Colonialism row is not about history but the attitudes of tepid liberalism
Those who see colonisers as the bearers of gifts are deaf and blind to the lives most of their countrymen live
The brawl over colonialism rumbles on because it has less to do with the past than our messy present. This is a proxy fight. On one side are those, mostly black, who perceive the claim of “some good” in colonialism as a defence of inherited white privilege. From the other side, mostly white, come complaints that accusations of racism shut down debate. Yet it is absurd to pretend that this represents a historical debate, despite even the Roman Empire being dragged in.
Of course, closing down debate is neither desirable nor defensible, but if you can’t understand the sensitivity of this topic then, once again, you’re simply not living in the same country as the majority of the population. Some recent justifications of colonialism are remarkably crass, with repeated boasting about a nirvana of cars and democracy. This boils down to the assertion, “To get the gain, you had to take the pain.” Others unconsciously mirror a common white complaint about post-apartheid “black entitlement”. This could be summarised as: “We delivered all this smart modern stuff, so we’re entitled to maintain a better, richer life than you.”
Then there are the history lectures about leaving the past behind. One former supreme court judge, after a long detour that included ancient Babylon, wrote: “The Romans introduced the territories that they invaded to a formidable array of skills, including engineering, architecture, water reticulation, art and culture and even personal hygiene. Much the same can be said in the case of SA, but if all else is ignored then the English language has conferred great benefits in communication, literacy, literature, culture, science and commerce.”
In SA to say, “the Romans did it too, y’know” is not exactly helpful. Indeed, delivering such a grand lecture to the recently exploited ignores the remark of Rome’s greatest historian, Tacitus, whose father-in-law subjugated Britain: “They made a desert and called it peace.” Yet if we really want to compare Roman emperors with, say, Lord Milner or Cecil Rhodes, what the learned judge omits is that while the Romans had slaves, they included “white European barbarians” and that freed slaves, including blacks, could and did rise to the very top of the Roman administration or become famous generals. In stark contrast, the British Empire was always premised, beyond class, on an implicit — and frequently explicit — value of whiteness.
This is exactly the dilemma liberalism still struggles with today. For a political credo based on individual rights, liberalism in SA has ironically been hobbled by being seen as a sort of lumpen pigmentariat; in other words, representing a “white thing”. Among many newly enfranchised black voters this bias even appeared to increase after the fall of apartheid — the very racial doctrine that, paradoxically, had long been opposed by white liberals.
Of the three major European belief systems introduced by colonists — Christianity, communism and liberalism — the only one that has failed to take deep root in Africa is precisely the solitary one that continues to flourish in Europe, though it is under pressure there, too. Here Christianity, massively, and communism, in minor key, have been indigenised. Not liberalism. The term is still used as a swear word by South African communists and African nationalists. And that’s where the current row over colonialism becomes a dialogue of the deaf.
It is not hard to see why liberalism has failed to gain significant traction among black South Africans. Perhaps only white liberals are baffled. During the 20th century, liberalism tended to define itself exclusively in terms of western, specifically European, ideas of progress and civilisation. This remained constant from the chilly high commissioner Sir Alfred Milner through to the Progressive Party of the doughty Helen Suzman.
Today on radio talk shows and letters pages, most defences of colonialism are premised on white folk as bountiful donors, as if we personally hand out gifts of German cars, Korean cellphones or the right to vote: a latter-day equivalent of offering colourful baubles to the natives in return for their valuable minerals. If only a few of our modern colonial champions would admit that it was not a philanthropic enterprise and that they — we — remain the major beneficiaries.
It was the proud boast of the British that they possessed an empire on which the sun never set. To which, in 1851, the British socialist Ernest Jones responded, “On its colonies the sun never sets, but the blood never dries.” If our supreme court judge, for example, had been required to deliver a sound legal judgment on colonialism, he would have had to weigh the good against the bad — all that blood, which, in SA at least, has not yet dried — before delivering his verdict. As it is, any judgments that lack this most basic balance must be challenged and taken on review to a higher court: in this case, the court of public opinion, which is, once again, so acrimoniously divided.
Helen Zille, after initially apologising for her colonialism tweet, fought back, tweeting: “My comment stands.” What might that sound like to, say, a black woman of Zille’s age still living in a shack? This dissonance remains a huge liability for the DA. An old French phase summarises the hypocritical colonial ethos, “Pas devant les domestiques” (not in front of the servants). Yet almost every black family in SA still has a relative working in a white household, consequently they hear what many white folks casually say in the privacy of their own homes; the overheard result is seldom a great vote-catcher.
Over a century ago Olive Schreiner put this debate into a wider historical perspective. In 1909, she warned against the dangers that would be created by legislating the following year for the Act of Union — on a racially exclusionary basis. Schreiner cautioned, “it is ordained by the laws of human life that a Nemesis should follow the subjugation and use, purely for the purposes of their own, of any race by another which lives among them. Spain fell before it in America, Rome felt it; it has dogged the feet of all conquering races. In the end the subjected people write their features on the face of the conqueror.”
Consequently, the topic of colonialism is not like some cordial Oxbridge seminar but embodies for many South Africans an extremely raw and still painfully felt experience. How long did it take Celtic Britons to celebrate being overrun by Roman legionaries? Queen Boudicca, the leading rebel, burned down Roman Londinium. Yet by the 19th century, Boudicca was depicted as the very symbol of British imperialism and today her statue stands right next to the Houses of Parliament in Westminster — not because Boudicca embraced the Romans, but precisely because she fought them. No wonder recent praise in SA for colonialism sounds rather like white folk congratulating other whites.
For the old Progressive Party, competing for seats in an all-white Parliament meant the priority was always to propitiate nervous whites. Suzman remained her party’s sole MP for 13 lonely years. Subsequently, for a long time and via serial name changes and various alliances, mollifying whites remained the major impulse for the DA, the standard bearer of liberalism in SA. Consequently, it is little wonder that until recently, news reports often affixed the damaging proviso, “a largely white-interest party”. The Zille-induced colonialism row has inevitably played right into that stereotype.
There has also been a bolder tradition of liberalism; the actual Liberal Party dissolved itself when multiracial parties were banned in 1968. Thus the surviving strain has been a tepid liberalism with a tendency to mutate into neoliberalism.
In the past, many liberals reminded me of the grand lady Sophie Chattel-Monkheim in the short story by the Edwardian satirist Saki: “Sophie had very advanced and decided views as to the distribution of money: it was a pleasing and fortunate circumstance that she also had the money. When she inveighed eloquently against the evils of capitalism at drawing room meetings and Fabian conferences, she was conscious of a comfortable feeling that the system, with all its inequalities and iniquities, would probably last her time.”
Liberalism has long tussled with “the black question” without properly acknowledging that, of course, SA really had a white question. This was beginning to change. Now, however, it will be as hard as ever to convince those hesitant black voters that under a black leader, liberalism finally promises more than Saki’s wry conclusion: “It is one of the consolations of middle-aged reformers that the good they inculcate must live after them if it is to live at all.”