[A friend of mine managed to get a photo copy of a the Landbou Weekblad magazine for 1920. This is the Afrikaans equivalent of the “Farmers Weekly” one might say. It has adverts and articles and letters from farmers.

It had some pretty interesting excerpts in it, which show some of the frustrations White people had back then with blacks.

I scanned a full page article from it where a farmer writes about the problems he has with blacks. He says that the blacks just do what they want, and they aren’t interested in working and whenever they get a chance they loiter around the towns and cause problems. Where are the Police he asks? Anyway, I’ll try to get a friend to translate the whole article. It makes for good reading.

But in it was this advert below for the “Chief Plough”:-

The area highlighted in yellow contains an interesting sentence which I have zoomed in on in the image below:-

Let me translate from the Afrikaans:
“When you buy a Chief Plough, you get a Chief plough which is specially built to work under the difficult conditions of South Africa, and it is so designed that even the dumbest black can handle it with without difficulty…”

As my friend remarked: How little things have changed in 86 years. The same problems we had with them then, are still plaguing us today.

Of course the irony is that one would have thought these black people are not motivated or interested in working for or with white people and that when they now own the country they would show more interest!

Well, let me tell you, that when they do their own thing, they’re even more unproductive than when we ruled them. I will still tell you folks about some of my black co-workers in my job. There is one of them whom we are seriously wondering if the guy is dying from AIDS. He is behaving extremely strangely and is hardly ever at work.

But let me tell you a bit about my “black apprentice” if you will, who I am training at work. How many university degrees do you have? Well, I have none. I have nothing more than a high school education – in fact, to a degree I am actually something of a high school dropout. Well, my “appy” (apprentice if you will)… has TWO University degrees. Not rubbish stuff… not arts… but the sciences – from reputable universities. I think the one degree is in chemistry and the other is in Information Technology. Some company sponsored him to study for several years to get both of them… Well… I give him free reign to operate on his own initiative and motivation. I gave him work to do, told him to ask me questions when he has them, and I’ll help out when he needs it. Anyway… I was very busy the last 6 weeks with other issues and hardly had time to actively monitor him. But he could ask me questions any time he needed help.

Well… one of my co-workers said to me, “Do you realise that your appy is actually ASLEEP at his desk?” Well… I had noticed he would put his headphones on to listen to music, and he would close his eyes sometimes while sitting at his desk… and he would sit very still yes. But asleep? No… surely not…?

Today… I was finally ready to actively start going through all the work he had done in the last 6 weeks… and when I walked up to him and spoke to him his eyes were closed and there was no reaction. So I touched him… no reaction… I eventually had to jab him to wake him up!!

I had a good chuckle though. Its not my company. Its not my money. Its not my employees. If I have a performance problem I just tell my non-white boss and he can jump all over their case. I don’t care. I just had a good chuckle.

I remarked to my co-worker: They should hire more blacks – because the more blacks they hire, the more work there is for us whites to do – fixing their stuffups and supervising them. Viva Affirmative Action I say!

And… watch this space… watch what Affirmative Action might yet do to the large corporates which run S.Africa’s businesses… it is going to make them extremely uncompetitive… and let’s see what that ultimately leads to!

So its 2006, and things are really no different to what they were in 1920. The same old discipline and work problems. The only difference is now we just don’t care. Let them do what they want and see where it gets them. Jan]