The white revanchism now driving America’s right often finds expression on the Business Day letters page. François Theron’s response to Adekeye Adebajo’s critique of Marco Rubio’s now infamous Munich speech is one example (“History should be told warts and all”, March 10).
Rubio’s speech celebrated Christopher Columbus and the five centuries of European expansion across the world that followed his arrival in the Caribbean in 1492. What is forgotten entirely is the human cost of that expansion. Columbus quickly established a regime of terror, tribute and enslavement.
Indigenous people were required to produce impossible gold quotas. Those who resisted or failed were subjected to brutal violence, including mutilation. Hundreds were shipped across the Atlantic in chains. This violence marked the beginning of conquest, enslavement and other forms of forced labour across the Americas.
Between 2.5-million and 5-million indigenous people were enslaved in the centuries that followed. A population that may have numbered 50-million to 60-million before 1492 collapsed to a fraction of that as a result of violence, enslavement and disease.
As indigenous populations were devastated, European empires turned increasingly to Africa, and between 12-million and 15-million Africans were transported across the Atlantic in chains.
Adebajo is correct to note that Rubio’s celebration of a supposedly beneficent Western civilisation ignores immense human suffering under European rule, including Germany’s destruction of 80% of the Herero and half of the Nama in Namibia, the killing of about 1-million Algerians during France’s colonial war of 1954-62, and the brutal repression of anti-colonial struggles such as the uprising in Kenya.
Theron’s letter repeats Rubio’s logic. His only acknowledgement of the horrors that accompanied European colonialism is implicit in his celebrating Britain’s abolition of the slave trade in 1807. But he says nothing about Britain having spent about two centuries deeply involved in the transatlantic slave trade and plantation slavery, and its profiting enormously as a result. It is as though Britain should be celebrated for ending the slave trade but not held to account for two centuries of slavery.
Missing, too, are the long struggles of enslaved Africans against slavery itself. The Haitian Revolution, in which enslaved Africans fought for 12 years, defeated the armies of France, Spain and Britain and declared an independent republic abolishing slavery on January 1 1804, disappears entirely.
For both men the lives destroyed by European conquest simply do not count.
Richard Pithouse
Via email
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