In South Africa: A Tribute To Apartheid Architects

In South Africa: A Tribute To Apartheid Architects.

ELIAS BIRYABAREMA
Grahamstown.

On 21st March 1960, a brutal clash erupted in South Africa’s Black township of Sharpeville between a crowd of about 5000 Blacks protesting arbitrary pass laws and the apartheid Police hell-bent on snuffing out native agitation.

69 protesters were murdered by the police before the unrest was quelled: a massacre that stunned the world and became the defining face of the Anglo-Dutch White supremacist regime in South Africa.

From then on, the resentment that had been bubbling across Africa and the world at large toward Whites for their repression and segregation of Black people took on a new grim intensity. Whites, as viewed through the Sharpeville bloodbath, became to the world a face of; evil, horror, extremism, savagery, monstrosity, inhumanity, vile, cruelty etc.
In the three South African novels I encountered in my early life—In The Fog of The Seasons’ End (Alex La Guma), Mine Boy (Peter Abrahams) and Cry, the Beloved Country (Alan Paton)—this is the standard theme, the quintessential face of White South African rulers.

In classroom lessons, endless books, songs, drama, media, speeches about Apartheid all across Africa and beyond we were drenched in this grotesque image of Whites as a merciless and greedy bunch that fled the discomfiting temperate climes and impoverished lives in Europe to come, subjugate and brutalise Blacks so they can revel in Africa’s subtropical paradise.

As I knew then and know now, all of this is true. True to the last bit.

But something else, too, is true, in fact much truer than all the foregoing.
And when it dawned on me it immediately started to influence my entire perception of the generations of White people than run South Africa for nearly a century before Blacks assumed power after the collapse of apartheid in 1994.

On the night of September 9th this year, I landed at Oliver Thambo International Airport in Johannesburg en route to Grahamstown, a tiny city in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa.
Almost instantly thousands questions started to puzzle my mind. Oliver Thambo—super-sophisticated, monstrously vast, hyperactive—is just about any of Europe’s flagship airports: Schiphol in Amsterdam, Brussels, Heathrow etc. In otherwords as soon as you land at Oliver Thambo, what is the image that immediately strikes one: a clean, advanced, efficient republic that is clearly incongruous with that that we know about Africa and Africans—a basic inability to build firm and modern nations.

Well, the answer to that contradiction, like the observation itself, is basically simple and well known: South Africa, Africa’s richest republic was built by those same people that were portrayed all around the world as extremist thugs and savages.
This pretty much is known.

But then comes the riddle that is still unsolved in my mind: how did these extremist Whites—operating in a hostile continental political environment; harassed and sabotaged by a determined Black liberation struggle; hated and economically isolated by the world—build an awesome and advanced nation that is South Africa?
How can it be possible? How did these crazy and maniacal racists still manage to overcome this maelstrom of odds and successfully transplant a European civilisation onto to a continent that has to this day stupefied all mankind?

This is the riddle that every African should attempt to crack.

We all consider apartheid to be one of history’s greatest crimes against humanity, black humanity. And those who perpetuated it in South Africa will forever remain in the world’s Hall of the Infamous, characters and regimes better forgotten by mankind.

That much is deserved.

But then we Africans and the world should be counter accused of having committed the gravest crime ever to a people (Anglo-Dutch supremacists): a failure to acknowledge them as the architects and builders of Black Africa’s greatest republic ever. In retrospect, I think it is equally criminal for all those teachers, singers, writers, dramatists, speechwriters and the media to have deliberately omitted telling us that those same White racists had given to our continent that that everyone of us had never achieved (and never could)—a great nation.

To me this is what is important and what should have been stressed in class. This is what my teacher should have asked me to find out: how come Kenya’s Jomo Kenyata and Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere could not transform their nations even though both have seacoasts, and have never witnessed military upheaval or any of the crises that beset White South Africa for decades?

We’re routinely told that corruption is the single evil responsible for Africa’s underdevelopment. But socialist and modest Nyerere has a wide reputation of a honest and fairly clean government. And yet years of dogged attempts at nation building left a cripple of a nation that is Tanzania today while besieged and isolated Whites down south rapidly turned around an impoverished settlement into a howling, wealthy nation.
How could my teacher miss to tell me this?

Besides their indignation at the horrors suffered under White rule: Black South Africans should eternally be grateful to their Anglo-Dutch conquerors for having bequeathed them the greatest and proudest heritage ever to Black mankind—a modern nation.

Had South Africa, with its vast mineral endowment, had a similar colonial history to that of many African nations where European colonialists suddenly succumbed to naïve nationalist forces and abandoned power, there’s a high likelihood that it would have turned out a D.R. Congo, Mali or Malawi—a backwater trapped at the bottom of human civilisation.