And Welcome

Apart from my mediocre title and vague name, welcome to my blog.

Now, to negate the vagueness, I suppose it would be a good thing to give a brief overview of what I'm hoping to achieve here.
I am a man of many opinions and very few convictions and I filter most of these opinions through the people that I know and in most cases call friends. To Start this blog off I'm going to give you, the reader, some background into who I am and how I experience the world; this will hopefully provide a lucid and transparent platform from which you can share my experiences and opinions.

I am a 23 year old white South-African who grew up in a former homeland named Boputhatswana. Bop, as a country, was integrated into South Africa after the fall of apartheid after 1994. The Bop capital city named Mmabatho became the capital of the North West province (1 of 9 provinces).

My father moved us (I wasn't born yet) to Boputhatswana to get away from the "broederbond" mentality. That means he wanted to get away from the overly conservative socialist environment that the apartheid regime had nurtured.

The idea that I have is that many of the white families in Bop had gone there for similar reasons as that of my father. The white population in Bop was a professional one, engineers, architects, intellectuals etc. Of course the whites were the vast minority in Bop but the atmosphere there was one of co-operation; and Mangope, the president, understood that these white "immigrants" were there for the same reasons that the local black population avoided the rest of South Africa.

Bop boasted the best recording studios in the southern hemisphere (Elton John's soundtrack for the Lion King), a world class sports stadium, an international standard university, a proper airport, and all these facilities are today still within a 20 minutes' drive of each other. Bop was a small but prosperous homeland and I believe it was the archetype of what the South African government wanted to create for the black population.

Do not misunderstand me, I like my father, still have strong feelings about the abuses and stupidity that was Apartheid. What I'm saying simply is that Boputhatswana was a wonderful place for black, white, indian, colored, chinese or whoever to live in. It was wonderful because Mangope was a great leader who used the finances he recieved from the Apartheid government to build a prosperous and apartheid free homeland. Mangope achieved the multi-cutlural dream that the ANC today still uses as a propoganda vision.

The ANC tried to smother the whole region that used to be Bop after 1994. The Airport has only recently started working again, the stadium is in ruins, BopTV has long since closed down, the recording studios are in disrepair, its safer for your car's health to drive on a Tswana Chief's dirt road than on municipal controlled tar roads. According to the ANC, Boputhatswana was run by a traitor who led a failed experiment. If you speak to any Tswana person (the local tribe) they'll tell you in bitter tones that the ANC is run by Xhosas and Zulus who cannot control their tempers.

What's happened in Mmabatho since it became the capital of North West Province South Africa, is alot worse than what happened in Mmabatho as the capital of Bophutatswana.

I'll just briefly attend to my personal experiences. I was in dual medium schools where whites were the minority. I played with the neighbors' children; guess their ethnicities. I was never even aware of what apartheid was until I was much much older than 8 years old (in 1994). I was only exposed to the white apartheid mindset when at 17 I went to a white school in a conservative white town.

One thing I'd like to add concerning South Africa is that it seems to me today that the number of BMW driving government officials is increasing steadily, poverty is increasing steadily, emmigration is increasing steadily... Wait wait wait wait, there's a more efficient way of saying this.

As time goes by there is/are:
MORE: BMWs, poor people, crime, emmigration of professionals.
LESS: Money, jobs, development.

Newspapers have great fun documenting these things.
So there is a brief summation of my background. I hope it isnt too boring or still too vague, these things are the impressions that I carry around with me today. This blog is NOT intended as a political platform with which to express my opinions on South Africa. This first post is simply meant to give the reader a general idea of where I come from.