A spokesman for the municipality of Cape Town,
Steven Otter, became the latest high-profile casualty of South African crime.
Free West columnist Dan Roodt offers the facts and some of his thoughts.
In
life Steven Otter castigated his fellow whites for their “misperception” of
black crime in South Africa. Yet in one of those harsh racial ironies the
country is famous for, he was stabbed to death by two black robbers in his home
on Reconciliation Day 16 December 2016, dying in the arms of his coloured partner,
Nathalie Williams — in front of her 7-year old daughter.
South
Africa’s minister of culture, Nathi Mthethwa, issued a statement lamenting his
death: “We are devastated and outraged to learn about the fatal attack which
claimed the life of author and former journalist Steven Otter.”............
(Full text at link below)
Steven Otter received the
ultimately South African reality check, being confronted in his own bedroom by
two knife-wielding black criminals. Yet how do we explain his seemingly
confused ideology and behaviour, working for a DA-run municipality, but feeling
more at home in the far-left, anti-white EFF? Was there something masochistic in
his love for the EFF, a tinge of the Stockholm syndrome? How did his sojourn of
a year or so in Khayelitsha affect his judgment about his personal safety?
Every day there are 50 murders in South
Africa, more than in some European countries in an entire year! Murder is no
longer news; it has been normalized. The public has been anaesthetized into
thinking it is “business as usual”. If Otter had not been a high-profile
employee at the City of Cape Town, his death would have passed unnoticed too,
like so many others. Yet, as a poster boy of the multicultural ideal of ethnic
mixture, and someone who had abjured his European origins to live among the
Xhosas of Cape Town, the media in their equally confused zest for the
sensational have emphasised his tragic death.
In the South African mainstream media’s
hysterical denunciations of white racism — the opposite is quite
acceptable — there is an underlying, unvoiced assumption: that only racists
deserve to die violently. So when an anti-racist like Otter falls victim to
black-on-white violence, there is a sense that the logic of multiculturalism
and ethnic mixing is breaking down. Surely, after everything that Otter had
done to deny his “whiteness” — to use a fashionable liberal term — he deserved
to live?
One way in which crime in South Africa is
rationalised by the media is to present it simply as “random”, like the weather
or traffic accidents. When murder occurs, we must see it as an unfortunate
accident disturbing the happy, smiling, multicultural faces of the liberal
narrative. It has all the hallmarks of a natural disaster that befalls us,
especially the innocent and righteous – from the liberal point of view — such
as Steven Otter.
