Erasmus (both from “Die Baai”), a happy herd of Springboks blew away the Poms, who came away with the prize for total lack of sportsmanship.
China landed a spacecraft on the far side of the Moon in 2019. So we can’t see what the buggers are up to. ISIS lost the last of its territory, but I doubt we have seen the end of them yet. Boris Johnson became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. During World War II the UK and the USA were led by great men, Churchill and Roosevelt. Now they have Johnson and Trump. How art the mighty fallen!
Then we got to 2020 and the coronavirus struck, and South Africa banned the sale of alcohol!
This has led to the rapid development of many home-built stills producing a wide variety of very drinkable brands. Let’s hope this continues after the ban is lifted.
You will have noticed that I have recorded the population rise from billion to billion as we have gone along. The respected Lancet journal very recently announced its projections for population growth for the rest of this century. What they have to say does not make happy reading for the “old” world.
They estimate that the world population will peak in 2064 at around 9.7 billion, and then decline to about 8.8 billion by 2100, by which time fertility rates in 183 of 195 countries will not be high enough to maintain current populations.
Populations are predicted to decline dramatically in many countries. For example, Portugal will drop from 11 million to 5 million. At the other end of the scale, China will drop from 1.4 billion to 732 million in 2100.
Bucking the global trend, sub-Saharan Africa’s population will triple from an estimated 1.03 billion in 2017 to 3.07 billion in 2100. North Africa and the Middle East is the only other region predicted to have a larger population in 2100 (978 million) than in 2017 (600 million).
So just under half the world’s population will inhabit Africa and the Middle East.
To quote “The 21st century will see a revolution in the story of our human civilisation. Africa and the Arab World will shape our future, while Europe and Asia will recede in their influence. By the end of the century, the world will be multipolar, with India, Nigeria, China, and the US the dominant powers. This will truly be a new world, one we should be preparing for today.”
The logical conclusion is that the Old World (Europe) will be forced to open its gates to the African and Middle Eastern hordes, because it won’t have the labour to keep the wheels turning.
The civilization which evolved in Europe over many centuries will face its sternest challenge yet.
To be blunt, Africa and the Middle East are not exactly models of progressive and effective civilization. Anybody read Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”?
What of Redhouse during the post-apartheid period?
The truth is that the Village which came into existence as a sporting venue a hundred and fifty years ago, and evolved into one of those “last outposts of the British Empire”, during which time it developed a unique way of life remembered with great affection by so many people around the world, has long been in retreat from those halcyon days.
It remains the ideal place to bring up children and dogs. It does its best to maintain it numerous traditions. But the number of its guardians gets smaller every year. Newcomers to the Village are not necessarily interested in its history or getting involved in maintaining its structures.
Entire generations of Village children have moved out of the country. Redhouse in its present state gives us a glimpse of the future of Europe. I guess traditions are only kept going if they resonate with the majority of the population.
However, nostalgia for a bygone age is quickly laid aside when we contemplate the concept of “tipping points”, those relatively sudden events which call us out of the “noiseless tenor of our way”.
The coronavirus is one such tipping point. It came as a shock to most people, but if you know anything about the past you will realise that it is just one of numerous plagues the human race has endured throughout recorded history and almost certainly before that. And it was predicted by a number of scenario planners and medical experts. It will pass.
Much scarier is climate change.
Mother Nature is getting angry!
In 1950, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere breached 300 parts per million for the first time in 800 000 years. Seventy years later, we are very close to 420ppm.
The more CO² in the atmosphere, the more the Earth warms, the more the ice melts, the more extreme storm events occur, the more droughts extend, the more species go extinct, and so on and so on.
Global sea level rose about 200 millimetres in the 20th century. During the last two decades, the rate has nearly doubled and is accelerating slightly every year.
The human race will react with positive counter measures as best it can. Fresh water will need efficient management. South Africa has a water scarcity problem. The first step in solving this problem is to remove the ANC from power so that people with expertise can be appointed to relevant positions, instead of the corrupt clowns currently in charge.
Finally, a message for the liquor entrepreneurs of the Village, I would like a glass of Bumbo please!
The pirates’ attractive alternative to the Royal Navy Grog, made with 2 parts of dark rum to one part of orange juice, ½ teaspoon of Grenadine, ¼ teaspoon each of nutmeg and cinnamon! Cheers!