Growing up in the Diamond town of Oranjemund, while attending Oranjemund Private School, there were these Sports groups that all the students were placed in based on your surname/family and you would be in that group for your whole primary school career. Sports was a big thing that time and we used to have yearly Inter house athletics, Swimming gala, Marathons etc where the whole school had to take part. The groups that would take part in the Inter house were/are called: 1 Oppenheimer aka Blue House, 2. Rhodes aka Red House, 3. Barnato aka Green House. I grew to love these houses and we students would proudly promote and sing songs praising Rhodes, Oppenheimer, proud to be associated with such. As I grew older and I started reading, educating myself I made it an issue to find out who these people actually were. Cecil Rhodes was the white English imperialist and diamond mogul who authored the Glen Gray Act which systematically removed black farmers from their agricultural, hunting, and tribal lands. An ardent believer in British colonialism, Rhodes was the founder of the southern African territory ofRhodesia, which was named after him in 1895. It was Rhodes who originated the racist “land grabs” to which Zimbabwe’s current miseries can ultimately be traced. It was Rhodes, too, who in 1887 told the House of Assembly in Cape Town that “the native is to be treated as a child and denied the franchise. We must adopt a system of despotism in our relations with the barbarians of South Africa”. In less oratorical moments, he put it even more bluntly: “I prefer land to niggers.” In April 1880 Rhodes launched the De Beers Mining Company which today owns about 50 Percent of our Diamond Mines down South. Barney Barnato was an English diamond king, who came to South Africa penniless, but within 10 years he was a millionaire and the Barnato Diamond Mining Company that he helped set up was a competitive rival of Cecil John Rhodes’ De Beers company. I pray and I wish these are not the people Oranjemund Private School made us grow up praising and singing songs about. I tell myself No school in an Independent Namibia would promote such, hopefully im correct and they had other individuals in mind. Anyway the moral of the story is let’s read…read and read, especially before we start praising people and ideas.
Posted on: Tue, 30 Sep 2014 07:16:37 +0000
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