In the last few years there has been a notable increase in the level and virulence of anti-white rhetoric in South Africa. This constitutes hate speech in its true form. The purpose of restricting such speech is traditionally precisely to protect vulnerable minorities from language which incites violence against them; for example, to protect the Muslim and Jewish communities in Europe, and black minorities and gay people from potential outbreaks of xenophobic or homophobic attacks.
Whites make up eight percent of the South African population, and the increasingly strident “anti-colonial” rhetoric we are witnessing needs to be challenged. It is self-evidently dangerous for one particular minority to be blamed for all the present problems of a country.
It is undeniable that, along with the bad, colonialism brought some good to South Africa – the Christian religion for one thing. In the 2001 census 79.77 percent of South Africans claimed to be adherents to Christianity. If Christianity is appreciated and valued so much by so many South Africans, then the debate over whether colonialism’s legacy was “not only negative” need not go any further.
Helen Zille illustrated this clearly by quoting a section of a poem by the renowned Thembu poet (imbongi) D.L.P. Yali-Manisi, which shows how the Xhosa appreciated missionaries such as Bennie and Ross, who transcribed the Xhosa language at Lovedale in the Eastern Cape. Zille quoted the Xhosa version but I will quote the last six lines of the English translation, which can be found online in Jeff Opland’s Oral Tradition (1988):
We’re thankful, we of the Xhosa,
For the arrival of men like Ross and Bennie
Who ignited the mind of the Xhosa
On the day they first wrote down the language
The unshakable language of the Xhosa.
I disappear!
The current debate then is basically one of truth versus political correctness, and truth doesn’t just win by itself. It needs to be fought for. All that Zille did was state an obvious fact, which no reasonable person can deny, and then all hell broke loose because there is nothing like the truth to hurt people’s feelings.