Put racial stereotypes aside in SA
IN South Africa today race plays a paramount role.
If you want to be educated, get a job, play sport – it all requires that you specify your race and this may not be as simple as it sounds.
The point is that race is not necessarily obvious. Take the term African, which is often accepted to mean a person with a dark or black skin.
However, this immediately excludes most of the people of North Africa, whose main interaction over millennia has been with the people of southern Europe and few have the dark skin associated with indigenous people farther south.
Yet they will claim to be as African as anybody else on the continent.
Unfortunately skin colour has now also been associated with colonialisation and in the South African context a person with a light skin (white) is immediately assumed to be a descendent of colonialist groups that settled in southern Africa since 1652.
Such assumptions are often erroneous, as the examples below demonstrate.
Eva Krotoa was a Khoi woman who served as a translator for the Dutch during the time of Jan van Riebeeck at the Cape. She married a Danish surgeon, Peter Havgard, called Pieter van Meerhof by the Dutch.
After Eva’s death in 1674, two of her children were taken to the penal colony of Mauritius, where one, Pieternella, married Daniel Zaaijman, a vegetable farmer from Vlissingen.
The family then moved to Batavia, from where they later returned to South Africa.
They intermarried with many South African families – Barendse, Basson, De Villiers, Du Plooy, Geldenhuys, Louw, Van Jaarsveld, Van Niekerk, Zaaiman and others.
Are these people to be considered colonialists or part of the African diaspora?
Another case is that of Stephanus Johannes Paulus Kruger, or Paul Kruger, president of the South African Republic from 1883 to 1900.
He was descended from Catharina van Bengale, also known as Groote Catrijn, a slave from Bengale, India.
Kruger played a leading role in trying to prevent Britain from colonising the then South African Republic.
Are such descendants of slaves to be considered colonialists?
Colonialisation is also not necessarily a matter of skin colour.
Collins English Dictionary defines it as “the policy and practice of a power in extending control over weaker peoples or areas”.
An obvious example of such colonisation is the Roman conquest of Britain, while Adolf Hitler can also be thought of as a wannabe colonialist.
In the Southern African context the case of King Mzilikazi should be considered.
He founded the Matabele kingdom after taking his tribe on an 800km journey from the Zulu kingdom of Shaka, with whom he had had a disagreement.
He moved through the then Transvaal, where he removed all opposition and remodelled the territory to suit the new Ndebele order.
He then moved north of the Limpopo, establishing the Matabele in what is now the western region of Zimbabwe.
Should Mzilikazi be considered a coloniser?
It is undeniable that colonisers treated the people they were colonising as inferior: the Romans thought the British were savages, Hitler had his dreams of establishing a superior Aryan civilisation, while the British and Dutch had few qualms about subjugating the indigenous peoples they found in Africa.
Mzilikazi assimilated all the tribes he conquered, forcing the people to learn and conform to the Matabele culture.
The history of colonialisation shows that in most cases the colonised people eventually assimilate the coloniser.
Ordinary people adapt to their situation, assessing what is best for them, and relationships and marriages occur across all barriers.
Advances in all fields are not necessarily associated with a coloniser and people will take what they need from all over the world.
This has happened in South Africa, but unfortunately a group of people – in particular the Afrikaner Nationalists – perceived that they could benefit by promoting the concept of a white race.
They attempted classifying people, even though – as shown above – many in their own group would have failed their own classification.
Unfortunately the present ANC government is continuing with these racial concepts, primarily because it is promoting the cause of a black race.
Nonetheless, it appears to be difficult to ascertain precisely who is black, white, Indian or coloured.
In the census it was left to individuals to categorise themselves – strangely the unspecified/other category drew negligible responses.
No doubt people classified themselves into categories where they felt most comfortable, or could benefit the most.
It is abundantly clear that racial – or other – classifications of people leads to conflict between groups, because they are taught to associate particular traits to people in the different groups.
What we need in South Africa is to consider people first as individuals without preconceived characteristics.
Furthermore, it is vitally important that all such individuals be given the opportunity to develop themselves to the maximum of their abilities.
Dr Eckart Schumann, Humewood, Port Elizabeth