The Conversation Africa falls prey to ANC/left hegemony and tyranny: Part 1

Part 1: The Conversation bans me 

In what is the latest example of the politically correct liberal-left media’s hypocrisy and tyranny, The Conversation Africa banned me from commenting on its site.

Education editor Nontobeko Mtshali, after first removing three comments, petulantly booted me off because I said the removal of my (civil) comments about terms “racially decolonised” and “decolonisation” in the context of an article “How the colonial past of botanical gardens can be put to good use” by Brett Bennett of the University of Johannesburg was censorship and a subjective and personal editorial dislike of my comments. Her pretext for removing the comments was that I was allegedly off-topic.

The Conversation Africa’s editor is Caroline Southey.

In my first comment (not removed) I said Bennett used “racially decolonised”, a neologism I and probably most people don’t understand (I’d not heard or seen it before until now). The Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens Garden’s – the subject of his article – booklet he cited used “transformation”, a word and concept that’s commonly used in the country to mean increasing the number of non-white workers aka racial quotas or affirmative action.

Decolonisation is a nebulous, undefined and contested term including among academics, the ones that use it most. It means whatever they want it to mean. And that’s the problem – it changes from person to person with no common understanding.

Even the University of Cape Town (UCT) where the movement started in 2015 with the removal of the Rhodes statue and often violent “fallist” protests, so named after “Rhodes Must Fall” and “Fees Must Fall”, officially uses “transformation”.

I said “decolonisation” and variants thereof are only used by politically correct, liberal-left academics – the majority – to prove their PC credentials for their jobs and fallist students and no one else in the real world.

Bennett replied he meant “racially diversified” in the workplace. I responded he should have simply said so or “transformation” or racial quotas or affirmative action. I referred to the latest controversial incident at UCT involving a fallist, and that as a concept it must be confined to a lab and “irradiated until it’s just a memory”.

Why not say ‘racially diversified/transformed’ because that’s what you meant, everyone understands it, a term or similar that’s applied in the workplace (except among fallist-types) and what in fact the Gardens is doing.

Even UCT, where the decolonisation movement started in South Africa, officially uses ‘transformation’ to mean diversifying staff. (However, after vice-chancellor Kgethi Phakeng congratulated fallist Mlandu Masixole whose honours project included ‘one settler, one bullet’ in the acknowledgements, I don’t know what it stands for anymore.)

Using ‘decolonisation’ redundantly, especially where something else is meant or a clearer definition intended (UCT’s Shannon Morreira: ‘the term is nebulous’) is writers being politically correct and writing to an audience of a very few.

In this context – not discussing the concept itself – its only purpose is to show the writer’s or speaker’s hip liberation credentials and not to advance the subject matter in hand. It’s off-putting and detracts from the integrity of their writing and what they want to say.

The oh-so self-conscious and faux decolonisation movement at universities and among academics, who don’t live in the real world where such terms are not used, is like a new infection, best studied in a lab under safe, controlled conditions and once all information is obtained as we would of any contagion, irradiated until it’s just a memory.

I received an automatic email from the “moderator” a few minutes later telling me the comment had been removed. I replied “You can’t be serious!” I thought it might have been for the “one settler, one bullet” reference, which is considered hate speech, or the “irradiation remark” could be considered to be inciting violence. So I reposted a watered down (self-censored, which I detest and usually refuse to do) version:

My earlier reply, which was neither offensive nor uncivil, was removed for reasons I can only guess at including in-noxious use of metaphor, while such offensive examples (mine was neither) that I cited in the context of decolonisation are encouraged or downplayed by sections of the left media, politicians and academia.

But I wrote [to Bennett]: ‘why not say what you mean, use words and terms everyone understands and are already commonplace, in the workplace in this instance, rather than neologisms – 'racially decolonised’ to mean workplace racial diversified/transformed – that here you may even have made up yourself, are not understood and ‘nebulous’ as UCT’s Shannon Morreira recently wrote  purely to show one is attuned to hip, but transitory and meaningless, jargon in presently vogue.

I received a second email telling me this comment too had been removed to which I replied “Now you're having me on”. Presumably in response to my email, Mtshali posted a comment in the thread that my comment was not on-topic and they reserved the right to delete it. I replied – see the screenshot below (I had a feeling and made a screenshot of the page). That comment too was immediately deleted. Only my first, original comment survived. 

A few moments later the user login page flashed the notice “Your account is closed”.

To be continued in Part 2.