ZILLE
JONNY STEINBERG: The cross of SA’s colonial past continues in shame
'So firmly is SA nailed to its colonial past that it is free to move no more than its fingers and its toes'
Midway through the Helen Zille colonialism debacle, I read Cristopher Clapham’s new book, The Horn of Africa. In Ethiopia in the 1960s, Clapham writes, it was commonplace for intellectuals to lament that their country had not been colonised. While all around Africa European empires built modern institutions, Ethiopia, they complained, had been stuck with a sclerotic, old feudal regime. I chuckled when I read this, and I mention it here, not to provoke or to offend, but to illustrate how idiosyncratic and inward-turned most national conversations are. What exactly did Zille offend against when she spoke of colonialism’s good side? The other day I visited the old sandstone building that houses the High Court in Bloemfontein. I was accompanied by a man who had been sentenced to life imprisonment in that building during the apartheid era. Standing in the courtroom for the first time since the day he was sentenced, my companion remarked on how little the physical setting had changed. The...
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