A reply to Everatt’s scholarly questionable aggressive/insulting rebuttals.

I feel compelled to reply to Everatt’s scholarly questionable aggressive/insulting rebuttals. 

I’ve re-read Zille’s tweet and speech the “tone” of which Everatt claims justifies his article’s highly aggressive/insulting ad hominem attacks.  The tweet’s only arguably aggressive/arrogant “tone” comes from capitalizing the words “ONLY” and “EVERY”.  Her “remarkable speech” is nothing more than a stubborn rebuttal of angry, bloody-minded politician (based on cherry-picked ‘evidence’) when her unreserved apology was dismissed summarily by would be political assassins and their academic acolytes, clearly including Everatt.  It explains, using quotes from Mandela and Dr Maanda Mulaudza, a respected historian, that suggest that there were direct and indirect benefits to indigenous Africans that were derived from colonialism, regardless of the motives of colonial oppressors.

Everatt’s article and rebuttals to commentaries are resplendent with ‘loaded’ and personally insulting words like: “shitstorm”, “irredeemably insightful”, “whisker away from being canonised”, “barbaric” (which connotes uncivilized, primitive, unsophisticated)”, “theft”, “brutal”, “colonized as commodities”, “violent/murderous” and “rapine”.  Why not use more accurate words like “parasitic”, “exploitative”, “culturally suppressing”, “demeaning” and “dehumanizing”.  Everatt’s word-strategy is used because it doesn’t open the door for Zille’s possible colonial ‘benefits’. 

‘Efficient’ colonies imposed foreign, often relatively sophisticated (however unwelcomed) civilization that gave local people some education, economic ‘scraps’ and even limited opportunity for success, despite the fact that they were nefarious, usurious constructs.   There were rapacious, murderous colonists, but the vast majority were either non-lethal parasites or patronizingly benevolent co-inhabitants (e.g. missionaries and ‘liberals’).  But, current national statistics also show that ‘post-colonial’ rape and murder still feature strongly across the South African landscape.

Indigenous South African people were horribly dehumanized, exploited (even indentured) and/or paid a pittance for their indispensable labour.  But, they were not, as Everatt claims, “slaves” that were bought, sold and traded.  There was no genocide like that that occurred in colonial Namibia, Cameroon and the Congo – and more recently in post-liberation Zimbabwe/Rwanda/Burundi.   Colonists introduced some structures, policies, technologies that benefitted the colonized, however unintentionally, especially after liberated nations inherited and chose to keep them or develop them further in new contexts to the further benefit of the liberated.  Hence the arguments presented in arrogant, immodest Zille’s tweets and speech.  Indeed, if interpersonal respect and modesty were made requirements for ANC and Fallist leaders [as it was in Sobukwe’s PAC], their ranks would be thinned considerably.

I (and Zille while she worked with Ramphele) certainly have experienced this constructive development at UCT since 1994 (and to some extent before), despite the evidence-free protestations of Fallist students and academics and mismanagement by post-Ramphele vice-chancellors.  I would hope that this is also the case at post-colonial Wits.  Is Everatt one of the ‘progressive’ academics who uses words like epistemological violence/genocide to describe current curricula at Wits and UCT and ‘socially justify’ Fallist intimidation/violence/vandalism/destruction?

As I have said elsewhere, Zille tells [everyone and not just] black people how stupid they are for electing and re-electing the corrupt ANC.

Lastly, a Head of a School of Governance glibly dismissing a socio-economically successful nation’s governance as ”throw[ing] human rights out the window” while praising that of the current ANC seems indefensible to me.

The scapegoating any self-identified group of South Africans is indefensible and any form of racial nationalism is social cancer.  People are free to tell others how to behave, but not to impose their views.  With regard to Everatt being “a proponent of apartheid-speak or whatever”, that’s for his students and readers to judge.  Sure, respond to Zille as stridently as she does to others, but please stop short of defamation and character assignation.

I do this in 595 words.