Who among us can say that the events in South
Africa of the last year or so have not been on our minds much? I think of them
when I walk my dog. They distract me while I flog my LPs on the vinyl Facebook
pages. I’m alarmed by the hatred and the bile and the poefie flying around.
I’ve thrown my own on the odd occasion, out of sheer frustration. What seems
also quite striking, however, is the silence of the middle-ground.
“The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate
intensity,” wrote W.B. Yeats on the eve of the 1916 Easter Uprisings in Ireland.
That country saw another 80 years of bloody mayhem before it began calming
down. What lies in store for us?
I have hinted on Facebook now and again
what I think about recent events, but I will attempt to lay it out here in a
more detailed way, starting with the debate over Zille’s tweets.
First, I have to address the accusations of
whitesplaining that some will throw at me. This notion holds that white people
cannot participate in any debates on issues of colonization, racism and the
rest. We must maintain a respectful silence, because of our inherited
privilege.
In the case of debates in person, I
generally try follow this rule, and also but to a lesser extent, on social
media. I want to know what non-white South Africans feel about these things. I
want to listen. Nobody likes a fool who blathers off at parties about every
topic under the sun. But I do have information (not opinions, mind you: I try
to keep those to a minimum) to add sometimes. In the last 15 years I have read
as extensively as I can on the history of this region, this little corner of
South Africa that was known as the Eastern Frontier for several centuries. I have
things to add, for I believe the seeds of our current predicament and strife
were laid here in the Eastern Cape, during those 9 Frontier Wars between the
British and the Xhosa. Not during Apartheid, and certainly not during ANC rule,
however shitty, incompetent, corrupt and arrogant it has been of late. To sum up: you can tell me to keep quiet,
but I’m not going to. In fact it’s probably the worst thing you can say to a
renegade atheist lapsed Catholic who emerged from the intellectual gulag of
Christian National Education under Apartheid.
My go-to book, as all my friends know, with
regards South African history, has been Noel Mostert’s monumental documentation
of the frontier wars, Frontiers: The Epic
of South Africa’s Creation and the Tragedy of the Xhosa People. I’m not
going to even attempt to distill his 1300 page magnum opus and 17 years of
research into this piece. Suffice to say that to me (and all the people I have
come across who have read it) it was a life-changing book. A brutal, sustained
and erudite assault on everything I as a white South African had been taught.
In short it was the most profound, shattering paradigm shift I had ever
experienced.
Maybe it’s because I am a songwriter that I
feel the need to at least attempt to put myself in the shoes of others. I was
brought up with the realization that I was privileged. I attended a small
Catholic primary school, where only a few pupils came from wealthy backgrounds.
The vast majority came from lower-middle-class families and more than a few
were poor whites, and Chinese kids who were essentially non-citizens. I was always conscious of this. Perhaps
because of this I have never been able to see privilege as a preserve solely of
whites. Largely of whites, definitely, but primarily an economic stratification
that in the finer details and nuances, and the harsh, brutal, uncaring nature
of late 20th century global capitalism, knows no colour bounds.
In a nutshell, I find it hard to see
privilege as only a white thing. Largely, yes, but solely, no. I don’t buy
that. But me myself? Yes, I was enormously privileged.
But the privilege most of us whites do have
has come on the backs of much more than just the immense suffering of the
indigenous populations. In America and Australia it involved the almost
complete annihilation of those populations. Here in South Africa it came from
the total destruction of a way of life they had known for centuries (replaced
with a brutal life of servitude, as we needed them for labour, which led to us whites
being one of the most pampered tribes on earth), and a complete destruction of
their entire worldview. That the earth was a giant sphere revolving around the
sun was something that they would have all had to accept anyway, because it’s
the truth (funnily enough I have not come across a single black person who
believes the earth is flat, but personally know more than a few whites who
believe this), whether this truth was to ultimately come to them from Europe or
China or wherever (or whether some of them had not already innately sensed it,
for who is to know, their history having been so completely obliterated).
However, that a fairly logical belief in the presence of their dead ancestors
in some nether world, and the vague acknowledgement of some greater power who
is far too busy to be approached directly, and never directly intercedes in our
affairs, was to be replaced by a belief in talking snakes, virgin births and a
bizarre story of shame in our own natural human desires and concomitant
inherent evil deep within us that necessitated a bizarre blood sacrifice of
this greater power himself, by himself, after he had sired himself, propagated
by those very same people who claimed to be bringing science, logic and
empiricism, is one of the truly astonishing anomalies of the supreme arrogance
of the colonizers. One really has to ask who were the civilized and who were
the barbarians.
The Xhosa had no doubt in their minds who
the barbarians were. The British system of retributive justice by way of
execution and flogging was completely barbaric and counter-intuitive to
them. If someone has killed someone else in a dispute, why then kill him too?
You have now weakened the tribe. And there can now be no restorative justice
for the family of the deceased. So too was the British ‘code’ of conduct in
warfare seen. In this regard, the Xhosa were far advanced, ethically. In all
those nine Frontier Wars, not one woman or child was killed by the Xhosa. War
is a man’s business. The British felt no such qualms of conscience, not with
the Xhosa and not with Boers many years later.
I do not have this fuzzy notion of Africans
all living in peace and harmony before the white man arrived. Humans have been
killing each other in squabbles over resources since we crawled out of the
swamp. But this I do know: many black African tribes had a complex societal
structure, with systems of law in place that were, from our standpoint today,
far advanced and far more humane from the systems of the colonizers, if the
‘system’ the Belgians had in place in the Congo could even be described using
the term “law”: it was nothing short of rapacious plunder and genocide of
humans and those beautiful sentient beings: elephants.
But none of this matters to many whites,
because we had the wheel. I’m so sick and tired of hearing about the fucking
wheel! That the notion that a culture’s ‘civilization’ can be measured by
technological progress still lives on 70 years after Auschwitz and Treblinka,
should make us all ashamed to ever use the word “progress” in respect of human
civilization.
As I said the other day on social media,
the colonists did not invent electricity any more than the Australians invented
cricket. There are too many people running around feeling proud for being
European, as if they themselves or their direct ancestors had invented
electricity or the telephone. While the Wright brothers were inventing
aeroplanes, most of our ancestors were either squabbling in dirty bars and
whore-houses on The Reef or sitting in the shade watching Bantus do the hard
work. Take pride in your own personal
accomplishments. Everything outside of that has got fuckall to do with you.
At the end of colonialism there was much
infrastructure. That's good. My dad and granddad as engineers designed some of
it. But they did, not me. If I designed a bridge it would collapse under the
weight of a couple of cyclists, if it ever supported even its own weight. And
it's important to remember that pretty much everything in terms of
infrastructure was built by black sweat. Extremely poorly-paid sweat at that.
The thing about me is, I just don’t buy
into the Protestant work-ethic. Why should you build a wheel when you don’t
really need one? It’s not like you have to transport large amounts of grain and
stuff to a barn in preparation for a long winter. You and a few of your
neighbours can just walk back to the village with a coupla yams and butternuts
in a basket every day and you’re sorted. Don’t get me wrong: when I have to
work hard I work hard, for months. But in between I like to chill, read books,
play my guitar, listen to my vinyls and ballasbak with my mates talking kak. In
short, I don’t think anyone has ever lain on his or her deathbed thinking,
“Christ I wish I’d worked longer hours.”
Personally, I
think many people are looking at all this in completely the wrong light. There
is a tendency to measure the worth of a civilization by its technological
prowess. The most technologically advanced societies have almost always been
the most violent and barbaric. War drives technology. Just look at America. By
claiming that all these inventions were built on ideas stolen from Africa is
not only largely untrue (there was an incredible, complex cross-fertilization
of ideas for the last 2 000 years between China, Europe, India, North Africa,
the Middle East and Japan) but also plays into the notion that there is some
kind of hierarchy of civilizations, and this hierarchy is linked to technology,
technology which will, I think, end up being the undoing of the entire human
race and most other life forms. We should be talking about the ethical codes
(or lack of them) that underpin a culture or society. By doing this we would
then see, for example, that the Xhosa were far superior to the British, for the
reasons mentioned earlier, and many other reasons that Mostert documents in Frontiers. I can't speak of other
African tribes, I don't know enough. But this focus on technology is a red
herring, and everyone is buying into it.
If Helen Zille
thinks life is so great in Singapore, she must mos go and live there, and see
what censorship of speech is all about. Here, we can still tune whatever we
want to tune. Hell, some black people have tuned that all whites should be
killed, and they’ve not been silenced, and Steve Hofmeyr and scores of whites
tune all kinds of kak, insulting black South Africans every day, and they’re
still running around free.
You don’t have
to be a rocket scientist to see that our current regime likes the fact that
we’re all squabbling and tuning each other kak. Imagine if all whites were just
to say “Yes, the colonial period was a living nightmare for all of you. The
Khoisan died like flies from the smallpox our ancestors brought. Your way of
life was destroyed. We constantly put you to the sword. We replaced your
beliefs with our own much more bizarre hocus pocus. The British killed the
Boers for the gold, then sent generations of your ancestors to dig it up. They
all died young and ours got rich. No amount of roads and infrastructure can
make up for this, and to talk of silver linings is an insult.”
But instead we
say “It wasn’t so bad, you were living in skins when we got here with our
wheels, get over it, stop flogging a dead horse, let’s all join hands and vote
for the DA.”
And the bloated ANC
sits and rubs their hands in delight. They don’t have to divide us to rule us.
We’ve done it all on our own.
