Janet Suzman Quotes
It was but then, when you're, one of the great poisonous events that have infected us all who were in South Africa is that the idea of difference is drip fed into your veins. It's that that you fight.
Suzman, Janet. Interview. Web of Stories, Web of Stories, 2007.
The Boers, the early Dutch settlers to South Africa were a “scurvey lot” who were very uneducated, narrow minded, and insular. They eventurally esterminated whole tribes of Blacks, caused the Boer War, and operated the disasterous apartheid era of South Africa. But the early Dutch governors of South Africa had great trouble with the Boers as well. See {583928} & {583928} for English similar assessments.
Senator Glen Taylor was arrested on May 1, 1948, in Birmingham, Alabama by police commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor, for attempting to use a door reserved for African Americans, rather than the whites-only door, while attempting to attend a meeting of the Southern Negro Youth Congress. He was subsequently convicted of disorderly conduct. It is hard to believe that such a thing happened in America but it did. ER was one of the few Democrats to condemn such behavior. She took a great deal of criticism from the Southern Democrats for this column. They claimed she called White Southerners “Stupid.”
The Boers were lower class, uneducated, farmers from Holland who came to South Africa before the English did. They were at the bottom of the Dutch socioeconomic ladder. Unlike the English who were interest in establishing a trading colony, the Boers just wanted to own and farm the land and use blacks as slave or cheap labor. The Dutch Government and Trading companies lost interest in South Africa as there were much more profitable parts of the world, and they felt no obligation to the Boers whom they were glad to be rid of. So the Boers found themselves having to follow the British laws and rules of the British Colonial Office. Slavery was outlawed, and Blacks could be educated and become citizens under British law. They could own land, and contest the right of the Boers who had settled in some uninhabited land and some that was owned by Black tribes. The Blacks outnumbered the whites in general and the Boers, and there were educated Blacks who “outclassed” the still relatively uneducated Boers. So the Boers, fighting for their “way of life” set up their own area in Southern Africa and claimed independence. But Blacks claimed that it was their land and looked to the British to exercise English law. The Boer war ensued. Although the Boers lost the war, the bred at a much faster rate than the English, many of whom did not even have their families in South Africa. By the end of WWII, the Boer white majority controlled the government and kept the majority Blacks from voting and having full citizenship rights. They dominated Apartheid South Africa until the Black Revolutionists obtained control and although Black and white relations are better in South Africa than most countries, the extemeist Boers and most militant Blacks are in political, but not violent, conflict. Churchill and the British have always perceived themselves as being caught in the middle between the Boers and the Blacks.
Dame Janet Suzman, DBE is a South African/British actress who enjoyed a successful early career in the Royal Shakespeare Company, later replaying many Shakespearean roles, among others, on TV. In her first film, Nicholas and Alexandra (1971), her performance as Empress Alexandra Feodorovna earned her several honours, including a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress.
