Helen Zille is one of my three least favourite people
because I find her a supercilious know-all and disingenuous, and she moved the
DA to the right. I am loathe to take her
side but the anger and criticism she’s receiving about her colonialism comments especially from people like media personality Eusebius McKaiser
and DA leader Mmusi Maimane are hypocritical.
McKaiser was educated at the University of Oxford, and in
his book A Bantu in My Bathroom
boasted about his time there. Maimane was educated at an apartheid/colonial-era school, Wits and Bangor University,
Wales.
These institutions are products of colonialism, Oxford being
the nursery of Cecil John
Rhodes, which the university’s Famous Oxonians website lists as “colonial pioneer, founder of the Rhodes Scholarships”.
Missionary schools played a
significant role educating particularly blacks but their founders – European missionaries who arrived with colonialists – had an ambiguous “moral
self-righteousness” about indigenous populations. Maimane is a pastor. How does he think Christianity came to South
Africa – evolution and cultural osmosis?
I’m not one of those
revisionists who believe colonialism was good – it was usurpation of local
populations by competing global powers to obtain
natural resources for home industries and market and geo-political influence.
But I’m not so dishonest that,
as far as SA is concerned, going to deny benefits it reaped: a parliamentary
system of democracy; the most industrialised economy in Africa (but who knows
for how long after a sustained attack on it by a motley collection of rent-seekers and the disaffected); many quality schools and universities,
and in 1994, a still functioning economic infrastructure we could be proud of.
What has 20 years of “freedom”
brought?
Strange how under stifling and
obnoxious political correctness people like Mckaiser and Maimane are quick to
denounce the qualities of extant colonialism that made them who they are.
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