Dr. Grace Naledi Mandisa Pandor, South African Minister of International Relations.
“I would appreciate them in helping us as well to address the belief our people have and the reality that there are many persons from Nigeria dealing in drugs in our country”-
Femi Fani-Kayode replied:
Many years ago in the early to mid-1970’s, when apartheid was alive and well in South Africa and when I was a young student at Harrow, which remains undoubtedly the best private school in England. I broke the jaw of a blond, blue-eyed English-speaking white South African fellow student who said some very nasty things about black South Africans during a history class.
During a heated debate about racial segregation and the South African Mixed Race Act which made it a criminal offence for blacks and whites to get married or have sexual relations, he got up and said, before the entire class, that
“allowing those dirty black dogs to touch our beautiful and pure white women is sacrilege. It is against the laws of God! It is like getting a monkey to mate with a human being!”
Finally he said “no sane white woman would ever want to have sex with a black African monkey and any of them that do should be sent to jail”.
I reacted swiftly and without any hesitation. Without any warning or even words of anger, I left my desk, walked up to him and broke his jaw with one clean blow from my right fist. He never knew what hit him!
I remember hearing and enjoying the way his jaw popped open and cracked. It was a strange noise and as he hit the floor his legs started to shake uncontrollably after which he lost consciousness.
For one horrendous moment I thought I had killed him but thankfully eventually his eyes opened, he sat up and he was rushed to the hospital on a stretcher.
He hailed from one of the biggest and richest white families in South Africa who were (and still are) in the diamond mining business and I almost got expelled from Harrow for my “wild and unruly” behaviour until I gave my reasons for hitting him to the school authorities.
They were shocked and equally appalled by what he had said, which they rightly regarded as a grave and reckless provocation, and they decided to let me off the hook.
I was reprimanded and warned and I remember that the Headmaster wrote a formal letter about the incident to my father who was livid with me for jeopardising my entire academic career because of a racial slight and slur.
Papa said “you didn’t have to hit him and almost kill the poor boy: you could have just attempted to educate him in a civilised manner and at the worst insult him back!”
Yet I had no regrets or remorse about my course of action or the choice that I made and to my eternal credit I never apologised for my action to the South African, the school authorities, my father or anyone else.
The truth is that I was proud of what I did and I believed that defending the honor of my black South African colleagues was far more important than staying at Harrow.
I was prepared to risk it all by physically assaulting the white boy and I did.
My gamble paid off and the South African boy, as sober as ever, never insulted or spoke ill of blacks again in my presence.
As a matter of fact we ended up becoming friends in the following years and I will never forget what he told me just before we left Harrow in 1977.
I remember the words because I wrote them down at the time and have meditated on them for years.
He said “you don’t understand the Bantus” (meaning black South Africans).
He went on to say “the day they get power in South Africa is the day that South Africa will begin to die.
Sincethe 17th century we Boers built up everything there and they contributed nothing.
We fought the Zulus and later the British and we built and developed that land with our flesh, sweat and blood. Giving a country like South Africa to them is like giving a monkey a loaded gun.
They will use it to kill everyone around them and eventually they will kill themselves. They are not like you Nigerians: they have no history or class.
They are unenlightened, ungrateful, primitive, uncouth and very backward and one day the rest of Africa will know them for what they are!”
Judging from the words of the South African Foreign Minister and the xenophobic and racist disposition of the South African President, Government and people, it appears that that day has finally come.
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