MICHAEL MORRIS: Sloganeer who remains a slave of history
South Africans are being challenged not to morally disqualify people for the accidental fact of who they are, and who their ancestors were
Prominent UCT fallist Mlandu Masixole almost struck a note of intellectual maturity when he was reported to have said that pinning the hot-button slogan “One settler, one bullet” onto the end of his dissertation had done exactly what he’d intended, which was to “start a conversation on the settler influence in society today”. Unfortunately, the impression was undone by the very next line, a direct quote, which has him declaring: “To be offended by ‘one settler, one bullet’ is to agree that you’re a settler — an exploiter”, a line of reasoning somewhat closer to the truer anti-intellectual impulse of his earlier Facebook declaration: “One settler, One bullet. Each bullet will take us closer to freedom.” The problem, he evidently fails to appreciate, is not one of offendedness, but delusion. What he had hoped to dress up as an argument turns out to be only a thuggish threat, a proposition invested with so little intellectual faith it could not risk exposure to interrogation. A bullet ...
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