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Dylann Roof wearing the jacket with flag patches stands beside a sign at Sullivan’s Island in South Carolina. The island is famous for being the disembarking port for over 40 percent of the estimated 400 000 slaves transported from Africa. It was the largest slave port in North America. Inset are Flag patches on Roof’s jacket. — New York Daily News

The Arena Hildegarde
HELL hath no fury like a man spurned. Former Presidential Affairs Minister Didymus Mutasa’s never-ending playing to the gallery is reaching desperate levels.

He seems to think that he can’t be outdone by whistle-blowers like Julian Assange of WikiLeaks fame and Edward Snowden.

But for every act there is a price to pay, sometimes a costly one. Compromising national security and sovereignty is never taken lightly anywhere in the free world. Mr Mutasa knows it because he was part of the system, a system he still desires to be a part of.

If indeed he puts people first, then he must read the book of the prophet Isaiah chapter 39, when King Hezekiah’s overzealousness made him show the Babylonians everything in his palace: “There is nothing among my treasures that I did not show them.” The children of Israel paid heavily for the king’s lack of wisdom and judgment.

It’s a week now since Dylann Storm Roof, that 21-year old white supremacist/terrorist/racist gunned down nine worshippers in Charleston, South Carolina in the USA.

An apparent justification for Roof’s callous murder was found on his website, The Last Rhodesian, where he wrote: “I have no choice. I am not in the position to, alone, go into the ghetto and fight. I chose Charleston because it is most historic city in my state, and at one time had the highest ratio of blacks to whites in the country. We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the internet. Well, someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me.”

Despite some historic developments on the case, many questions remain unanswered.

Who would have thought that the “N-word” would defy political correctness to become a major talking point? And, President Obama referred to “nigger” when he addressed racism.

“Racism, we are not cured of it. And it’s not just a matter of it not being polite to say nigger in public,” President Obama said in an interview.

“That’s not the measure of whether racism still exists or not. It’s not just a matter of overt discrimination. Societies don’t, overnight, completely erase everything that happened 200 to 300 years prior.”

But, this is about four flags, three presidents and a killer and how some of the answers we are searching for can be derived from these symbols and personalities.

Dylann Roof was a flags person, and the symbolic nature of these flags is expansive. The pictures taken from his website show how besotted he was with flags.

First, the American flag! Roof says on his website, “I hate the sight of the American flag,” and in one of the pictures he is holding a burning American flag.

Then there are a number of pictures where he is seen holding or standing near the Confederate flag — that pro-slavery, racist and/or rebel flag.

This flag defines the deep southern states’ place in American history. But it does more than that. It is a flag that places the United States of America at the centre of slavery and the injustices against black people that led to the martyrdom of the nine Charleston worshippers, and others before them.

The other two are the apartheid South Africa and Rhodesian flags, which are on the jacket that Roof wore three times based on the pictures found on his website and Facebook profile.

Some right-wingers’ claims that the Rhodesian and apartheid South African flags were digitally altered (photo shopped) are not worthy paying attention to. Even their spirited assertions that Roof’s Facebook page and website are a hoax should be dismissed with the contempt they deserve.

According to Ahmed Areff of News24: “Front National South Africa started questioning the picture — something about those two badges were . . . ’odd’. And suddenly, in the blink of an eye, the Facebook profile ‘disappeared’, but not before we got hold of the original “un-photoshopped” picture. The REAL badge is rather reminiscent of the logo of the American Democratic Party of Barack Obama!”

South African right-wingers and their Rhodesian kith and kin realised that they had been caught with their pants down, and the best they could do was to defend the indefensible.

They fell short of saying that the murders were stage-managed, which would have revealed their true colours — that black lives don’t matter.

However, Iain S. Thomas, a South Africa blogger, wrote: “I know the top flag on Dylann Roof’s jacket very well. I remember drawing it as a child, the orange at the top and the blue at the bottom (to represent the sun and the sea) in crayons of the same colours. I remember all of us, in my whites-only school, hanging the flags across the classroom. . . It was just always there. It was just there as much as the black gardener and the black maid were, and still are, just there.” But, what conclusions do we arrive at with regard to Roof and these two flags? The South African connection is easy to analyse, although the website name points to very strong links to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).

According to reports, Roof got a gun from his father on his 21st birthday in April this year.

April and the figure 21 have a lot to do with Roof and democratic South Africa. On April 27, South Africa celebrated 21 years of democratic rule for on April 27 1994, South Africans held their first democratic elections, with Nelson Mandela becoming their first black president.

If Roof is 21, it means that he was born in 1994, the same year South Africans rejected the apartheid system through the ballot box.

Mandela’s statesmanship has been acknowledged globally. That’s the president who fought the apartheid system whose symbols Roof was happy to wear.

In his manifesto, Roof draws parallels between South Africa and the US southern states: “The South had a higher ratio of blacks when we were holding them as slaves. Look at South Africa, and how such a small minority held the black in apartheid for years and years. Speaking of South Africa, if anyone thinks that think (sic) will eventually just change for the better, consider how in South Africa they have affirmative action for the black population that makes up 80 percent of the population.

“It is far from being too late for America or Europe. I believe that even if we made up only 30 percent of the population we could take it back completely. But by no means should we wait any longer to take drastic action.”

The other president is none other than the United States’ first black leader – President Barack Obama. Any wonder that Roof thinks that black people are taking over? Robert Mugabe, Nelson Mandela and Barack Obama!

In the same manifesto, Roof claims: “The event that truly awakened me was the Trayvon Martin case. I kept hearing and seeing his name, and eventually I decided to look him up. I read the Wikipedia article and right away I was unable to understand what the big deal was. It was obvious that Zimmerman was in the right. But more importantly this prompted me to type in the words ‘black on White crime’ into Google, and I have never been the same since that day.”

At the height of the Trayvon case, President Obama lamented that he could easily have had the same fate as this black teenager. And, any black person in Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal church that fateful Wednesday evening could have been shot, President Obama included.

But as the US tries to find itself, arriving at answers too quickly will not help. It is time that they redefined terrorism. These terms: hate crime, racial war have reached their sell-by date. It’s terrorism, and home-grown terror too!