Several years ago, while living in Cape Town, I played a series of games of chess with a housemate and friend of mine. We were pretty evenly matched, and these games could (and did) go either way. I found them very tense, as did my opponent. One day, after another of these harrowing encounters across the chess board, my friend observed: "The thing about chess is that you're actually playing to determine who is more intelligent." We discontinued our games, for neither of us thought securing a definitive answer worth the stress (or the potential risk to our self-esteem.)
I was reminded recently of this comment by the visceral responses to David Bullard's last column for the Sunday Times and his consequent defenestration. The debate around the merits, or lack thereof, of ‘colonialism' appears to be about one thing, but it actually concerns another. Before one tries untangle what that is, it is necessary to go into some of the deep history of this issue.
African nationalism, the ideology that currently prevails in South Africa, developed in reaction to the myth of European racial superiority. This myth was founded upon the belief that the great technological and material achievements of Western Europe were a reflection of the innate superiority of the ‘white race'. Conversely, those seen as being lower down the racial and social hierarchy were regarded as doomed by heredity to remain there. Thomas Hodgkin, a sympathetic and perceptive scholar of African nationalism, wrote in 1957 how "according to the conventionally accepted European myth [black Africans] are ‘people without a history', who, until the period of European colonisation were ‘living in the Stone Age'. The primitive level of their techniques can be demonstrated by the fact that ‘they never invented the wheel' and ‘never developed the art of writing'."
"It was at one time the fashionable view that any remarkable work of art or architecture discovered in Africa south of the Sahara must have been produced by non-Africans - Arabs perhaps, probably Portuguese - since Africans were by definition incapable of this level of achievement. This was the only way in which Europeans could account for the sculptures of Ife and Benin, the castles of Gondar, the fortifications of Zimbabwe, without disturbing their preconceptions. Now the archaeological evidence has led to a rejection of this a priori reasoning in each case."
Faced with the "heavily artillery" of European racialism, Hodgkin noted, African nationalists "have been compelled to develop their own counter-attack; to answer the myth of African barbarism with the counter-myth of African civilisation and achievement." These answers took positive forms such as the debunking of various prejudices, a rediscovery of African history, and a renewed emphasis on the "qualities of pre-European African societies."
However, African nationalists also developed a tendency to romanticise the pre-colonial era as a kind of "golden age", and to blame the material backwardness of much of sub-Saharan Africa entirely on colonial ‘exploitation.' The rapid economic advance that European rule had facilitated in certain parts of the continent was completely discounted.
The British economist P.T. Bauer noted "In the Gold Coast [later Ghana], there were about 3,000 children at school in the early 1900s, whereas in the mid-1950s there were over half a million. In the early 1890s there were in the Gold Coast no railways or roads, but only a few jungle paths. Transport of goods was by human porterage and canoe. By the 1930s there were railways and good roads; journeys by road required fewer hours than they had required days in 1890s. In British West Africa public security and health improved out of all recognition in this period. Peaceful travel became possible; slavery, slave trading and famine were practically eliminated, and the incidence of the worse diseases greatly reduced."
The first president of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, took the view that the colonial powers had been "all rapacious." He wrote in 1963 that: "They took our lands, our lives, our resources and our dignity. Without exception, they left us nothing but our resentment...It was when they were gone and we were faced with the stark realities, as in Ghana on the morrow of our independence, that the destitution of the land after long years of colonial rule was brought home to us."
If there was one idea that would poison the well of post-colonial African progress it was this one: That the metropolitan countries, and the non-black minorities within Africa, had contributed nothing but had acquired their advantaged position solely through robbery and exploitation. This belief was such an intoxicant precisely because it appeared to explain away the apparent disparity in attainment between Africa and Europe, black and non-black, on which European claims of racial superiority had rested.
The prescriptions which flowed from this diagnosis of the African condition - rapid Africanisation of the civil service, nationalisation, the dispossession of productive minorities - would set back, by decades, the institutional and economic development of one country after another in Africa. As Bauer observed (1976), "Ethnic minorities whose maltreatment [by expropriation or other measures] is the order of the day over much of Africa and Asia have often been the main agents of economic progress in poor countries. These minorities have usually had incomes much above the average for the country. Their maltreatment has reduced both current and prospective incomes in these countries, and thereby widened income differences between them and the West, most obviously when they have been expelled or massacred."
The ANC comes from the same ideological tradition as Nkrumah, except it is the indigenous white South African minority (rather than Britain) who are accused of having attained their ‘privileged' position through the ‘colonial' exploitation of the black majority. The ANC's efforts to dismantle the so-called ‘legacy of colonialism' have already resulted in extensive discrimination against that minority in government employment, as well as in the granting of government tenders. It has yet to cross over into outright expropriation, though it is close to doing so. The recent exposure of the institutional decay that has resulted from Africanisation (most notably with Eskom) seems to have generated an acute new sensitivity to white perceptions of black incapacity.
The debate about ‘colonialism' then is deeply bound up with racial insecurities as well as nationalist concerns of ‘competitive prestige.' It is not actually about the negative or positive effects of the European incursion into Africa a hundred-and-fifty years ago, but rather about the place and status of black and white in South Africa today. It refracts very differing sensitivities. Many white South Africans feel that to say that ‘colonialism' was nothing but a ‘crime against humanity' negates their not insubstantial contribution to the making of this country and even of their right to exist. In turn, their efforts to defend that contribution are sometimes misread by black intellectuals as an effort to underplay the debilitating effects of apartheid-era discrimination on black society. (It is worth remembering, incidentally, that Afrikaner nationalism was anti-colonial in orientation.)
In his column Bullard certainly stepped in some of the footprints of colonial-era European racialists. I don't think this was intentional, though it was foolish. The destination in which he was heading was also different to theirs. The article, as I understood it, was meant as a satire of the African nationalist (and ANC) orthodoxy that all the woes of Africa are the fault of European intrusion and colonial exploitation. An obscure, and apparently still largely unread, English philosopher once remarked:
"The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error."
