OPINION

De-colonisation: Let's go the whole hog

Stephen Mulholland says the pernicious legacy of British imperialism must be thoroughly dismantled

As we are all aware South Africa is now caught up in a glorious and determined drive to rid our society of all vestiges of our colonial heritage.

Brave champions of this campaign have even risked their health by smearing human faeces on statues honouring the memory of those colonial swines who arrived here uninvited and stole the country from its indigenous owners who, of course, had previously stolen it from its earlier indigenous owners.

The faeces smearers are quite right! To hell with colonialist bloodsuckers! Let us revert to the noble ways of our ancestors, thus winning their approval. 

As the great Jacob Zuma has repeatedly reminded us, our ancestors and God are on the side of the ANC and it thus can never lose and will rule until Jesus returns. What other party anywhere can make this claim?

Back to the hated colonial heritage. It must go. There is no debate to be had.

Let us commence with sport. To paraphrase Karl Marx on religion, soccer is the opium of the masses. Instead of attending party rallies our people turn out in their millions to support soccer teams.

Soccer as we know it emerged in what is now the UK in the late 14th century. In between killing and exploiting our ancestors, English colonialists played soccer. It is now our most popular sport although we do not seem to be very good at it.

Anyway, just like those bloody statues, the “beautiful game”, as our oppressors call it, is clearly as much a relic of colonialism as are the statues of Rhodes, Van Riebeeck and so on. Instead of attending Kaiser Chiefs games the proletariat must partake in collective study of the works of our communist heroes led by the immortal Lenin and the indomitable Stalin. 

There is no choice in this matter: soccer is a relic of colonialism. It must go!

Same goes for cricket. In their avaricious thrusts around the world, the English, who apparently took to the game in 1550 in Surrey, left the legacy of cricket in the lands they conquered and ravaged. And today, those very victims of colonialism such as the West Indies, India, Pakistan, Ceylon, Australia, New Zealand and, of course, our own beloved South Africa, indulge in this senseless colonial game with enthusiasm.

We must set an example and ban cricket immediately. This will also assist in dousing the flames of tortured argument about merit versus transformation which may well have cost us a recent world prize.

Anyway, if we do the right thing and rid ourselves of this useless colonial baggage we can disband the cricket unions and get on with the job of returning to our roots.

Then there is that infernal game of rugby, the object of which appears to be to maim as many members of the opposing side as possible while kicking and throwing a ball around. Again, we have those evil poms to thank for this sport which has enriched generations of orthopaedic surgeons.

And to rub salt into the wounds of exploitation, it was a boy, William Webb Ellis, at the elite private school of Rugby, who first picked up the ball and ran with it in 1823. Today there is a statue of him at the Web Ellis museum near the school: what a great target for our champion faeces throwers!

Now there’s a sport we might look at. Image a national faeces-throwing championship! What fun, followed by a hot shower. This could well be SA’s gift to world sport.

But why stop with sport? Let’s rid ourselves of the whole colonial bang shoot. Tarmac roads, for example, were developed by an Englishman who patented the concept in 1901. But what’s wrong with those winding footpaths which endlessly criss-cross our magnificent continent. And there are no potholes on those footpaths so there’s no need for that boring stuff called maintenance.

Speaking of which brings to mind electricity or, as in the case of our beloved country, the lack thereof. This is yet another colonial interference in our affairs having been foisted on the world by an English scientist, William Gilbert, in 1600.

Why bother with that colonial construct? Let us return to our traditional ways. Man was made to sleep at night. Days are for hunting while women till the fields. Which brings us to another colonial curse: why do we need scientific, mechanised, computer driven agriculture or agronomy as the colonialists call it?

As King Zwelethini recently demanded, the people must return to tilling the fields. Forget about tractors, crop rotation, scientific fertilisation and all that colonial baggage. Get to it in that back-breaking, life-shortening labour intensive joy known as subsistence farming. Otherwise the King will become mighty pissed-off.