The 400 Year Myth.... There is a story that has been doing the rounds for some time now that is as pernicious as it is factually incorrect. I’m talking, of course, about the idea that there was unbroken, monolithic and systematic oppression of black Africans by white European invaders since around 1652. Our president, Jacob Zuma, has gone so far as to claim that all of South Africa’s problems can be traced to that date. I wish to raise several points that will debunk this myth and how it continues to hinder our attempts at nation building. Furthermore, I will expose its simplistic nature that is, itself, built upon pure, racist fantasy. Firstly, the math just does not add up; 1652 was 363 years ago. It was therefore 342 years between then and 1994, when white political dominance ended. In history, you can’t simply ‘round off’ to the nearest century and claim that nothing changed in the designated time period. There is a difference of several decades between the reality, and what the president and his intellectual brethren claim. The figure of ‘400 years’ is therefore meaningless, and serves as a cheap attempt to dodge responsibility for the ANC’s own political failures. Secondly the claim undermines the black African’s own ancestors, creating an ideological problem for the ANC. If Jan Van Riebeeck arrived in 1652 and immediately conquered all of the black peoples of Africa from Cape Town to Limpopo in a sweeping campaign, reminiscent of Pizarro and the conquistadors in Peru a century earlier, it paints the black people living there at the time as a powerless group that just passively accepted ‘white rule’ and sat around waiting for the messianic ANC to liberate them. This is at complete variance to the truth. Van Riebeeck was only around for ten years, and never engaged in an expansionist policy past his insignificant refueling station. Later waves of white immigrants had to deal with up to nine wars with the Xhosa, and how can this narrative account for the rise of the Zulu empire during this timeframe? Would a united white government, bent on the total domination of blacks with the technological capacity to put down any rebellion tolerate such a development? Furthermore, if white rule were so monolithic, how do these butchers of history explain the conflict between the two main white factions, and how black people willingly allied with them based on shared strategic interests? An example that comes to mind is how the ‘Boers’ assisted Mpande to oust Dingaan as king of the Zulus. Black Africans were a strong, independent people that fought for their existence, created new empires and enjoyed a large amount, if not total, autonomy up until at least 1879. At the same time, white rule was divided into four, small governments that had little to no power outside their settlements, built on land that the black chieftains had granted to them. To deny these facts is to rob those black African people of their dignity and autonomy. Perpetuating this myth is of no use to anyone, calling into question the function that it serves in South African political discourse today. The only function that I can think of is that it paints the white race as fundamentally evil and attempts to vilify even the very first white person to set foot on South African soil. The myth seeks to encourage the idea that there is a certain spirit of dominance and colonialism present in every member of the white race. The ANC wants to establish, in the minds of its members, that this ‘spirit of whiteness’ exists in every white person in South Africa. To do this it has, ironically, co-opted the basic narrative of the Apartheid historians, who also warped history to show an unbroken line from Jan Van Riebeeck to the Trek Boers to the National Party and its leadership as the expression of a white African spirit of pioneers and the rightful rulers of Africa. This author is convinced that this is the reason why there has been such a strong reaction from Afrikaners such as Zelda Le Grange and the Freedom Front Plus – they recognize these tactics from the previous regime. A more prosaic view will show that the ANC is using the 400 year myth to push the idea that there has never been a good white person in South Africa, and there probably never will be. This is the most repugnant aspect of the myth, and the most important reason that it must be unpacked and destroyed. In conclusion, we have seen the revolting distortions of white people that the myth seeks to establish in the minds of the black South African citizenry. It wants to retroactively expand the darkest days of Apartheid that lasted thirty years at most, back to the very start of contact between the two races, and then conveniently round it off to four centuries of monolithic domination. The purpose of doing this is twofold, namely to excuse the ANC’s dismal failures since 1994 based on systemic inequality, supposedly established in 1652, and to generate political capital by stoking racial tension. It is lamentable that an organization that claims to be founded on the principles of non-racialism should have sunk so far as to use race as the basis of its political mandate. m.news24/news24/MyNews24/The-400-Year-Myth-20150121
Posted on: Wed, 21 Jan 2015 17:16:48 +0000
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