Colonialism’s damage must be repaired

HUMAN Rights Day is a time for some serious introspection.

Helen Zille’s latest tweet is, sadly, symptomatic of the kind of closetthinking of too many white folk living in South Africa today, most of whom were simply, and through no fault of their own, born into “white privilege”.

Apart from the small number of white anti-apartheid activists and the valiant efforts of the Helen Suzmans and others, the vast majority of both colonial and apartheid-era white folk chose the “expedient path” of “not rocking the political boat” – much like the silent majority of “decent” Germans living in Hitler’s Nazi Germany. That the Third Reich of Nazi Germany had some “positive credentials” such as, for example, impressive infrastructural projects like the German autobahns (road highways) is neither a redeeming nor justifying factor when examining Nazism under the microscope of history.

A Germany without the advent of Hitler and Nazism would have resulted in a vastly different world today and certainly one without the absurd notions of “racial supremacy”!

A world without imperialism and colonialism would also have resulted in there being little, if any, racism in the world today!

The Helen Zilles of the world should refrain from postulating any positive outcomes of colonialism but rather focus on building inter-racial and inter-cultural bridges to reconstruct and repair the decades of damage caused to human dignity in the name of colonialism.