There is a story that is told by my father’s side of the family about my very distant relative Monash – not his real name to protect his identity, but a name I chose because it means spiritual, analytical, focused.
Monash was a quiet, scholarly boy who could be found most days sitting in the shade of a mango tree with a book on his lap, his knobby knees drawn up under his chin. Scrawny, like a plucked chicken the Aunty used to say about him.
Useless, she’d say to my mother and my own blood aunties, swatting at his head. Not quite all there, this said through paan stained teeth, using an orange finger to make circles at her temple – an ancient gesture to indicate mental illness.
She was not a nice aunty, this woman who was supposed to be babysitting this boy.
Monash was shy. So shy that he kept his gaze averted at all times so as not to engage with another living creature.
I sort of got why the aunty thought he was a little short on intellectual ability, though not why she used it to humiliate him. Monash’s powers of deduction or understanding were completely hidden from view behind lashes so long he looked like a camel. There was really no way to tell if anyone actually lived inside the boy’s head.
My cousin J was an impatient child who wanted everyone to communicate with her instantly – brightly and willingly and interestingly. If you didn’t answer her questions or agree to her instruction to play, she became a bit of a bully. I myself was often a target, and remember flinching from her sharp tongue. I’m ashamed to say that I sought refuge in my mother’s voluminous Grace Kelly dresses with their pinched waists and gathered skirts.
But in the end, even J took pity on this poor nerdy boy who was afraid of his own shadow.
The child’s story was not a happy one. His mother had run away to marry the man she loved, a man who was not the same religion as her.
Her parents turned their backs on her – they’d warned her, her mother told my aunties, and now she had made her bed and she must lie in it.
It seemed a little cold, but when Monash was born there seemed to be a thawing of relations until his grandparents were killed in a freak accident while they were on Hajj in Mecca.
It was 1964, the same year Malcolm X went on the Islamic pilgrimage the aunties remembered.
Monash’s mother, an only child, inherited her parents house on the North Coast and, with much sighing and a sense of relief that she was to get some of her freedom back, she and her husband and baby moved into it.
But his parents did too, and an older brother and his teenage sisters.
It’s like being colonised, I heard my mother mutter to my father. Like being a stranger in your own home subject to someone else’s rules.
That’s what colonisation is: the policy or practice of acquiring full or partial political control over another country, occupying it with settlers and exploiting it economically.
So my mum was right. And she wasn’t just referring to Monash’s poor mother who had to endure, who became a Cinderella-like slave in her own parent’s home, who was exploited economically – having to make rotis for sale in the neighbourhood to keep her invading in-laws fed.
My parents were historians and we were brought up on a diet of British Raj history; how British rule on the Indian subcontinent lasted from 1858 to 1947, how Queen Victoria became Empress of India in 1876.
My father read Paul Scott’s 1966 Raj Quartet long before it was filmed as The Jewel in the Crown.
Of course my lovely dad filled in the backstory as he read; how Mahatma Gandhi started the Quit India movement in 1942, of his insistence on nonviolent protest as a means of “fighting” for an independent India.
Colonialism, we know, is about oppression and subjugation. It’s about racism. It’s about superiority.
Colonisation is the process of settling among and establishing control over the indigenous people of an area.
It’s just rude behaviour, going into someone’s home and taking over.
No matter what benefits come with the colonising invaders, it’s an invasion. (Monash’s mother was constantly being told she should be grateful – after all, she had baby sitters so she could go out and sell the rotis she’d made without having to take her son with her).
So I’m a little surprised by Western Cape Premier Helen Zille’s inflammatory comments on colonialism; especially at this volatile time in our fledgling democracy.
It annoys me that her words hurt the DA, that they do much to strip away the party’s burgeoning credibility.
Yes, she took back her tweet that colonialism had positive spin-offs, but she should never have tweeted it in the first place.
There may or may not be positive spin offs from colonisation. But do we really need, at this time in our history, to mention the obvious, especially when it causes such pain and negativity for a large portion of South Africans?
I think its careless talk and just takes us away from what should be the real debate: Corruption and patronage and incompetence and Sassa and Prasa and…
I’m afraid, Helen (who I have admired in the past for her smarts) joins the ranks of Donald Trump as a politician who should steer clear of social media.
He/she can inflict too much damage in 140 characters.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.