OUT TO LUNCH
___STEADY_PAYWALL___
According to the current narrative being pushed by what we genuine free thinkers mockingly call the “main stream media” (plus the usual collective of political nutjobs) I, as a white man, am the descendant of land thieves. Apparently my ancestors arrived here many centuries ago, killed lots of people before they had a chance to introduce themselves formally, stole their cattle and raped their women folk. It’s a pretty shameful past and I thought it would be only right to make amends.
So after I had checked my white privilege, my unearned privilege, my toxic masculinity, my homophobia, my patriarchy, my misogyny, my heteronormative attitude to the game of bowls and whether I had any more quinoa smoothie in the fridge I quizzed my sister in the UK as to this lamentable blot on the Bullard escutcheon. In between directing theatrical masterpieces in the Surrey village of Lingfield my sister has been researching the family tree and would surely be in a position to reveal the truth.
I have no reason to believe she is lying to protect our family reputation but it seems as though my tribe never set foot in Africa until the late twentieth century. Not a whiff of land theft, genocide, cattle rustling or sexual misconduct then (not in Africa at any rate). The only record of Bullard land settlement here was yours truly borrowing money from a bank to buy a townhouse, paying some transfer duty to the government and being stuck thereafter in the hamster wheel of bond repayments, utility bills and rates. As the years wore on the only thing to change was the enormous amount of money needed to buy a relatively modest home with the commensurate increase in transfer duty and rates payable.
I imagine this may be what some talk radio hosts refer to as the “lived experience” of many of my countrymen. Along with this absurd land theft fiction goes the divisive topic of colonization and whether or not it had any benefits. Poor Helen Zille got into hot water when she returned from a trip to Singapore and tweeted "For those claiming legacy of colonialism was only negative, think of our independent judiciary, transport infrastructure, piped water etc."