‘Colonial’ tweet misused

THE essence of the spat between Mmusi Maimane and Helen Zille is the paucity of sufficient vocabulary to allow an adequate discourse on events in post-colonial societies, namely Singapore and South Africa. It is common cause that, from our present perspective, colonialism – defined as the impact of the advent of people and their practices from beyond the previous borders – had bad aspects which adversely affected the pre-existing population.

It also seems to be common cause that there are some exogenous things which have been introduced which are accepted as beneficial – at least their uptake indicates this.

A difficulty arises when there is only one word to describe both categories. It is rather like the challenge of talking in English to an Eskimo about snow. While we find one word adequate to describe all conditions of snow, the Eskimo can be confused about what it is we are discussing as he has seven words for snow, each one being about a significantly different form of what we loosely group under the one term.

And so it is with colonialism when we don’t have enough distinct terms to enable us to distinguish the different aspects about which we are talking.

The result is that those who want to manufacture outrage at something useful that Helen Zille was wanting to communicate have a feast day while she is attacked and vilified for something which, as she immediately admitted, was not her intent.

Indeed, her March 20 Daily Maverick article on ‘Lessons from Singapore’ provides a very useful understanding of lessons that South Africa could learn from Singapore, given that both have moved beyond being British colonial states.

As wise minds have observed, we become what we think about or, biblically, “as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he”. (Proverbs 23:7).

The lesson to learn is that, by personal choice, each South African can aspire to be a member of a First World society by working towards that objective by choosing to be self-reliant rather than, as at present, to be dependent. Of course, those original inhabitants of Southern Africa who were colonised by the Nguni invasion from central Africa and those who were colonised by Shaka tend to be conveniently forgotten by the present agents provocateurs who seek only to play the victim card. — Thembelihle Williams, via e-mail