It wasn’t so long ago that the nation of South Africa was under the racist rule of a white supremacist government.\u00a0 Plenty other world governments and leaders at the time were just fine with this arrangement.\u00a0 It took agitation by individuals and rights groups, both from within and without the country to get people to notice what was going on.\u00a0 And eventually the tide turned against the racist whites who held most of the population down.<\/p>\n
But many of South Africa’s black people suffered and many died at the hands of the white authorities.\u00a0 This song<\/a> tells part of the story of Stephen Biko<\/a>.\u00a0 He was beaten to death by white South African police while in custody.\u00a0 His crime – to the whites – was that he was a black man who resisted their racism.\u00a0 That racism was official policy and it was called “Apartheid”.\u00a0 I guess that’s Dutch for “whites are better than everyone else”.<\/p>\n Unfortunately now, even though South Africa is no longer ruled by a racist white regime, Apartheid lives on in other parts of the world.\u00a0 And the spirit of those racist white South African police and military figures, sadly, lives on despite the end of their regime.<\/p>\n It’s sad for me to reflect on this, and even sadder to realize that this will probably go on as long as humanity does.\u00a0 There will always be racial supremacists, religious supremacists and others who will think that they are better than their fellow humans.\u00a0 And those people will always want to kill everyone else off.\u00a0 It’s the story of humanity’s history, and it’s the course of our future.<\/p>\n The only way to live with that is to resist.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It wasn’t so long ago that the nation of South Africa was under the racist rule of a white supremacist government.\u00a0 Plenty other world governments and leaders at the time were just fine with this arrangement.\u00a0 It took agitation by individuals and rights groups, both from within and without the country to get people to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[328,327,329],"class_list":["post-1067","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-song-of-the-day","tag-apartheid","tag-peter-gabriel","tag-racism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1067","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1067"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1067\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1069,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1067\/revisions\/1069"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1067"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1067"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1067"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}