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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To be honest, I haven't seen that. What I can say is Prince Mangusutu Butelezi, who was a very well-known Zulu politician, anti-apartheid activist, he once apologized to the Afrikaner people for the massacre of Petretif that I mentioned earlier.
I think it's oversimplified, but I think enlightenment philosophy has played some role.
So why I say enlightenment philosophy played a role, I mean, there are many examples. We mentioned Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Voltaire, for example, if you read his works, he places a lot of emphasis on as many modern philosophers do, sort of detachment from the community.
We have to cultivate your garden, which is a good thing, but the Voltairean view of cultivating your garden is, you know, don't look at what's happening in the world out there, just focus on your garden at your home, something like that. But Voltaire also writes a lot about how other, you could say, civilizations are actually better than the West. He writes a lot about the East, about
That's your frame of reference.
Yes. So maybe a different way of putting this, as opposed to reference, talking about enlightenment philosophy, is to say the West has had to make this, the West went through some form of a recognition that the Western frame of reference is not the frame of reference, but a frame of reference. And I think a lot of people in the West recognize we're not quite sure how to deal with that.
We still aren't. Yeah, which leads to a lot of conflict and one way of dealing... And doubt. Yeah, and one way of dealing with that is to say that our way is right and everyone else's way is wrong and we need to enforce our view on the rest of the world.
Yeah, well, that's got its problems, I'd say. And another way of dealing with it that is equally bad is to say, well, we need to dissolve. Yeah. We, you know, it's... We have an identity crisis as a result of this. And so maybe those guys are better than we are. And I think the appropriate solution lies in the middle. The golden mean is to say that we have a particular frame of reference.
And we see that in South Africa all the time, that there's a Western frame of reference, but people who aren't Westerners don't have that frame of reference. And one practical example in South Africa is property rights. So we believe in individual ownership of property.
Yes. Yeah, but the Zulu culture is much more one that emphasizes monarchy and communal ownership of land. So the king owns the land. And I don't think the correct way to deal with that is for me to go to the Zulu people and say, you guys are wrong. You need to change your culture. You need to adopt our way of thinking. And it's not that easy to navigate.
And I think that's why South Africa is such an important case study for the world because we have these communities living on this piece of land. And how do we deal with that? Because people think about things like history, as we mentioned, differently. They think about things like property rights differently. They think about ownership and so forth in different ways.
And the appropriate way to deal with that is not to try to enforce your way of thinking onto the other, but to try to find a way where there's mutual recognition and respect between different perspectives.
Yeah, which to us was very important, but in their culture, it's not that big a deal. And the signed document is almost irrelevant.
1990.
So we're basically 35 years away from that.
Is that about right? Let me just say something about the dismantling of the apartheid system. By the end of the system, initially it started out as an attempt to deal with these complex dynamics that we've been discussing. And the broad idea was, let's give everyone homelands. We have a strong central government to keep everyone in check, and then the different nations have their own homelands.
And, you know, that sounds great, but in practice it's not quite that applicable, especially when you still have a strong central government that sort of manages everything. But by the 80s, the Afrikaner people knew this is not working. You know, we need to change.
Culturally. So the argument was that South Africa should be thought of as Europe, which I don't think is a bad argument because the point is it's a big piece of land that's very diverse. And how do we deal with that? And the solution to Europe is not have one big European government,
Exactly. So the solution must be some form of decentralization. But the way to do that, they thought, was to have one big centralized government that sort of manages the decentralization. And then, of course, there were all these laws that were implemented. And it was also during the time of the Cold War. So they had the Suppression of Communism Act implemented.
which said that if you promote communism, it's a crime and you're going to be prosecuted.
Showing 121–140 of 479 · page 7 of 24
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