British colonialism has put all South Africans in one boat

British MP William Rees-Mogg’s ignorance about the Anglo-Boer War is echoed in faulty analyses locally too

In Ghana, I once sat next to a young student in a bus on the way to a human rights conference. Are there many whites in SA? she asked. Yes, I replied, a few million. Haven’t you heard of apartheid and PW Botha’s National Party? Yes, she said, she was taught all about it, but she thought they were black people. The spat over British MP William Rees-Mogg displaying his ignorance on Anglo-Boer War crimes against humanity reminded me of this conversation. Particularly of an issue that may look too arcane for nonacademic discussion, but which actually offers a useful lens to view contemporary problems from another angle.

Where does white anticolonial resistance against the British empire fit in with the common narrative of SA’s step-by-step liberation? Is it different to the ANC’s and PAC’s just because the latter are black? The student in Ghana either was ignorant, or race didn’t matter to her, since state repression is so common in Africa.

Struggle icon Neville Alexander has called Boer fighters the first freedom fighters, but historians writing in the British tradition are not enthusiastic over such usurpation of English liberalism as the font of all that enhances freedom. They usually resolve the conundrum by talking of Afrikaner resistance and rule as a special kind of colonialism. And in such a schema, 1994 marked the end of colonialism, emeritus UCT professor Chris Saunders has argued, for example.

Many would disagree, saying we are now the victims of a neocolonialism once again, even in a globalised world where we all are able to be neocolonisers through exploitative capitalist networks in which we participate through our direct or indirect share in multinational corporations.

In the latest such discourse, scholar and author Shoshana Zuboff argues that the Faang firms (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google, with a combined worth of $3-trillion) acted like colonial explorers in invading newly discovered digital space and stealing stuff we did not even know was worth anything, just like the natives of the Americas parted with their gold and silver.

Faang moguls are like governors of colonies who see themselves as living on a higher plane, and justify the devastation and death they wreak as bringing the civilisation of best market practice to a layman world that needs it to progress.

But what if we shifted SAs colonialism boundaries? What if we were to take Alexander, product of the Robben Island university, at his word and regard the Boers as the first freedom fighters? Fighting British colonialism was the alpha and omega for many of their descendants, and among some bitterenders it is to this day.

As with the PAC, this was a racial battle. The word race was first used in SA by the British to demonise the Boers, and as late as the 1940s Afrikaners were regarded as a different race with inferior qualities and intelligence by influential men such as Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery.

When students and academics call for decolonisation of education, Afrikaners and white English speakers are lumped together as the colonist enemy. Our new school history curricula tend to devote just a few paragraphs to the AngloBoer War, in which the deaths of 48,000 people of all races in the concentration camps doesn’t count for much — it was a kind of correction, a disciplining or a reordering among colonials.

In places the 2015-2017 student uprising has degenerated into an EFF-type rabid racism, accompanied by a lot of earnest scrutiny of “whiteness” as the new medium of suppression, the equivalent of what Afrikaners of previous generations might have called “Englishness”.

“Engels, Engels wat jy sien en hoor,” was a common refrain for decades. Of course, things are much different now, since their privileged apartheid education has generally left Afrikaners with a good command of English, the key to the global economy.

If we see the Afrikaner power grab as a drawn-out African freedom struggle, the watershed year would be 1961, when our republic was established, followed by SA’s ejection from the Commonwealth. A typical African postcolony, in the philosopher Achille Mbembe’s terms, was set up. Afrikaners could also have stepped straight out of a Frantz Fanon book. Damaged by Boer War trauma, many suffered from a kind of collective Stockholm syndrome and kept on trying to be more British than the British.

They swopped coffee for tea, beskuit for muffins and jukskei for rugby. They modelled their forces on the British army and their writers deemed dissidence to be to revive their hybrid roots in France, that other great colonising power in Africa. They came to scorn the Dutch, who had become one of the most liberal people.

All this while taking an anti-British stance at the same time, weeding Afrikaans of anglicisms, giving army conscripts orders in Afrikaans only and, fatally, demanding that certain subjects be taught in Afrikaans in black schools. Mbembe and Fanon both described the farcical characteristics of the postcolony, and of that there was plenty in apartheid SA with its pencil tests, underwear detectives, bleaching of Chinese patients and fighting the enemy by never switching on the TV.

In such a reading, 1994 would just be another chapter in the postcolony, when it was extended to other races. After the Mandela golden years the farce acquired new dimensions … sweet potatoes as Aids cure, Schabir Shaik’s slow death by golf, white girls on sushi tables, the EFF fashion revolution, selling SA to Russia …

Some would offer 2017 as the new date when we finally exited both our colonialist and postcolonial eras. So relieved are we that a rationalist in Cyril Ramaphosa has taken the reins that we forgive him his apparent die-hard commitment to the national democratic revolution, rooted in the ideas of 19th-century German revolutionaries writing tomes in London.

Why might such an analysis be important? For one, that British colonialism deeply affected black and white, leaving both with a destructive sense of grievance. Reducing colonialism to antiwhite racism is a waste of resources.

Second, much can be learnt from Afrikaner dissidence, which started shortly after Jan van Riebeeck landed and was often aimed at the world’s first multinational, the Dutch East India Company, a forerunner of today’s Faangs.

Third, we are now in an epistemic shift of geological proportions. The anthropocene era we are entering is making us all citizens of one republic, that of the earth. The time of war, racism and monarchs, also of sociopathic merchant kings and political tsars, is over.

We should not stop making money, because it will be needed to compel people to fight climate change — otherwise we’ll have to leave it to the Chinese Communist Party — but that money will need to go to projects for the global good and not poured into the bottomless pits of the multinationals anymore.

Picking at our wounds, especially if they are the same kind of wound, nurturing our various senses of historical grievance, will just set us back in this endeavour.