Ernst Roets
speaker
479 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard May 2025
Ernst Roets’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
They said that in 94. Yeah, they even said that before 94. They published it.
Yeah. There's a well-known book that was an international bestseller, My Traitor's Heart by a guy called Rian Malan. It's sort of his autobiography.
And so there's one section in that book. I know Rian. I know the author. He's a great guy.
He speaks like he writes as well.
So there's one part in the book where he talks about picking up the New York Times. And I'm sort of saying this from memory from reading the book. But broadly speaking, what he says is he picks up the New York Times in, I don't know, 1992 or something in New York or wherever. And there's two stories on the same page. The one is about the ANC and Nelson Mandela coming to save South Africa.
And then the other story is a somewhat smaller story about a guy being necklaced in a local community, a guy being viciously attacked and killed. And so he writes in that book that... What concerned him was that the New York Times was not able to connect these two stories to each other. They didn't recognize that it's part of the same story. It's presented as two completely different stories.
That was while the Rwandan genocide was happening.
It was the same month, even. The election, at least.
That's not hard. Well, there's a story from Rwanda that I keep mentioning in the same time. I think Linda Melvin wrote a book called Conspiracy to Murder, which is about – I think she lived in Rwanda and she's a journalist and she wrote about what happened. And she writes about a –
It must have been a party in Washington between American diplomats and government officials from Rwanda in the run up, I think, to the genocide. And it was just a big celebration and everyone was happy because Rwanda was in the process of becoming a democracy.
And then afterwards, someone asked one of the Americans, but did you not know what was happening in Rwanda, that they were on the verge of committing genocide? And he said, the American diplomat said, yes, we knew, but we were so excited about democracy and Rwanda becoming a democracy. We didn't want to spoil the mood by confronting them.
Yeah.
So that's very, very alarming, this idea of being so excited about a potential idea that you are not willing to confront the realities that's happening or that could potentially unfold.
Can I give you an example of that from the South African perspective? So I mentioned the name changes. It's a big thing in South Africa. Yeah. I'm sure that'll fix your problems.
No, obviously. So there's a town called Amanzamtoti, which is on the east coast of South Africa. The main street was named Kingsway. They changed it to Andrew Zondu Street. Now, Andrew Zondu is really only known for one thing. He was a member of the ANC Youth League, and I believe it was 1985. He planted a bomb in a shopping center, and he killed, I think, five people and injured 40.
All of the people who were killed were women and children. That's the only thing he did. And he was a member of the ANC Youth League. The ANC regards that event as something that they claim as an act of heroism. So they named the main street after him. And so there are people in that town who drive to work in a street named after the person who killed their children.
And now they would say that they need to do these name changes to make sure that they get rid of offensive names. Offensive names are Afrikaans names, names linked to South Africa's past. And so I was at, again, a summit where this was discussed. And I mentioned this. I said, so you say that in Pretoria, Church Street is an offensive name and has to be changed.
In Amanzum Toti, you change King's way to Andrew Zondu. And I tell this story and I said, so who decides if it's offensive or not? And the guy said, oh, well, that's easy. The majority decides. And so, but it's not even the majority. It's just the government. The government decides because they believe they are the majority.
So we have these extremely offensive things happening under the banner of- Well, they're murderous.
Yeah. No, definitely. Yeah, we'll stay. You guys must love your country. Yeah, we really do. I mean, in South Africa, everyone who's been to South Africa would say it's an incredibly beautiful country, and it truly is. And it's a country that unfortunately has suffered so much under this current government. and has suffered so much in the past.
Showing 441–460 of 479 · page 23 of 24
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