Posts
August 07, 2008
Multiculturalist Malaise—From South Africa
To The Pacific Northwest
By Ilana Mercer
the English-speaking people share—idiosyncrasies that make
life so very pleasant. You notice them not at all when they
pervade the culture, and pine for them when they’re gone.
And they are slowly disappearing in America, by
and large due to the twin evils of multiculturalism
and mass immigration.Ordinary Americans outside the halls of power will
appreciate the fellow-feelings that are stirred in me
by my miraculously preserved, distinctly American
neighborhood here in the Pacific Northwest.
It’s a place where people still greet one another in
English and engage in distinct chit-chat: “Lovely day,
isn’t it? Oh, it sure is fabulous.” Or, “You go girl,”
when I’m jogging up the mountain.
It’s a haven where certain conventions of civility and
decorum are observed; and where the same decorations
go up around Halloween and Christmas time.
As an immigrant many times over—from South Africa
to Israel back to South Africa to Canada to the US—I’ve
become excruciatingly aware of what may seem petty,
but is far from it.
As you know, emigration is traumatic. It’s up there
with bereavement and divorce. Leaving a country leaves
one with an irreparable hole in the heart. Leaving a few
countries, as I have, may cause permanent damage.
All the more so when the place you’ve fled, South Africa,
is being dismantled and dropped bit-by-bit down a black
hole. The almost-overnight disintegration of that Christian
civilization at the tip of Africa has sharpened my understanding
of how fragile such western outposts are and how quickly
they can crumble in culturally inhospitable climes.
American opinion has always been as patronizing as it is
ignorant about South Africa. It considered the Old South
Africa an exotic, multicultural society because it was
predominantly black. But it was nothing of the sort. Settled
and shaped by the Dutch in the mid 1600s, the Old South
Africa was Christian, conservative, and, broadly speaking,
bi-racial. Blacks had long since been missionized. In South
Africa, the white man’s quaint, western ways have only
lately come under a full frontal assault.
It is in the New South-African “Eden” that tribal exotica
—shamanism, for example—is considered a manifestation
of an African Renaissance. (Ditto the highest murder rate
in the world.)
Immigration into the Old South Africa was relatively
low. Growing up there, I didn’t know any immigrants. Bantu,
Boer, and later British had been competing over that
much-contested corner of the continent for an eternity. My
own family had arrived in South Africa at the turn of the
last century—Jewish traders (and a couple of rabbis) who
fled the massacres and Marxism of Russia.
As a consequence, South Africa was a culturally homogenous,
if politically fractious, society. It will surprise some to learn
that I experienced the greatest multicultural shock to my
system in Canada and the US. The very first time I had
been unable to communicate with a neighbor was not in
faraway South Africa, or Israel, but in Canada, where I
lived among Iranian, Korean, and Iraqi immigrants.
(They seemed perfectly charming, but I had no way of
telling for sure.)
In South Africa, English and Afrikaner “niceties” once
dominated. Still, while black South Africans often had
more English than some of my husband’s American
co-workers today, they appreciated pidgin exchanges
in Xhosa, the dominant Bantu language. To elicit
beguiling grins, one had only to greet the petrol
[British/South African English for gas] attendant
with the words, “Molo Butte” (“Good morning,
brother”). To which he would reply, “Molo Sissy,”
or “Mama,” depending on his interlocutor’s age.
“Progressive” doesn’t imply progress. Like successive
American governments, the “progressive”, lax-on-law-
and-order African National Congress government is
indifferent to immigration enforcement. And, although
South Africa is slowly going the way of Zimbabwe, it
still has some distance to go before there is nothing
left to loot and distribute. In the meantime, the rest
of Africa wants in.
Under the tough-on-law-and-order Afrikaner government,
illegal immigrants from the killing fields to the north
dared not brave the Boer border guards and their equally
ferocious, indigenous assistants: four-legged, wild
beasts. If an illegal immigrant made it into the Old
South Africa, he was removed, turned back at the
gate. Firm but fair.
But blacks now rule the South African roost—and they
deal differently with foreigners foisted on them by the
state: They kill them. And so it transpired, back in
May this year, that gangs of black South Africans swept
through the townships of Johannesburg slaughtering or
Indeed, Africa moves in mysterious ways. Tribe and
territory trump political abstractions. The neoconservative
propositional nation, held together as it is by notional
ideas, doesn’t much move most Africans. Neighbors are
what count.
These brutal actions were underwritten by a deeply felt
impulse, to which Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam
indirectly—and reluctantly—lent scientific imprimatur. Putnam
discovered that the greater the diversity in a community,
the greater the distrust and the despair. His unexceptional
observation that diversity was devastating communities
across America did not drive Putnam to issue an S.O.S.
Rather, he sat on his findings for some time before
publishing Diversity and Community in the Twenty-
First Century. Like many a social scientist living in
symbiosis with the state, Putnam’s loyalties were not
with its suffering subjects.
In the multiplying multicultural communities Professor
Putnam described herein, people "hunker down": They
withdraw, have fewer "friends and confidants," distrust
their neighbors regardless of the color of their skin,
expect the worst from local leaders, volunteer and
car-pool less, give less to charity and "agitate for
social reform more," with little hope of success.
Unlike Americans, Africans don’t huddle in front of the
television, alternating between activism and escapism,
unhappiness and ennui. Instead, they seek and destroy
the causes of their misery. (Yet the press in the West
maligns the Minutemen more than it does killers of
newcomers!)
Cut to my community in the Northwest. Down in the
idyllic village three young girls were recently robbed at
knife point, in broad daylight, by a man they described
as Hispanic. Elsewhere in this little hamlet, a woman
stabs a man to death. It is the first murder in five
years, almost unheard of in this well-to-do tiny
town. Unlike the down-market drift increasingly
visible on the streets, demographic details in this
case are (of course) suppressed by the local media.
Higher up on the mountain, where I live, “English
niceties” still prevail. Occasionally an elegantly swaddled
Indian lady will waddle by me on my excursions
outdoors. She stares straight ahead, even as she bumps
me on the narrow sidewalk. She doesn’t know I exist.
In that respect, the South Asian couple that walks by
resembles the East Asian lady. I smile. They come
uncomfortably close, but look right through me.
