Providing cover for the historically dishonest
Zille’s actions do not indicate ill-will, but she should not provide cover for those who are historically dishonest
The sharpest riposte to Helen Zille’s now infamous airport tweet about colonialism deserves an answer: “Why then do the European states claim for themselves the right to spread civilisation and manners to different continents? Why not to itself?” That mild question was posed 80 years ago by the great Austrian novelist Joseph Roth, author of The Radetzky March, making it even more pointed at a time when much of Europe lurches towards nationalist or authoritarian demagogues.
Roth’s query appears at the start of historian Mark Mazower’s acclaimed book, Dark Continent — referring not to Africa, but to 20th-century Europe. While Hitler admired the British Empire, especially the way Britain ruled India, his territorial ambitions lay in Europe, to the east, with the stated aim of reducing the despised Slavs to a servile worker caste. Unlike the older imperialisms, which had seen their dreams of expansion and “civilising burdens” as being outside Europe, Mazower points out, “national socialism did not: and just here, no doubt — by turning Europeans back into barbarians and slaves — lay the Nazis’ greatest offence against the sensibility of the continent”.
Zille, whose parents fled Nazi Germany, knows this better than most, I suspect. Her hard work and honesty are evident. Years ago, when I was chairman of a small trust created to upgrade a township school, we were prevented from starting work by an absurd planning objection from a rich property developer. We contacted the then Western Cape MEC for education. Zille arrived that week, picked up the principal’s phone, spoke firmly to the developer and personally organised and attended a planning department meeting; work began almost immediately. The same cannot be said for her ANC successor. When that school urgently needed help again, the new education MEC, Cameron Dugmore, one of Zille’s most vociferous critics, never replied to my e-mails.
In politics, however, an opponent’s flaws are no vindication for your own folly. The instant damage of Zille’s tweet was tactical: diverting anger from the social grants fiasco. The second casualty was theoretical: the incongruity of her comparison of Singapore with SA. The significance of this has been entirely lost in the subsequent hullabaloo. While there may be lessons to be learned from other countries, it is always more useful to compare like with like. It seems unhelpful, then, to use the smallest nation in Asia as a stick with which to beat SA. Singapore, a tiny city-state, has a population of 5.6-million. It is defined by most observers as “semi-authoritarian”. The same party has been in power for 57 years and today holds 82 out of 84 parliamentary seats. An estimated 82% of the population lives in state-owned housing, mostly flats. Singapore is also a “tax haven” (ranked by Oxfam as the fifth worst), with extremely secretive banking laws. All this might almost be imaginable, as science fiction, if one hived off Johannesburg, declared it a tax haven (Guptas most welcome) and ruled by party diktat. Is this really the DA’s vision for SA?
But for SA, the more lasting harm of her tweet is social. It has unleashed much that persists as smug and self-righteous in the white population, a barely disguised sneer that implies: we brought roads, running water and technical gizmos, so what are you bleating about? Such arrogance, an enduring colonial legacy, blithely discounts the negatives: the massacres and exploitation. Where does one begin? Let’s start with the earliest European sailors as they ventured south. Along the curve of West Africa, the string of original European names reveals the real interests of colonial powers: the Grain Coast, Ivory Coast, Gold Coast and Slave Coast.
Colonialism, South Africans often forget, spread wider than this continent. Indian intellectuals are equally sick of hearing that whatever iniquities there may have been under the Raj, Indians should be forever grateful for their railway network. Haiti established its freedom after a slave revolt in 1804. But in 1825, aided by a blockade by the US, Haiti was forced to pay $150m in compensation for the loss of France’s most profitable slave and sugar colony. That “debt” was finally paid off in 1947.
Meanwhile, merely to stick to this continent during the lifetime of my grandmother: the atrocities of Leopold II in the Congo; the first genocide of the 20th century in Namibia, where the Germans experimented with pseudo -racial science theories; or later in the 1950s and ’60s, the barbaric acts of torture practised by British troops in Kenya.
Most European powers scuttled from their colonies when the pressure became too much, leaving them woefully unprepared, including the French in Algeria and the Portuguese in Angola and Mozambique. The historian Guy Arnold records that, when the French departed from Guinea in 1958, “the crockery had been smashed, the telephones removed, all portable government property taken. Where things were too big to be taken away, they were destroyed.”
Or, is it the national boundaries of Africa that embody the boon of colonialism? New frontiers were drawn at the Berlin Conference in 1885 when European powers apportioned among themselves what had yet to be appropriated on the continent. The 19th-century British Tory prime minister Lord Salisbury was more honest than our modern-day apologists: “We have been engaged in drawing lines upon maps where no white man’s foot has ever trod; we have been giving away mountains and rivers and lakes to each other, only hindered by the small impediment that we never knew exactly where the mountains and rivers and lakes were.” The result has been catastrophic. Most European wars have been fought between nation states. In Africa, as a consequence of that cynical colonial carve-up, most wars since independence have been fought within nations.
The question remains: would modernity have come to Africa without colonialism? Of course, but in what way we cannot possibly tell. What we can say is that colonialism underdeveloped the continent. Some of those supposedly generous bequests, such as parliaments and judiciaries, were exclusively for the colonists, not the locals: most recently and most despotically, in SA. A lot more modesty and historical honesty is called for.
My own declaration of interest: when I met Zille, I discovered she was also beginning to learn Xhosa. Zille is now fluent, not something I can claim. Learning an indigenous language is seldom the hallmark of a colonial mind-set, so perhaps we should conclude that her tweet was less ill-willed than horribly ill-judged. The best way to make amends? Not just to admit her error, but to exhort her more colonial-minded supporters to sober up.
It was Nelson Mandela, when still president, who came in April 1999 to launch the trust appeal to redevelop the Oranjekloof Moravian Primary School, which mostly serves children from Imizamo Yethu township in Hout Bay. His backing ensured that we were soon able to raise enough funds to plan a double-storey block of spacious new classrooms. But it was only 18 months later, with Zille’s decisive intervention, that we were able to build those classrooms, which today remain a standing legacy, however small, of the combined efforts of Mandela and Zille. Yet the history of that poor school alone represents a terrible indictment of both colonialism and apartheid — and of the enduringly superior attitudes that underpinned those deformed ideologies.
Apart from that memorable day when Mandela spent more than two hours at the Oranjekloof school, when only half-an-hour had been scheduled, I heard him speak on several other occasions. What struck me forcibly each time was that instead of indulging in glib triumphalism or party political posturing, Mandela essentially urged his audience “you can do better”, while seeming to inspire his listeners — in each case, largely black — to feel energised to do so. Where are the white leaders in SA today who will tackle the retrograde attitudes of many of their suburban followers?
In 1960, then British prime minister Harold Macmillan famously warned the shocked South African parliament about “the wind of change” sweeping through the continent. Only two months before, not so famously, Macmillan had also remarked: “Africans are not the problem in Africa, it is the Europeans.” Today, when complacently denying the history of colonialism, that’s still the case. Rostron is a journalist and author.