On Saturday evening the South African National Editors Forum, representing the cream of South Africa’s journalistic and editorial elite, held a banquet dinner at which its Nat Nakasa award for editorial integrity and courage in journalism was announced. This went to the Daily Maverick editor Branko Brkic, for his role in managing and breaking the Gupta leaks expose. The keynote speaker at the dinner was Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng. Mogoeng had been asked by the organisers to speak on “the importance of courage and free media in exposing and holding power to account” but in his address he sought to interrogate the notion that the role of the media was to focus just on ANC government power.
He suggested rather that sinister external forces were, and probably still are, responsible for Africa and South Africa’s many problems. “To be truly effective in exposing and holding all real powers accountable”, he told his audience, “we must seek to know those powers, what sustains them and why they may never let go.” In support of this thesis he then quoted, as he recently had in other speeches (including to members of the judiciary), the “the loaded words of Lord Macaulay on 2nd February 1835 while he was addressing the British parliament”:
“I have travelled across the length and breadth of Africa and I have not seen one person who is a beggar, who is a thief such wealth I have seen in this country, such high moral values, people of such calibre, that I do not think we would ever conquer this country, unless we break the very backbone of this nation, which is her spiritual and cultural heritage and therefore, I propose that we replace her old and ancient education system, her culture, for if the Africans think that all that is foreign and English is good and greater than their own, they will lose their self-esteem, their native culture and they will become what we want them, a truly dominated nation.”
Using this quote as his authority, Mogoeng stated, “the much talked-about poverty, unemployment and inequality did not just happen. The contentment, abundant supplies of the needs of the African people, their cultural and educational heritage was deliberately destroyed by a colonial power to entrench poverty, unemployment and inequality. Crime and corruption, according to Lord Macaulay, was virtually non-existent. There was no theft, he said. The high moral values upheld and the calibre of the people of Africa struck him as being so essential to the sufficiency or prosperity, morality, peace and virtual absence of crime, that it all had to be destroyed to reduce the people to the level of poverty, helplessness, criminality and absolute dependency that they have been brought down to, over the years. The very backbone of their being and success had to be broken. Otherwise, Africa would never have been as poor, run down and despised as it is.”
To any ordinary reader with basic historical knowledge some aspects of this quote jar with plausibility. In 1835 Africa was neither a country nor a nation. It was riven at the time by the indescribable horrors, and devastating effects, of the intra-African slave trade in which the continent’s peoples were being raided, enslaved, marched to the Atlantic and Indian Ocean coasts, and sold off to European and Arab traders for export to the Americas and the Middle East. 1835 was also twenty years before David Livingstone would traverse central Africa, becoming the first European to view the Victoria Falls, and forty three years before the European powers carved up Africa between them at the Congress of Berlin. It seems somewhat unlikely then that Thomas Babington Macauley (the son of a prominent anti-slavery activist) would either have made such a journey at that time or seen what it is said he claimed to have seen.
An online search of the provenance of this quote quickly reveals that this was an internet meme originally meant to have applied to India. Someone simply took out “India” and “Indians” and replaced them with “Africa” and “Africans”. See two images below.