Build and respect, not destroy

Historical monuments targeted

I URGE all South Africans to read Nelson Mandela’s speech to the Mandela Rhodes Foundation on the centennial anniversary of the Rhodes Foundation in 2003.

It was also the launch of the Mandela Rhodes Foundation which has subsequently, through funding from the Rhodes Foundation, provided generous scholarships to numerous South African students.

It is tough to quote one or two lines from the speech as it is indeed a Madiba classic. However he ends the speech by saying, after he had repeated their names: “It has been an honour to dwell in their ghosts’ company for an evening. Good night Willem Adrian and Cecil John.”

Madiba was not hateful nor at any time did he attempt to throw his faeces on their statues. No, he looked at how he could build something positive out of something negative.

Only short-sighted people take the easier option “to destroy”.

As for the latest debate about trying to eradicate history by throwing faeces and destroying statues, it is a ridiculous and simple solution. Once a statue is destroyed or removed, how do the proponents then go about rewriting the facts and the history books?

You cannot, as the past is the past and has already happened. A starting point though is for proponents of removal actually to understand history.

Not only does history teach us that if we do not learn from its mistakes, then we are doomed to repeat them, but it also teaches us that (with a few exceptions) “evil” men also do some good. The army of Napoleon, even though he unleashed 25 years of Napoleonic Wars, was the first to create an ambulance service, and his laws and restructuring of the civil service in France are pretty much still in place 200 years later. He was that efficient.

Look at two of the greatest German businessman, Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz. They were ruthless businessman.

George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, John Quincy Adams and most of the Americans who signed the Declaration of Independence were initially slave owners, yet they were instrumental in creating the greatest nation on Earth today and in emancipating millions of slaves at huge cost. Even the British “colonial masters” had their pros.

They may have built statues and been ruthless colonisers and businessmen, but then what businessman is not quite ruthless? They did however introduce electricity, the Industrial Revolution, roads, planes and government, developed the concept of democracy (that originated with the Greeks), time-lines, global trade, telephones, cricket, rugby and soccer.

This is just a small list, yet they are all colonial concepts. The idea is that we have all added great value.

And Rhodes? I do not idolise him, but I do respect some things he created. By the age of 40 had built an empire that in today’s terms would have been larger than Bill Gates’s empire!

It was the largest business empire on the planet, and made even the Vanderbilts, Gettys and Fords look small. It was a fact that Rhodes was an imperialist, and that many whites and even more blacks suffered as a result of his “Cape to Cairo” quest.

However, in death, he did something massive, he did more for education than any other person in history. His legacy, if left alone, will continue to do so.

Rhodes’s will created the establishment of: ý Kirstenbosch Gardens; ý UCT – more than 300 000 graduates since it was established;

ý Rhodes University – more than 150 000 graduates since it was established;

ý The Rhodes Scholarship and Mandela Rhodes Scholarship – more than 1 000 of the greatest human minds alive have benefitted from this. Graduates have pioneered nuclear technology, the Large Hadron Collider, solar power and others, to being anti-apartheid activists (Bram Fischer), Nobel Prize winners, poets, authors, engineers and presidents;

ý De Beers, which has paid and continues to pay billions in not only salaries to all its employees, but also billions of rands in taxes. At present you could also safely say that the R50-billion in taxes that the ANC government receives from mining companies and employees is largely due to Rhodes.