6th April 1652, Jan van Riebeeck, on board of the Drommedaris, arrives in Table Bay. The next day Van Riebeeck personally goes ashore to look for the best place to erect a fort. Under the command of Van Riebeeck, the VOC establishes a refreshment station at the Cape between the foot of Table Mountain and the shores of Table Bay. The purpose is to provide fresh water, fruit, vegetables and meat for passing ships en route to India as well as build a hospital for ill sailors.

These Dutch Settlers formed the basis of the white contribution to the development of South Africa, and a brief look at the South Africa Timeline, gives us an understanding of the countries failure to integrate, while isolating the majority of our community from the global world.

Timeline = 358 years of a unique history in South Africa:

This initiative has two main objectives:

1:   Empower our Township and Rural youth, through the transfer of skills from the Previously Advantaged in  the Township and Rural areas.

2:   Through the integration of communities at the grass-roots level, to dissipate animosity towards whites that is bubbling under the surface, and will explode within the next ten years if we do not address the situation.

This initiative has one underlying objective:

The Previously Advantaged Contributors, through their contribution, they will be in the position to qualify for exemption from the existing 'EMPOWERMENT POLICIES', while empowering the Still Disadvantaged Youth, bringing them into the global world, and allowing them to achieve the opportunities that our history, South Africa's legacy to-date, has still not given them. This will reverse the negative trends that the country faces, negative trends that will drown us within ten years.

Born in South Africa, 1947, a product of South Africa, the South African National Party era, the Apartheid era, and in this forum I express my personal findings and attitude towards our new South Africa, influenced not by my background, nor through my conservative Afrikaner family and friends, but in the Township, and I talk from inside the Townships, I talk animosity, growing animosity, and the threats that we are all faced with, most of my approach appears to be negative, but I have made what as I see as the solution, my business.

Please take the journey through this website so that you can understand the background to how I have, over a period  of six years, gradually established an understanding of the problems that our youth are faced with in the Township. When I talk about the impact of the 'lost generation', the growing animosity towards white, the need for us to address these issues, it is not just a brief exposure to an incident that has triggered this understanding.

My lively-hood is based on taking international visitors into the Townships and Rural areas, www.tasteofafrica.co.za; for this reason I should hide any growing animosity that I feel in the Township, yet I am honest. What I do know is that all black youth respond positively when-ever we make contact with them, and this is what motivates us to commit to this initiative.

 Cedric de la Harpe

Let us stop pointing fingers, and extend our hands;

Start Here;