Colonisation is one side of the racist coin, a thief of people’s minds, then land
THE furore caused by Helen Zille with her pro-colonialist tweets has predictably drawn the public into two opposing sides; the pro-colonialists and the anti-colonialists.
While the anti-colonialists have history on their side, and their arguments require no further elucidation, it is the pro-colonialist advocates that seem to rely heavily on loquacious creativity to advance spurious arguments such as freedom of expression (when they really infer a self-ordained entitlement to be publicly racist) and the liberation from tree swinging granted to us ungrateful and undeserving blacks by our successive European colonisers.
However what the pro-colonialist faction fails to understand is the many abhorrent processes and practices that drove the ideal of colonisation.
First, we need to understand that one does not colonise a land, you colonise its people. While the land and its natural resources may be the primary goal it cannot be successfully colonised if the indigenous population is not made subservient.
Thus when one successfully colonises the indigenous population, the land becomes an attendant bonus. This is what political philosopher Frantz Fanon called “colonisation of the mind”. To achieve this the coloniser needs to destroy all existing belief systems held by the indigenous populace. In short, the policy demanded destruction of everything held dear by the indigenous people. And this was not a policy developed solely for Africa. So the destruction of indigenous systems went hand in hand with replacement of the value systems of the colonising power.
The enduring effects of this policy can still be seen in the form of black supporters and defenders of the policies and decisions of right-wing organisations such as AfriForum, Solidarity and the DA.
Let’s now explore the myth that our forefathers were swinging from trees and had no technologies to speak of, apart from the ability to peel a banana, when the great white liberators arrived on our shores.
We did not exactly welcome the strangers who came to plonk themselves down on our land. They had to fight many wars (or as they prefer to call them, skirmishes) against the various indigenous tribes in order to take over. The colonisers finally prevailed because of the superiority of their firearms and other strategies of warfare.
The indigenous tribes in Africa were mainly peaceful agrarian communities, as opposed to the constant warring tribes of Europe, and therefore the need to develop weapons of mass destruction was never a priority.
On this point, let me draw attention to the fact that gunpowder was not an invention of the Europeans but rather of Taoist alchemists in China; hardly a European country. Another great European myth exploded.
The pro-colonialist faction surely will find this hard to believe but neither Jan van Riebeeck nor any of the 1820 settlers brought any of their own land with them, they settled on our land. But I digress.
Let us also not forget the academic and technological advances in Egypt (hard to believe but Egypt is an African country) that came to an abrupt halt when the various European colonial masters arrived and stayed for centuries.
When the colonists arrived our ancestors were engaged in many technological innovations. We were already smelting and working precious metals, the primary goal of the colonialists. We also had well established trade routes, such as Mapungubwe which was the central area of trade from 1200 to 1300AD. To advance the colonisers’ agenda and to fully exploit our natural resources all these indigenous practices, belief and education systems needed to be destroyed.
The result is that all further development by the indigenous people was forcefully and brutally halted. To now ask why there is limited development by the indigenous populace is an extreme affront to us.
To find the real reason for the arrest of African technological advancement the pro-colonialist lobbyists are looking in the wrong place. They should be looking at the pictures of their forefathers standing proudly with rifles at their sides and bandoliers over the shoulders hanging in their voorkamers; there is the real cause.
Is it not intellectually fraudulent to ask why there is limited progress from us when you and your ilk are the real cause? That is why I said at the start that you (the pro-alliance) “fail” to understand because it becomes clear that you appear not to have the intellectual capacity to even grasp the depths of depravity that is colonialism.
This is precisely why Zille was comfortable and saw nothing wrong when she postulated that “… for those claiming legacy of colonialism was only negative”. Surely she cannot and does not understand what colonialism represents. This also explains why the pro-colonialist protagonists are mainly drawn from the white population and the anti-colonialist proponents from the indigenous peoples.
Another myth propagated by the pro faction is that Africa was filled with uneducated and savage warring tribes; of course the pros tend to forget how the “uneducated” Shaka had the nous to roundly defeat some of them.
Additionally, another key strategy of the European colonialist generals was to provoke and encourage inter-tribal conflicts between different ethnic groups. It is acknowledged that the European colonisers arrived in ships, brought with them firearms and assorted farming and industrial technologies.
But were they really European inventions or technologies as is oft claimed? For the edification of the pro-colonialist adherents I offer you a country you seem never to mention, called China.
When the Europeans arrived in China they found that the Chinese had in addition to the previously mentioned gunpowder developed some of the following (this is a very small list): the compass (1 000BC); blast furnaces and hydraulic powered bellows (developed in third and second centuries BC); co-fusion steel processing (sixth century AD); mechanical belt-driven machinery (about 15 BC); cast iron bombs (13th century AD); churn drill (221BC); crossbow and repeating crossbow (202BC-220AD); exploding cannonballs (14th to early 15th century); the mechanical clock (618-907); tea production (about 2 000BC); porcelain (1 600BC); woodblock printing (650 and 670AD); papermaking (202BC-9AD).
The list is severely limited and places emphasis on some of the technologies the European colonisers needed to control our indigenous populace. So while the colonisers arrived with these technologies on our shores there were not really European inventions, were they? Like everything else the Europeans did where they “visited”, they stole it from others.
As for Zille’s assertion apropos piped water, we may not have had pipes but our ancestors irrigated crops by digging irrigation canals, although you prefer to call them furrows in order to continue to belittle our forefathers’ achievements.
The pro-colonialists sadly only think in Eurocentric terms as their benchmark, like their forefathers did. The strategy of colonisation of the mind is to instil in the indigenous people the European beliefs and cultures; to make us a population of servile clones, wearing ill-fitting suits, bowties and dusty battered hand-me-down hats when attending the church service and swearing allegiance to alien monarchies living far away.
An important question to the pro-colonialists; why do you never publicly defend or glorify the Lebensraum of Adolf Hitler as you do colonialism in Africa? Why the collective amnesia with regard to Hitler’s colonisation of Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland and France? Let’s hear your defence of that.
Finally, Zille berates the anticolonialists that “think EVERY (her emphasis) aspect of colonial legacy was bad”. As a black South African I am hard-pressed to find one example of a positive outcome of colonialism.
If you expect us to be grateful for the legacy of genocide, human depravity, corruption, slavery, materialism, alcoholism, fanaticism, plagues and political instability that you bequeathed us, then I suggest you don’t hold your breath.
When Zille and her pro-colonialist lobby are able accept that racism and colonialism are two sides of the same filthy coin and they are willing to accept this universally held truth, then they will understand our rightful indignation at their glorification of an inherently evil system.
Maybe then they will also accept the generosity of the indigenous South Africans in allowing them to stay here and even willingly pay them for land their forefathers stole from my ancestors in their murderous conquest of our land.