How long’s a grudge?
ON MONDAY, it’ll be 953 years since England was last colonised, 1 024 years after the previous time. In April, white people’s presence in South Africa overtakes the 367 years of Roman rule of Britain.
For that riveting, if useless, information, you might thank my friend N. What got me wondering was a fight with her about colonialism and a candidate for a very public job that we only heard of the day before yesterday.
After 410 when Roman rule ended, how long until the original crowd shucked off their grudge? Was it all grudge, or also “Travel safely, guys, thanks for the aqueducts, roads, monetary system and all”? How long until remaining Romans merged into the human landscape, nobody noticing whether anybody was all-Roman or quarter-Roman or 1/64th or what?
They were evidently over it before they got pounced again, from France, by an aggrieved duke claiming he’d been offered a job, king, which irritating Harold, the son of Godwin, stole. This time the conquest never ended, it evolved into nothingness. Nobody now wants Saxon Economic Enrichment or a Saxon Business Council. No one says things like “As a Norman Englishman, I…”.
Someday, I take it, that happens to us. Which day? In our lifetimes? Our children’s? Third millennium?
The issue arose from N objecting to ex-premier Helen standing for the DA’s federal chairman. This is terrible, says N, because Helen is disliked by black people. I say it seems to me she’s talking of the usual mouthy lot. What I mainly hear from regular people is “Yo! She gets things done, that one!”
N reckons no, Helen has sinned irredeemably. Like she tweeted that colonialism did some good.
I say, N, I can’t believe you fall for that. That debate has existed all our lives. We’ve had it ourselves a couple of dozen times. We might never agree on how much plus and how much minus, but we’ve never doubted that only the imbecilic or the insane, or their suckers, can claim all one way.
N says no, times have changed. I say, meaning you got scared of bandwagons? N says no, it’s right that your thinking changes as your times change and you see more. She goes into a sagacious brief tutorial incorporating adoptive parents never seeing things like the adopted does, and colonialism stealing Africa’s pride in self-discovery – “we might have taken a thousand years but we would have got there”.
Then things disintegrate a bit. Maybe we’re both thinking with genes, not brains. She’s on white plots, the white plot against Patricia de Lille, white plot against Lindiwe Mazibuko, white plot against Mmusi Maimane. Then on Zille backing Allister Sparks about Verwoerd, and I am into words like “absurd” and “ridiculous” – Allister’d conveyed that Verwoerd was formidable; to make that into grounds of ostracising needed severe suckerdom, even when inflamed by hypocrisy.
If N was replying to this item – maybe you would, N? – she’d surely identify ways that my logic vanished from view.
But withal, first we parted as friends, as always. Second, we parted with a sense of having tried to deal with something real, as opposed to ducking it as per national convention. Letting a bit of heat out is a good way of strengthening a relationship. Which is not done by non-Africans acting as conspirators sharing secret rejection of perspectives they publicly applaud.
I’ll be glad when Black-White withers like Saxon-Norman. We might do it a little speedier. If we tried.