Speech by Belinda Bozzoli, DA Shadow Minister for Higher Education and Training on Africa Day, Parliament, May 28 2015
Madam Speaker
It is a wonderful thing that we are all expressing our love of and commitment to Africa today. This is a great antidote to the xenophobic hatred and violence we have seen in recent times, and augurs well for a more tolerant and outward looking future.
However we do need to ask which Africa we are committing ourselves to. In my view there are two Africas.
First is the postcolonial Africa so tragically depicted by the great Frantz Fanon, who writes in his prescient book The Wretched of the Earth about what he calls the national bourgeoisie.
This is an undeveloped class which, he says, enriches itself, and indulges, for example, in buying cars and country homes. And which, driven by greed and envy, seeks to replace the colonialists in all the key areas of the society, such law, politics, the administration and the economy without itself displaying any actual productive capacity whatsoever.