Show your support by donating any amount. (Note: We are still technically a for-profit company, so your
contribution is not tax-deductible.)
PayPal Acct: 
Feedback: 
Donate to VoyForums (PayPal):
| [ Login ] [ Main index ] [ Post a new message ] [ Search | Check update time | Archives: 1, 2, 3, [4], 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 ] |
| Subject: Mbeki attacks Britain's colonial record in Africa | |
Author: David (Australia) | [ Next Thread |
Previous Thread |
Next Message |
Previous Message
] Date Posted: 02:10:56 01/06/05 Thu The South African President, Thabo Mbeki, has made a withering attack on Winston Churchill and other historic British figures, branding them racists who ravaged Africa and blighted its post-colonial development. Mr Mbeki made the remarks to the Sudanese assembly in a speech which critics faulted for not dealing with the Sudan Government's human rights violations in Darfur. South Africa's President said British imperialists in the 19th and 20th centuries treated Africans as savages and left a "terrible legacy" of countries divided by race, colour, culture and religion. He singled out Churchill as an originator of vicious prejudice who justified British atrocities by depicting the continent's inhabitants as inferior races who needed to be subdued. He devoted much of the speech to attacking Britain's colonial record in Sudan and South Africa, noting that Lord Kitchener and Viscount Wolseley had waged ruthless campaigns in both countries. "To some extent, we can say that when these eminent representatives of British colonialism were not in Sudan, they were in South Africa, and vice versa, doing terrible things wherever they went, justifying what they did by defining the native peoples of Africa as savages that had to be civilised even against their will," he said. The President made the speech on New Year's Day but the full text was made available in South Africa only this week. As an exile in Britain in the 1960s, Mr Mbeki was educated at Sussex University and worked in the London office of the African National Congress. Once considered an Anglophile, his admiration for South Africa's former colonial power seems to have cooled in the wake of spats over the Iraq war and strife in Zimbabwe. Churchill served in Africa as an army officer, worked in the colonial office and wrote articles and books about the continent. Mr Mbeki quoted a passage from The River War, Churchill's account of Kitchener's campaign in Sudan, which detailed shortcomings in "Mohammedanism", or Islam: "Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. "The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live." Mr Mbeki said this attitude conditioned the behaviour of British empire-building in South Africa, including the crushing of the Zulu people and the scorched-earth policy and concentration camps of the Boer War. The President was in Sudan after attending last week's signing of a peace accord between the Khartoum Government and the Sudanese People's Liberation Movement in Kenya. Before his address, he visited Darfur, where Khartoum is accused of massacres and ethnic cleansing, prompting what aid agencies consider one of the world's worst humanitarian crises. South Africa's main opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, said the speech was a missed opportunity to pressure Khartoum to rein in Arab militias, the Janjaweed. "Mollycoddling the Sudanese Government is hardly appropriate in the face of its failure to put a stop to the Janjaweed terrorism," an Alliance spokesman, Douglas Gibson, said. "It amazes me President Mbeki feels that he should insult the memory of the greatest Briton by associating him with British colonial policy of 120 years ago." Sydney Morning Herald 6/1/05 [ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ] |
| [> Subject: Yet Africans are quite happy to take aid from Britain | |
|
Author: Jim (Canada) [ Edit | View ] |
Date Posted: 03:00:29 01/06/05 Thu [ Post a Reply to This Message ] |
| [> [> Subject: The question is why they need aid in the first place | |
|
Author: Andrew [ Edit | View ] |
Date Posted: 15:58:38 01/06/05 Thu The rulers' incompetence and corruption is one factor, but the colonial record of the Europeans all over the third world certainly has contributed to their poverty... as has the current relationship between the first and the third world. [ Post a Reply to This Message ] |
| [> [> [> Subject: Well.. | |
|
Author: Ed Harris (London) [ Edit | View ] |
Date Posted: 16:15:34 01/06/05 Thu Until the 1930s, the wealth gap between the developed and developing world was narrowing. Now it is widening. Post-colonial regimes have made it easier for white people to exploit other peoples, not less... just because corporations rather than countries are now doing the exploiting doesn't make them any less exploited. But I agree about our poor record. Okay, so we weren't as bad as the Beligians and French and other European Empires, but the 'socialist empire' movement between the 1930s and 1960s, impressed with what could be achieved by societ-style central planning etc., handed over to the successor regimes a ready-made framework for totalitarian rule: central controls, the use of government as a buying cartel, licensing, economic dirigisme, the side-lining of traditional structures in favour of educated elites who were forunate enough to have gone to the LSE, and all that garbage. This has driven Africa down a path of indigence and starvation and we shouldn't be especially proud of it. On the other hand, it is not this sort of thing about which chaps like Mugabe is complaining. Indeed, he seems to imagine that the starvation visited upon his people as a direct consequence of his own policies are the fault of Britain. "You have forced this evil policy on me by colonialism", never specifying which precise aspect of the colonial regime in Rhodesia has caused him to rig a lot of elections and beat up his opposition. I would also argue that the British government's role in the places in which we settled in great numbers, such as southern Africa, was to restrain the rather gung-ho instincs of our colonists. We didn't much like Ian Smith, and he declared independence from Britian (the only UDI since 1776) because he wouldn't have Westminster interfering in Rhodesia with liberal ideas about treating Africans as real people. This can be seen elsewhere: the Proclamation of 1763 to try to stop the American colonists from nicking all the native Americans' land; the Treaty of Waitingi; the Privy Council's insistance that Australian colonists could be hanged for murdering aborigines; the list goes on. All I'm saying is that British government policy should not be blamed so much as the actions of individuals which were repellent to the government. [ Post a Reply to This Message ] |
| [> [> [> Subject: Didn't the Empire set up economies in the African colonies? | |
|
Author: Jim (Canada) [ Edit | View ] |
Date Posted: 16:46:30 01/06/05 Thu [ Post a Reply to This Message ] |
| [> [> [> [> Subject: Yes... | |
|
Author: Ed Harris (London) [ Edit | View ] |
Date Posted: 17:05:08 01/06/05 Thu ... and then it destroyed those economies with socialist claptrap and premature abandonment. [ Post a Reply to This Message ] |
| [> [> [> [> [> Subject: Colonialism and “Under Development" | |
|
Author: Steph (U.S.) [ Edit | View ] |
Date Posted: 17:40:10 01/06/05 Thu The problem with the idea that colonialism is the cause of Africa’s poverty and misgovernment is that it is counter factual. If it were true that English colonial government was the cause of Africa’s problems then it would stand to reason that the United States which “suffered” from this problem from 1620 to 1775 or 1781, depending on how you measure the end of British colonial rule, would have a much worse problem. Like wise, India which was a colony for about 200 years should be worse off than Africa. While the British experiment with socialism in the mid 20th century at home and through out the empire was a catastrophe especially for the African Colonies, the fundamental fact is that Africa was poor when the Europeans arrived, it was poor (though less so in the British colonies) when they left, and it is poor now. Colonialism is just an excuse for the post colonial ruling class to trot out to take the blame for its failures. That is not to say that the Empire and the U.S.A. didn’t make mistakes, we did, but our failure was to lose confidence in the superiority of our ideas and fail to teach them to those we had won dominion over. Instead many of our forbearers indulged in the unspeakably mindless and vile belief in racial superiority. Steph [ Post a Reply to This Message ] |
| [> [> [> [> [> [> Subject: Quite so. | |
|
Author: Ed Harris (London) [ Edit | View ] |
Date Posted: 17:54:08 01/06/05 Thu The old argument goes that the richer countries are rich becuase they all had colonies, and the poorer countries are poor because they all were colonies. The USA, Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore and others were all colonies and are some of the richest countries in the world. Norway and Switzerland never had any colonies and are even richer. On the other hand, until the 1990s Britain, which was the ultimate coloniser, was a complete economic failure. Bhutan is reckoned to be the poorest country on Earth but is also the oldest independent kingdom in history. I disagree, however, that we failed to teach our ideals to our sibject peoples. Often we taught them all too well. The democratic ones learnt about freedom and what-not at Oxford, then went home and failed to see any reason why that shouldn't apply to them as well. The less democratic one's went to the LSE in the 30s and thought that economic and social controls should be concentrated in the hands of a central committee dominated by a chairman, and turned Africa in a a collection of People's Republics whose human rights record makes the Belgians look friendly. And I'm not sure that doctrines of racial superiority were mindless - they were just very wrong! [ Post a Reply to This Message ] |
| [> [> [> [> [> Subject: I think the problem with the Empire was... | |
|
Author: Andrew [ Edit | View ] |
Date Posted: 17:52:59 01/06/05 Thu that they didn't really train the natives how to run the establishment they'd created. The settlers left, and so did the admin. It would be like the government privatising a company and sacking all the management and secretaries. The first Kikuyu (?) to get a degree was in the post-war period. So, it was difficult for a place like Kenya to rule itself since the natives never got told how. It was often an alien system to them. Mugabe is the result of colonialism rather than a real response to it. [ Post a Reply to This Message ] |
| [> Subject: Mbeki | |
|
Author: Ed Harris (London) [ Edit | View ] |
Date Posted: 11:54:52 01/06/05 Thu He's not a nice chap, Mbeki. His hobby is jumping on bandwagons. But it is a sad truth that, when African presidents are having crises and don't have the faintest idea what to do, they think, "I know, I'll make a speech showing that I am a pukka anti-colonialist, to distract attention from the fact that we can't do the blindest thing about our problems..." And that business about Churchill's book: "Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live." I defy Thabo to refute any of that in terms of the current goings-on in the Sudan and elsewhere. [ Post a Reply to This Message ] |
| [> [> Subject: So he's blaming Britain for Zimbabwe's current strife? | |
|
Author: Dave (UK) [ Edit | View ] |
Date Posted: 12:11:55 01/06/05 Thu There is only one man responsible for Zimbabwe's current post-colonial enlightenment, or lack thereof, and it is not Winston Churchill, Harold Wilson or Tony Blair. [ Post a Reply to This Message ] |
| [> [> [> Subject: Oh yes | |
|
Author: Ed Harris (London) [ Edit | View ] |
Date Posted: 13:46:51 01/06/05 Thu Our Robert is the African Anglophobe par excellence. You can always tell if someone is living in the past if they blame Britain for all their problems rather than America, which is the up-to-date fons et origo mali, so to speak. [ Post a Reply to This Message ] |
| [> Subject: Churchill | |
|
Author: Paddy (Scotland) [ Edit | View ] |
Date Posted: 18:40:53 01/06/05 Thu "Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. "The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live." Honestly, could anybody actually look someone straight in the eye and say that they disagree with the above analysis? [ Post a Reply to This Message ] |