Example of the benefits of colonialism

I WISH to comment on two features in the Weekend Argus of April 1, apparently different in content yet closely linked.

In his letter on colonisation, V Smith argues history confirms certain benefits have resulted from it – that the colonisation of Britain by the Romans nearly 2 000 years ago brought roads, sanitation, literacy, law, education and medicine.

This reminded me that 19 countries conquered by Arabs more than 1 000 years ago still speak Arabic and practise Islam today, and that just as Iranians and Turks adapted to culture inherited from their Arab colonisers, so many of today’s Indians and Africans have incorporated (and extended) much of the culture of their once Western conquerors.

Former Supreme Court judge Rex van Schalkwyk has written that the hordes of originally illiterate Aryans, after contact with the ancient culture of the Babylonians, conveyed the word of Sanskrit into India and to north Africa – where the famed library of Alexandria was established by Alexander the Great, a Macedonian coloniser.

Author Rian Malan has stated the single most important legacy of colonialism in our country is our constitution.

In short, while one should fully acknowledge that colonisation resulted in appalling misery, some aspects of its legacy here and elsewhere have been undoubtedly beneficial (whatever Western Cape Premier Helen Zille’s political detractors have said to twist the statement she made when she returned from Singapore).

Secondly, my favourite journalist, Michael Morris, wrote a splendid article on how in 1936 the then-prime minister General JBM Hertzog steered a bill through Parliament, removing black voters from the common roll yet allowing them to elect their own white representatives.

Some folk might wonder why this Afrikaner’s names were James Barry Munnik!

The answer lies in the “colonial legacy” provided by Dr James Barry who arrived in the Cape from Britain in 1816 and became colonial medical inspector here in 1823.

On Tuesday July 25, 1826, Dr Barry performed the first successful Caesarean operation in the British Empire – on Wilhemina Munnik at a house in Waterloo Green, Wynberg.

There had been three recorded such operations in the world when both mother and baby had survived, but this was the first time in the empire it happened. The Munniks offered to pay Dr Barry handsomely, but Barry insisted that giving the baby his name would be sufficient reward.

The Munniks named their son James Barry Munnik.

How many of our leaders and rulers have benefited, I wonder, from this wonderful “colonial medical legacy”?

Dr James Barry