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The simpleton President Trump showing photos from the war in the Congo to the president of South Africa as proof of his nation’s nonexistent “white genocide.” Cape Town is 500 miles farther away from Congo’s war than Duluth is from Havana, Cuba. 

Our incredible shrinking president resorted to some of his schtick this week to shore up his listing ship of state. He kneeled once again on the neck of a black man. See also my: “A Good Lynching and “our way of Life.”

Last week Cyril Ramaphosa, a confident fellow billionaire one billion richer than Trump, visited the White House. He is President of the black-run Republic of South Africa, which he helped found. Ah, mention of South Africa leaves me an opening to digress to my favorite subject – geography.

I’ve always been fascinated by the Cape of Good Hope. Two of my fattest unread books are about South Africa. One is the history of its black peopling and the other is about the white African giant, Cecil Rhodes, who used his wealth mining diamonds to build a railroad from Cape Town to Cairo across the earth’s second largest continent. 

Africa is the birthplace of humanity and, according to Trump, it’s also the birthplace of his predecessor, Barack Obama.

It was the Union of South Africa when I started collecting stamps in 1960. In 1957, when I was seven, there were only two nations on the colonized continent. There were nine independent nations in 1960 when JFK was elected. By that year’s end there were 26 total, including South Africa. 

The Union became the Republic of South Africa when a narrow 52% of its’ white-only voters chose to leave the British Commonwealth. Today Africa has 54 nations. Trump generally considers them “shitholes.” 

My family has a charming story about the war of independence waged against Queen Victoria by the Dutch-speaking Boers of the Transvaal region. 

Described as England’s Vietnam War, the Boer War began in 1900 when Trump’s cousins, the Boers, tried to break free from the redcoats. 

Far away from South Africa, in the vast middle of America my mother’s Robb family followed a siege of British troops in the South African city, Ladysmith. You might recognize its name from “Ladysmith Black Mombazo” - A-weema-weh, a-weem-weh. 

Every day the East Coast-kin of the Robb family in Salina, Kansas, mailed them the latest London Times. This was before Trump broke the U.S. Post Office.  In each Time’s edition they read breathless reports from the Cape colony of a heroic attempt by the Brits to avoid being overrun by the Boers who were besieging them.

One day, as the siege played out, my sturdy anglophile great grandfather, Thomas Robb, returned to his farm after conducting business in town. As he approached his six children raced to tell him the news that Ladysmith had fallen. Thomas Robb was furious. Then he was puzzled when his children broke out in uproarious laughter. The family’s calf, “Ladysmith” had fallen into the icehouse.

When I was a high school sophomore in 1967, I was assigned to read the novel Cry the Beloved Country in my pre-college English class. Written by the South African author Alan Paton, it described the woes of an unlucky black family trapped in a Kafkaesque system called Apartheid. The system was devised by a tiny white minority to suppress a huge black majority.

Apartheid’s oppression continued until 1993 when Ramaphosa negotiated a peace deal that gave all South Africans the democracy they deserved. His work resulted in the award of a Nobel
Peace prize for Nelson Mandela and President F. W. de Klerk. 

Trump’s kindergarten evidence has become routine in his Oval Office appearances where he slouches uncomfortably like a man trying to pass a 10-pointer into a bejeweled toilette. His pics of “genocide” for Ramaphosa were cringe worthy. Taken in the Republic of the Congo they were one more assault on truth, law, democracy, NATO, Canada, Christian decency, our economy etc. etc. etc.

Trump knows less about South Africa than the ancient Egyptians who may have rounded the Cape of Good Hope 2,500 years ahead of the Portuguese explorer, Vasco da Gama. He made his voyage in 1497.
I’d highly recommend that our reading-averse president listen to the very, very funny and poignant autobiography by Trevor Noah titled Born a Crime. Noah was born and raised in South Africa.  his book is available on audio from Audible. No reading required.

Trump could follow Noah’s example by penning and then reading his own more up-to-date autobiography. He could call it, Born into Crime.

Check out “A snowman speaks” on Substack, where Harrys columns often appear before the Reader.