The Sunday News
Something sinister and uncanny takes place in the South African information and knowledge economy, something that can be dismissed as silly or ignored as innocent and irresponsible. Now and again a white person appears in the social media landscape and expresses gross racism, after the usual public outcry the person apologises and life goes on until another white racist emerges and the cycle is farcically repeated. Among many, there was a David Bullard who publicly wondered in a newspaper column what South Africa and Africa would be like if the white man did not arrive with civilisation, and then there was a Penny Sparrow who thought black people are a pack of monkeys that annually invade to crowd and pollute the otherwise pristine beaches of South Africa.
Recently it has been an entire Hellen Zille powerfully arguing that: “For those claiming legacy of colonialism was ONLY negative, think of our independent judiciary, transport infrastructure, piped water etc.” After the traditional ritual of the public disgust and outcry Zille performed the customary routine of apology “I apologise unreservedly for a tweet that may have come across as a defence of colonialism. It was not.” Behind the silliness of such statements and the apparent clownish deportment of the people who make them lies a powerful and dangerous agenda of power and authority. Very easily these statements can be read as attention seeking outbursts of bored journalists and lonely politicians, nonsensical utterances that cannot be dignified with public attention, idle winds. That is how discourse works; words can be said as a joke that invites laughter or as an insult that is quickly withdrawn, but the meaning and weight of discourse remains in the public memory as a powerful statement of history.
Discourse is the meaning of language that remains after the words of language have been erased, silenced, forgotten or withdrawn. As a joke in bad taste or as a profanity, discourse is a family of statements that are scripted or verbalised in the knowledge that they may be ignored, dismissed, silenced or withdrawn but that their weighty meaning would remain performing the intended agenda of the writer or the speaker. For that reason, discourse analysts and critical discourse analysts know that discourse as the language that remains even when words as shapes on paper or sounds in the air have been removed, is the language of power and privilege; it is the tool of racists, colonisers and enslavers. In their administrative and juridical absence, in the absence of slave drivers and colonial administrators, where slavery and colonialism have been illigalised, discourses of slavery and colonialism are alive, well and ever powerful. We may write and speak powerful words but that which becomes discourse becomes not just powerful language, it becomes the language of power, the ruling ideas that Karl Marx wrote about.
Who exactly is Hellen Zille?
Hellen Zille embodies power and privilege, so much of it that her slips of the tongue or jokes are products of design rather than accidental sayings, and she is a polished and trained mind. Born of Jewish parents who fled Nazi persecution in the German of the 1930s, Hellen Zille is a child of history of oppression, survival and power. She and her parents were associated with the Black Sash anti-apartheid movement; they always have been noted white liberals. She is a student of the humanities from the University of the Witwatersrand, an accomplished journalist of the Rand Daily Mail who was credited with exposing the lies of the apartheid regime concerning the murder of Steve Biko. She is the wife of a distinguished South African sociologist, Professor Johann Maree. In 2008, as the Mayor of Cape Town she won the World Mayor of the Year Award for her performance.
She has been leader of the Democratic Alliance and presently she is the Premier of the Western Cape. There is no way that Hellen Zille can be considered innocent of history, of life and its weighty issues. She is not insulated from the cold realities of the life and experiences of black people in South Africa and the plight of the oppressed of the world. Hellen Zille is a 66 year old white woman and politician who embodies power and the privilege that comes and goes with it. Hellen Zille’s words may not be powerful but they belong to the language of power and privilege, hegemonic discourse. When she endorses and seems to endorse colonialism and apartheid as she has repeatedly done, far much more than ordinary incompetence is at play, she makes history and she means business. Hellen Zille’s actions, her words and her total performance of power and privilege are not the doings of an idiot pushing her foolish life on the stage of life; she is an ambassador of a worldview and a historical sensibility. She represents a kind of philosophical and political illuminati that is present without existing.
The clash of Histories
Statements uttered or textualised in the social media can be assumed to be exactly that, social banter. However, in the true nature of discourse behind the banter lies true matters of life and death, and jokes of the powerful and the privileged are articles of history and destiny. The argument that colonialism was good for Africa and Africans is not an invention of Hellen Zille. Empire builders like Cecil John Rhodes uttered the same, philosophers like Wilhelm Georg Hegel philosophised that idea. It is an idea that lies at the heart of the argument and thesis of the slavish and colonial civilising mission. It is a deeply held thesis of the “empty lands theory” which holds that Africa was empty until at separate times blacks and whites arrived, so in truth no one colonised no one or stole anyone’s land. On the one hand thinkers and political leaders such as Thabo Mbeki have presented ideas of African indigeneity and nativity in Africa as one narrative of African history; on the other hand Hellen Zille and other have presented an alternative narrative which holds that colonialism was modernisation and civilisation. South Africa has two clashing narratives of history, one that justifies colonialism and apartheid and another that contests them.
Tragically, the narrative of South African and African history that Hellen Zille recently represented comes as a powerful and privileged discourse. It is a narrative backed by power and money. In the South African education system and the entire information and knowledge economy, largely, the fiction that whites came with and continue to represent development and progress is believed as a baptismal truth. South African primary school and secondary school children may not be taught directly that colonialism and apartheid were good, but that fiction is not contested or refuted in the literature that they consume. As a result, Hellen Zille speaks a white fiction of South African history that is believed and lived in South Africa.
That is exactly why Africans from other countries are seen as the pests and the pollutants of the land, and not the whites !
Except for recent demonstrations by university students who demand the decolonialisation of higher education and the privileging of the epistemologies of the South, the South African education system and the total knowledge economy has not with enough stamina confronted that colonial lies that Hellen Zille and other continue to peddle, here as a twitter joke, there as an insult that one apologises for but ultimately in truth as a powerful discourse of history, power and privilege. The increasing vote share of the Democratic Alliance and the way the so called born frees of South Africa disregard African history and the history of the Global South in preference for neoliberal narratives, postmodern myths and postcoloniality testifies to the power of the discourse that Hellen Zille represents. In short, Hellen Zille using her power is giving respectability to racist and colonial discourse, she speaks to the sentiments and bigotry of Donald Trump, she is a true citizen of the present world system and its orders. It is people like Hellen Zille that make decoloniality make sense in the way they show how much alive coloniality still is. If it is madness of Hellen Zille to defend and justify colonialism, the method behind the madness is very dangerous.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from South Africa: [email protected]
