Zille’s tweet smacks of racist past
One of the worst legacies of colonialism was the breakdown of families, with fathers forced to work as migrant labour in the mines for little pay
IT CAME as no surprise to me that Helen Zille tweeted about the benefits of colonialism as she returned from Singapore, on the eve of Human Rights Day.
Her tweet that generated most condemnation was: “For those claiming legacy of colonialism was ONLY negative, think of our independent judiciary, transport infrastructure, piped water, etc.”
Zille is, of course in good company, with this tweet. She is in the company of the likes of Marine Le Pen, Donald Trump, Ian Smith, Cecil John Rhodes, David Duke of the KKK, and our very own racists like Verwoerd, Vorster and PW Botha.
Madam Zille, I and millions of others beg to differ with you and your racist and colonial ideological bedfellows.
One of the worst legacies of colonialism was the breakdown of families, as fathers were forced to work as migrant labour in mines, far from home, for very little pay. This system was entrenched under apartheid. But its origins can be traced back to Rhodes.
The subtext of her tweet is a sentiment shared by many conservative members of the white community, hankering for the good old days under apartheid “where things were much better for them”. According to many such apartheid apologists: “Under apartheid there were better schools, better universities, better hospitals, better piped water and less corruption (really?) – and all of these would not have been built if apartheid was not there.”
The obvious counter to that is, of course, that under apartheid most South Africans did not have access to any of those basic rights. It was only under the new democratically elected government that the majority of people were afforded the right to housing, water, electricity, education and medical treatment.
A sad reality is that we should not be surprised that Zille and others believe in such a subtext. Entrenched in power, surrounded by like-minded advisers and minions, they become emboldened enough to allow their real personas to emerge from the shadows.
The question is, who are you to decide that colonialism was not allbad, Madam Zille? It is now, in the time of social media, when you have thousands of followers, and you are drunk on power that you can feel free to tweet your opinion on colonialism.
Did you feel the brunt of colonialism? How did it affect your life?
I would guess that you and your families were beneficiaries of colonialism through the apartheid spatial planning, academic institutions reserved for whites, hospitals and other important life amenities preserved for a select few – white people. Should we therefore be surprised that you see the benefits and not the failings of colonialism?
I can tell you how it affected me and millions of other South Africans. And the effect was definitely not pleasant. We, eked out a living, battling the odds, living as secondclass citizens in a country that should have belonged to all who live in it. Many talented and bright black pupils were denied the right to study at whites-only universities such as UCT and Stellenbosch, only because they were black.
Many, including my immediate family, had to leave SA and study medicine at overseas institutions under difficult conditions and return to SA to service their communities. When I and a handful through our own perseverance and hard work were admitted, we were made to feel unwelcome and repeatedly told by some white lecturers and professors that we were the “lucky 10% and should be thankful”.
In fact so drunk were they with their colonial mindset that in whispering tones they gently discouraged us from dissecting white cadavers (dead bodies) lest it infuriate our fellow white students in the anatomy class. This is the madness of colonialism.
I am not, and neither should you, the reader, be surprised by Zille’s tweet. When she reluctantly handed over her crown to the DA’s first black leader, Mmusi Maimane, a twitter storm broke when her mentor Alistair Sparks likened her to apartheid arch-architect Hendrik Verwoerd.
Yes, her mentor Sparks, thought Verwoerd and Zille were smart politicians, which is the equivalent of saying Hitler was a smart politician. It is people such as Zille who want us to believe that Africans, and African society have not shown any progress, and that the masters of colonialism and apartheid were really good people, who brought progress to Africa.
We are asked to ignore the savagery, brutality and havoc that colonialism brought to peaceful communities and civilisations who existed for thousands of years and which produced immense knowledge, innovation and prosperity.
We are asked to ignore that it is colonialism and slavery that decimated millions of Africans and forced them to sail in the dungeons of slave ships across the oceans, away from their loved ones and to work under the most brutal and horrific conditions.
This is the real colonialism as it is the real apartheid, which resulted in the massacre of 69 people in Sharpeville in 1960; which confined millions to the homelands; which forcibly took productive land away from the people and imprisoned or killed the very best leaders. This is why we celebrate Human Rights Day on March 21, to prevent this from ever happening again.
Struggle giants Govan Mbeki, Walter Sisulu, Nelson Mandela and Ahmed Kathrada were imprisoned on Robben Island for decades. They and scores of other struggle icons were denied their fundamental right to live with and see their families and friends.
This, Madam Zille, is the legacy of colonialism and apartheid, two sides of the same blood-spattered coin.
Cape Town today symbolises in many ways the thinking of Zille. The city is lauded by Zille and others for the “progress” they have made in traditionally white areas, investment into the province, lack of potholes and so forth. But if Zille and her colleagues will only step out from the sanctuary of Leeuwenhof, Zille’s official residence and Wale Street, to see for themselves the abject poverty that still exists in communities like Khayelitsha, Hanover Park, Manenberg, Mitchells Plain, Gugulethu and Langa.
Many members of the black SMME business community in Cape Town speak openly about Zille and other DA politicians hosting business meetings, lunches and dinners at Leeuwenhof and other places of government in Cape Town, with hardly any or token representation from the black business community.
One of Independent Media’s titles, the Cape Times, has been a victim of Zille’s moral bankruptcy and fascist censorship. She has constantly written and tried to project the title in a negative light. Using her power she has banned the Cape Times and the Cape Argus from being subscribed to and distributed in provincial offices. This is a woman who is only in power in the Western Cape; imagine if she was in power nationally, what kind of power drunk and neo-colonial and neo-apartheid decisions and censorship we would have to deal with?
There are those who would argue that the ruling black government of today, the ANC, has let us down. This is true and tragic and a slap in the face of those of us who are democrats longing for social justice in our country and who actively supported the ANC’s quest for freedom and liberation. The most recent Sassa debacle is an indication of how we as black people have let ourselves down. But we have to fix it together with our progressive white compatriots and we have to make sure that we deliver the fruits of freedom to the majority of the population.
To be clear, Zille as a colonialist apologist, does not reflect the views of all white people since there are many white people who gave their lives, fought for freedom to overcome the effects of colonialism and apartheid. But Zille leads millions of people in the Western Cape, most of them classified as coloured under apartheid, all of whom were badly affected by colonialism and apartheid and who, to this day, bear the scars of slavery and injustice.
A “Twit” for the purpose of this article” is a term I coined to describe a tweet made by a person that has idiosyncratic beliefs. It may or may not exist in the Oxford dictionary.
Dr Survé is a philanthropist, black intellectual, businessman and medical doctor. He is the executive chairman of both Independent Media and the Sekunjalo Group.
He writes this opinion piece in his personal capacity and it is not necessarily the view of
IN THE first week of March, activists, writers and journalists around the world looked to spread the word that Israel was an apartheid state. Their core argument: Until and unless justice and dignity were returned to the Palestinian people, Israel ought to be shunned for the pariah that it is.
And unsurprisingly, it is, as I wrote in early March, the description that Israelis hate most.
It gives onlookers a form and prism to decode Israeli propaganda that turns every crime into a matter of “defence” and “survival”.
Apartheid is a brutal terminology because it draws an immediate parallel with a shamed, failed system. After a 2004 visit to the occupied territories, Denis Goldberg and Ronnie Kasrils famously declared that the occupation “makes apartheid look like a picnic”.
“We never had jets attacking our townships. We never had sieges that lasted month after month. We never had tanks destroying houses.”
The response to Israeli Apartheid Week is usually swift. And the arguments are usually the same: “Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East”, to “what about” inequality in Saudi Arabia, or Yemen. The direct allegations of the structural prejudice within Israeli society are never addressed.
In truth, the same arguments were used to justify South Africa’s tyranny, when Angola, Zimbabwe and Mozambique were burning in the 1970s. No one wanted the gold and diamonds of the beloved country to fall into the hands of black communists.
Apartheid analogy
Not everyone agrees with the Israeli apartheid terminology, despite its rising legitimacy among many academics and scholars in the field. As a contentious analogy, the UN had never – until last week – officially called it apartheid either.
In a bid to ascertain if the apartheid analogy was fair, the UN’s Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) conducted a “detailed analysis of Israeli legislation, policies and practices”.
The thoroughly researched report, titled “Israeli Practices Towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid” found that Israeli policies enable Israel to “operate an apartheid regime” that “dominates the Palestinian people as a whole”.
It concluded that “Israel is guilty of policies and practices that constitute the crime of apartheid as legally defined in instruments of international law”.
Crucially, it moved beyond Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories and concluded that even Palestinian citizens of Israel were “subjected to oppression on the basis of not being Jewish”.
The report is important because it adds tremendous weight to the analogy. As a UN report, it compels member states and international civil society, who may otherwise turn a blind eye to the injustices, to engage with the findings, and even forces them to take action.
As soon as the report was published, the backlash began. The UN’s Secretary-General Antonio Guterres distanced himself from the report.
According to Rima Khalaf, the UN under-secretary general and executive secretary for the (ESCWA), she had been asked by the top UN leadership – at the behest of US and Israeli demands – to withdraw the report. She refused.
But the sequence of events since the publication of the report is hardly surprising.
Donald Trump has promised that the US will be closer to Israel than at any other time. Meanwhile, Trump has warned that he will be cutting funding to the UN.
Guterres knows that endorsing the report would hurt the functioning of the larger body. That there has been this fierce attempt to bury this report is significant. That the facts are out there now, though, is a lot more important.
Essa is a journalist at Al Jazeera. He is also co-founder of The Daily Vox.