Myburgh insufferable and arrogant

KEN OWEN

Sunday Independent April 8 2001

The deficiencies of James Myburgh's culture-bound attempt to explain Thabo Mbeki by reference to Hannah Arendt's views on European totalitarianism ‘Mbeki and the total formula", (The Sunday Independent, April 1), are many but I confine myself to two.

First, Myburgh's theory as expounded, applies to Verwoerd, PW Botha, and indeed to any political leader who reacts to dissidence in the ranks by saying, as Tony Leon recently did. "There's the door!" Politicians share a lust for power and they share many of the unappealing attributes that go with it.

More seriously, Myburgh is being insufferably Eurocentric, morally complacent, and racially condescending. To understand the effect of his arrogance he might read another classic text, Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, which describes in poignant terms the destructive impact on African leaders of exile in Europe - "that same Europe where they were never done talking of Man, and where they never stop proclaiming that they are anxious for the welfare of man: today we know with what sufferings humanity has paid for every one of their triumphs of the mind".

Fanon might not explain President Mbeki, but it should alert Myburgh to the special sensitivity of the African intellectual who, in Fanon's words. "Is terrified by the void, the degradation, and the savagery he sees" in the wake of colonialism.

Lacking awareness of the problems of post-colonial reconstruction emotional as well as physical, Myburgh blunders across the African landscape oblivious of the offence he gives, and is therefore very pleased with his own cleverness.

Cape Town