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 loath to take her side, but the anger and criticism she’s receiving about her colonialism comments, especially from people like 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".
Mission schools played a significant role in educating 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 SA: by 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 geopolitical influence.
But I’m not so dishonest as to deny the benefits it brought SA: 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, an economic infrastructure we could be proud of.
What has 20 years of "freedom" brought?
Strange how under stifling political correctness people like McKaiser and Maimane are quick to denounce the qualities of extant colonialism that made them who they are.
Thomas Johnson
Cape Town
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