Is Rian Malan just slow or is he being underhanded?
In his piece on Helen Zille and colonialism (Politicsweb 25 March 2017), Malan refers to an entry I made on Facebook, and then spectacularly misses the point I made – or simply chose to misrepresent it.
Let’s start with what I wrote on Facebook – see if you get it:
“My paternal grandmother, Alberta du Preez, looked after me for a few years when I was a small boy. I wish I could talk to her now and tell her to stop thinking about her time in the British concentration camps of Heilbron and Kroonstad, where she lost many family members, or about the fact that her family lost everything because of the British scorched earth policy. I would have told her: Ouma, be grateful, the British taught you more sophisticated table manners and how to speak English. What you thought was democracy as practised by the two Boer Republics was primitive stuff, and then the British brought you the Westminster model. God save the Queen, Ouma!”
Here’s Malan’s reaction: “That line would have got Max’s nose broken in almost any platteland bar as late as 1980. How can an Afrikaner joke about such a thing? Again, the answers lie in the past. Max was born around the time Afrikaner Nationalists came to power, and benefitted from a good education and a university degree. By the time he reached adulthood, Afrikaners were drawing level with the English in terms of income and education. Freed of ancient humiliations and resentments, Max was at last able to become a liberal internationalist and view the British Empire with a degree of objectivity.”
More than a thousand people clicked the “like” button on my Facebook page. The overwhelming majority of the about 200 reactions showed that they got my point. And Malan didn’t? The same Malan who had published at least one acclaimed book?
Did he really think I was saying that the absolute devastation the British Empire had inflicted upon the Afrikaners of the old Free State and Transvaal republics – 26 251 women and children died in 34 concentration camps, for example – was a fair exchange for the “gift” of learning English and improving table manners?
Did Malan really not get that I was satirically trying to make the point that survivors of dispossession and occupation can’t be expected to simply smile and nod their heads in agreement when someone praises the technological advancements that were achieved during that period? Like Helen Zille was perceived to have done with her tweets?
He’s right, of course, that I am free of “ancient humiliations and resentments”. Even my late father was, actually he was a borderline Anglophile, despite being a Broederbonder. (It was his mother I referred to – his father spent two years in a POW camp in Ceylon during the Anglo Boer War.) But more importantly, the ethnic group I was born into had been running the country since before my birth and the nasty impact of British colonialism on Afrikaners had been largely neutralized by the time I was a young adult.
That is not the case of black South Africans in 2017. Dutch colonialism was replaced by British colonialism and that morphed into half a century of apartheid, the impact of which we still see all around us. Colonialism fundamentally disturbed the natural development of the black societies in South Africa from the 17th century onwards.
There’s no telling which way they would have developed if the European settlers – my ancestors – hadn’t settled here. To praise the benefits of colonialism suggests that the black and Khoisan societies of the 17th and 18th century would still be living in the Iron Age if it hadn’t been for the colonialists.
