Imagine someone said to Jewish people: "The holocaust had positives, it led to Zionism and Israel receives billions from Americans" – there would be no need for reductio-ad-absurdum being advanced, writes Fikile Mbalula
In May 2012, apartheid-era president FW de Klerk went on CNN and told the world that apartheid had been good to blacks in the Bantustans. This was rightly met with global outrage as it effectively meant the United Nations had been mad in its resolutions that apartheid was a system of racial oppression and a Crime Against Humanity.
Fast forward to May 2017, DA leader and Western Cape Premier, well known for her hyperbolic histrionics and racism whiff laced social media posts – she took to lecture black South Africans about the good of their brutal oppression, that it wasn't that bad and that it offered positives.She tweeted: “For those claiming legacy of colonialism was only negative, think of our independent judiciary, transport infrastructure, piped water.”She doubled down when challenged and tweeted: “Would we have had a transition into specialised health care and medication without colonial influence? Just be honest, please.” She took no heed of protests that she was being insensitive and offensive, instead became more defiant stating that the outrages over her statements were because she was white.
This assertion explains why Zille went shopping for "good" blacks to be DA mascots and ideological neophytes who could then say whatever is anti-black and be anodyne. We call this "politics of duplicity". In psychology, it's called "cognitive dissonance" – that of holding two conflicting beliefs at the same time. Zille’s premise is as duplicitous as it is flawed of course. Let us deal with the matter of why colonialism occurred. Why did Europeans sail oceans for Africa?
Why did the Americans come to Africa for resources, bonded labour and human trafficking of Africans? According to Zille, DA's forefathers came to "civilise" the uncivilised barbarians who needed tarred roads and independent judiciary and so forth. Dependable historic data however tells us a different story. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization’s, "FOA" data indicates that global undernourishment in 1945 was at 50%. Data reveals that 300 years earlier, circa 1600, countries like Sweden and France experienced great famines.
From 11 century to the 17th, France experienced several famines. In central France, it is written, the hungry ate human flesh to survive. India, China and Central Asia experienced even worse incidents of famine in the 1600s. The French and English during these times received less daily calorie intake than the worst hit Sub-Saharan Africa today.
In political school conducted by the ANC underground there was a booklet by the United States Food and Administration titled, The Hunger Map. It showed Western Europe as a hunger games movie set. They got hungry, they came, they saw and pillaged.
Their hunger and desperation, not benevolence, led to their invasion and pillaging of our fertile Africa. They found Africa, green, sunny, with plenty above and below surface. European survival is mostly owed to Africa and her resources. Africa has been raped and stripped by foreigners that it has lost its biblical status as a bread and gold basket of the world. The period Africa started experiencing colonialism was the moment Jan van Riebeeck landed.
Colonialism was all-positive for whites everywhere.
Naturally talented Africans built Europe with their skill and natural mineral wealth grabbed from their motherland. The African housemaids who were often sexually abused cooked fatten oxen for their masters, fattened and stolen from Africa.
In the early years of colonisation, Scandinavia, Austria-Hungary, Germany, United States, England to Spain, poverty rates were between 40 – 50%. In 1830, life expectancy in Western Europe was 33. The African fat helped increase that.
The colonial judiciary Zille is braggadicous about, only in 1772 did the Chief Justice of England declare slavery unlawful. The colonial courts were never independent, neither were apartheid courts. The democracy blacks bled for brought about the independent judiciary in 1994. Europeans brought foreign diseases and other problems to Africa.
Zille joins De Klerk in peeling off the scab of the wounds they refuse to help heal. The generosity of blacks continues to make the DA arrogant and empathy free. The DA suspended Zille from all party activities but for being premier.
What is politically duplicitous and stunning is that the general public is forced to have Zille, a person the DA finds unpalatable nor fit and proper to be its member, but her repugnance and racism is fit and proper to govern blacks she was injurious to.
@MbalulaFikile
* The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Newspapers.
Sunday Independent