And what inspired it:
Now finish the sentence: “Africa…”
“Muti” means “magic” in most Bantu languages.
Category: Africa
Of Course They Have
Here’s one that should come as no surprise to anyone:
Afghanistan goes back to the Dark Ages
Just a point of order: when, precisely, did Afghanistan — or any of the -stans for that matter — ever leave the Dark Ages? To continue:
The Taliban have ordered dozens of people to be killed by stoning and four convicts to be executed by having walls collapsed onto them, exposing the scale of brutality under the regime.
Figures released by the Taliban’s own Supreme Court show the group also publicly flogged more than 1,000 people across Afghanistan in 2025, including at least 150 women.
The data points to a sharp rise in corporal punishment, with Kabul recording the highest number of cases.
Official Taliban statements reveal that 1,030 people were whipped in public this year for offences including theft, running away from home and acts deemed contrary to Islamic law.
Well, yes: when you govern according to Islamic law, the Dark Ages is pretty much a given.
Mind you, I’m not altogether opposed to a few public floggings. I can think of a number of people (like this one or this one) who could only benefit from same, and our society might well be the better for it.
But a flogging for drinking booze and/or wearing a miniskirt?
Forget that crap.
Giving Up
Of course, I read this with great regret and sadness, because it’s my home town being written off:
Johannesburg: The slow death of a city that may have outlived its purpose
Johannesburg is in an advanced state of decay, destruction, ruin, crime, waste, and all of it seems, sometimes, like a mirror image of South African society. We grieve over the once-great city in a veritable cult of grief.
But we are too afraid to look in the mirror because our vanity overwhelms our misery — we are, after all, a great people, and a great people we have to remain…
In and around the city, the families and communities in its suburbs and on the periphery are struggling to live full lives. As days and weeks go by, the denizens are losing reason to value their surroundings. The taps run dry frequently, energy supply is interrupted regularly, flagship institutions, and all those little things like roads, pavements, pedestrian crossings, traffic signs, road signs and robots are bleeding like wounds that will not heal on a body in terminal decline.
The city is depleted, and lacking in the nutrients and the energy necessary to bring it back to full functionality.
We can point, as we may, to mismanagement, maladministration, lack of planning, a lack of foresight and vision. We can, also, consider Johannesburg as a city that has reached the end of its natural life and is approaching the end of its purpose.
Johannesburg, as we came to know it, was established by European settler colonists in about 1886 for the sole purpose of exploiting the gold buried in the rocks below. Those gold deposits are finite. If it’s not entirely finite, mining it is becoming more expensive, while demand may well increase.
Yeah, what the hell. It’s just a shell of a place, an aggregation of concrete, glass and tarmac: it’s too difficult to govern or manage, so why bother?
One might also say the same thing about Manhattan or Los Angeles. In fact, one might say the same thing about all the major cities of the world, where concentration of the population has become too difficult and in most cases, too dangerous.
So let the animals take over and feast on the bones. And when the bones are gone and the animals need to go further afield to survive… then what?
And now, if you’ll excuse me, I think it’s time to go to the range.
Back In The Day
Reader pkudude99 provided this link about Ponte Tower in Johannesburg — actually in Hillbrow, which used to be to downtown Johannesburg as, say, the Bronx is to Manhattan. (Interestingly, Hillbrow’s colloquial nickname for many years was “The Bronx”.)
Back when I lived there, Ponte was a very desirable address to call one’s own, and there was a mile-long waiting list for prospective residents. (I was on the waiting list for a while, but gave up after a year or so and moved instead to Yeoville, the next suburb over.) Ponte was literally across the road from my apartment, as can be seen from a pic I took from my back balcony:
Here’s a daylight pic:
…and from the inside looking up:
In retrospect, I’m rather glad that I didn’t end up living in Ponte. I went to visit a friend there once, and while the apartment was very nice (in that super-modern style that was so trendy but that I now detest), the apartment building itself was terrible. It felt like a prison block, and it’s small wonder that it was once suggested that Ponte should be turned into a maximum-security prison (never implemented, though).
Now? You couldn’t get me within ten miles of the place — or of Hillbrow itself. What used to be a glittering urban location with dance clubs, all-night restaurants, coffee bars and shops, late-closing bookstores and a permanent buzz of excitement is now… Third World Africa.
Like so much of what was once wonderful in Johannesburg is now just shabby, dangerous and… sub-Saharan Africa, no different from Mogadishu, Harare (another tragedy) or Nairobi.
Makes me sick just to think about it.
Stopping The Drain
Friend and Reader Hank T. sends me a link to a website I’ve not seen before (and it has a most excellent title). The post itself shines a light on the usual totalitarian reindeer games:
After leftists fundamentally transform a country, people must be prevented from escaping. South Africa is no exception.
A storm is breaking over the South African Afrikaner remnant. What is being framed publicly as a diplomatic incident is, in reality, an act of war carried out covertly and deliberately. We are bearing witness to something far more sinister than an isolated raid. This is a convergence point, political treachery, racial targeting, and spiritual warfare colliding in the open.
On Tuesday, December 16, 2025, a U.S.-affiliated refugee processing center in Johannesburg was raided by South African officials wearing khaki uniforms. The facility had been operating quietly, processing asylum applications from white South Africans, many of them Afrikaner farmers, under provisions authorized by executive order. The raid was calculated, hostile, and executed while U.S. immigration agents were on site. It was not just interference. It was a direct act of aggression.
These agents were forced to flee.
Calls to mind the construction of the Berlin Wall, dunnit?
At this point, I’d believe anything about the foul South African government, who are doing things to the people that are far, far worse than the evil apartheid regime ever did.
In case anyone thinks I’m exaggerating on this, here’s something to ponder: at no point during the apartheid years did the government ever allow and encourage ordinary White people to slaughter Blacks without fear of prosecution. Ask any White farmer how that’s going right now.
What saddens me is that when you talk to White South Africans, as I do regularly, they persist with the moonbeam nonsense about how beautiful the country is and how things aren’t as bad as portrayed.
Uh huh.
Of course, this is going to end in tragedy.
Gone Forever
Here’s one statement from the Trump administration that’s guaranteed to get me angry:
The larger issues facing Europe include activities of the European Union and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty, migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence… if current trends continue the continent and its economic issues are “eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure.”
Back in 2004, after I returned from a trip to Paris, I posted this pic of an impromptu street concert by some students from the Sorbonne, taken in the little square just in front of the university:
The classical music was quite lovely, the musicians very accomplished. I stood, entranced, and watched them for the entire time they played — well over an hour, as I recall.
I also remember commenting on the old website that if the Muslim theocracy and culture were ever to establish itself in France, joyful concerts of this nature would completely disappear, suppressed no doubt by some bullshit aspect of shari’a law, and a little bit of the joie de vivre would be gone from Paris streets.
And that is precisely what the Trump administration means by “civilizational erasure”.