Why hang Helen Zille?
Africa is neck deep in colonial bondage, unless somebody can demonstrate to me that the flag is the economy!
LOOK at her: she is beautiful, she is elegant, and she is provocative, even at the mature age of 66. Moreover, Helen has got the African talking once again, even thinking, about his place in this Whiteman’s world. Helen Zille is the current premier of the Western Cape in South Africa. Until May 10, 2015, she was at the helm of the Democratic Alliance. Then a male white in a black mask named Mmusi Maimane took over leadership and since last week he has been trying to get Helen to resign from the party.
Compared to Botha, to Penny Sparrow, to Andre Slade, Helen committed a small sin. Not much worse than Donald Trump who said Africa needs to be recolonised. She only said colonialism was not “all bad”. The other three have declared that blacks are not people. If God wanted blacks to be people, opined Botha, he should have created them white. None of the three has been hanged; why beautiful Helen?
Well, because patronising and paternalistic liberalism is more dangerous than racism outright, unsheathed and frying hot. It is because of the poisonous, tranquillising effect of patronising liberals and their deceitful love and compassion that Africa is still under colonial rule - economically. How can one be so ungrateful to fight somebody who loves them, wants to reconcile after a brutal war, is prepared to forgive and forget so long as they keep the spoils.
After a visit to Singapore, marvelling at what she believed was a product of Britain’s colonial handiwork and legacy, Helen Zille tweeted that colonialism was not all bad. The Empire brought civilisation to the world - roads, an administration and education in the form of mathematics and the English language, and light.
Colonial pact
It starts with France. Which is no different from the rest of the colonial powers. They never wanted to leave Africa, and they won’t do so any time in my lifetime. Bitter wars had to be fought in the hope of gaining our liberty. But that has never been more than tokenism. Africa is neck deep in colonial bondage, unless somebody can demonstrate to me that the flag is the economy!
Before the French were forced out of Algeria after a bloody war (1954-62), they destroyed almost everything, from schools to hospitals and roads. The country was made to pay for the benefits of France’s civilising colonisation. Exactly what they did with that little cursed island, the first slave republic of Haiti in 1804. In 1825 France threatened to destroy the island with warships if it didn’t agree to pay it 150 million gold francs compensation for “lost” land and slaves.
The New African magazine did a tear-jerking article in 2013 based partly on an interview with economics professor and author of the book “The Servitude of the Colonial Pact”, Mamadou Koulibaly. This is what he revealed: “Under the ‘solidarity’ independence pact, former French colonies or CFA countries, the “14 African states are obliged to put 65 percent of their foreign currency reserves into the French Treasury, plus another 20 percent for financial liabilities. This means these 14 African countries only ever have access to 15 percent of their own money! If they need more they have to borrow their own money from the French at commercial rates.”
If you thought that was evil, you underestimate the benefits of colonialism. Listen to this: “France has the first right to buy or reject any natural resources found in the land of the Francophone countries. So even if the African countries can get better prices elsewhere, they can’t sell to anybody until France says it doesn’t need the resources.
“In the award of government contracts, French companies must be considered first; only after that can these countries look elsewhere. It doesn’t matter if the CFA countries can obtain better value for money elsewhere.” (Our African intellectuals won’t write about this. Our poverty is all due to independence diseases - dictatorship, mismanagement and corruption.)
CFA nations are being taxed heavily for the benefit of being colonised and exploited by France. This has been going on since the 1960s. The poor island of Haiti managed to clear its debt to France only in 1947 after it was reduced to 90 million.
The Americans were deep in it. I am not surprised these iniquities have never been raised at the United Nations as a grievous human rights matter. France has openly refused to repay Haiti, and there is a global conspiracy of silence. Enter Helen and Cde Tokyo Sexwale This is a Whiteman’s world, and people want to hang beautiful Helen for stating a fact of life!
If I should have a gripe with Helen Zille’s tweet, it is this: she ran out of salt to rub into the sore wound.
Let me help her. The roads and rail network were strategic to the further theft of African resources. They led to the ports to transport colonial booty from the hinterland to the mother country.
Talk of education, there was just enough of it for the tortured African to better take instructions like Caliban, and to minister to the white master. There was nothing in it for him; he was not consulted the way Zimbabweans clamour to be consulted on whether their vernacular languages should be used in schools.
That is the irreparable mental damage Helen’s colonial education inflicted on the African. It sought to wipe out our languages and cultures, and to this day we are ashamed to speak them or to practise our own culture, for instance what constitutes marriage. The African is a rootless wanderer in his own country, on his continent, across the globe. Thanks to Madam Helen’s superior education.
Helen Zille said colonialism was not all bad. It gave the dark natives a beautiful constitution and an impeccable judiciary. Here, ANC struggle stalwart Sexwale seems to agree with her, yet it is precisely these Whiteman’s trickster institutions which stand in the way of ending Africa’s colonial pact with the Empire.
In a letter published in the media on April 29 last year to Ajay Gupta over the infamous “state capture” allegations, Sexwale is very clear on the real cancer, beside the diversionary Guptas. He sums up the broader struggle with striking lucidity:
“The objective of our current national development effort is the economic emancipation of our people, beyond mere political power. The real root causes of the triple challenges of poverty, unemployment and inequity are located squarely on land hunger and the rest of the economy, which is still largely in the hands of a tiny minority within the white minority. Therefore, liberating South Africa from country capture was only the beginning.”
(Sexwale’s observations about who owns the South African economy are corroborated in that burnished white far-right publication, the Financial Mail of February 16 -22, 2017 in a piece titled “White monopoly capital”.)
A nation hogtied
Sexwale’s analysis misses the real obstacles in the fight to emancipate the poor “beyond mere political power”. It is a blind spot which makes our intellectuals often the most reactionary: The pillars of white monopoly capital in Africa, and South Africa in particular, are the white constitution and its impeccable white judiciary.
“Land hunger and the rest of the economy” are enshrined in the constitution and the judiciary. That is why the willing seller, willing buyer route to “economic emancipation” has failed and Jacob Zuma is talking a narrative of “radical economic transformation”. It may be too late for Zuma, but those are the thought processes and language which should separate Sexwale from Helen Zille. Remember President Mugabe’s turning “swords into ploughshares” speech in 1980? It didn’t work until he realised it was the constitution and the judiciary, stupid.
Thanks Helen for your superior culture, too. If we don’t marry according to your culture, we give birth to bastards, which all of us were until you arrived. Our rites are pagan, so we must go white to continue to give the Empire money.
From a jelly called Ambi and other skin-lightening creams, human hair and outlandish fashions which make our otherwise beautiful women move around semi-naked, the Empire still rakes in billions of dollars annually from the colonies which import this junk. Only the French go about it the crude way.
The goal is the same; Africans must pay tribute to the Empire for civilisation and colonialism or endure sanctions the way of Haiti and Zimbabwe. Or are destroyed like Libya and Iraq for rejecting the mind-numbing opium of democracy, human rights and rule of law or legalistic constitutionalism - all of which are anchored on leaving ALL colonial white privileges intact in Orania while the African scorches in the Karoo Desert. He should never touch of the fruit in the middle, lest he dies.
Why hang Helen?