Compassion must replace destruction

It is paternalistic attitudes like these, which are at their core racist, that have given rise to the #RhodesMustFall movement and the opportunistic EFF desecration of colonial-era monuments 21 years into our democracy.

So it comes to be that an Anglo Boer war memorial in Uitenhage, erected in 1904, is blackened by burning rubber tyres and the statue of the bronzecast Horse Memorial in Central, which was unveiled by the mayor of Port Elizabeth, Alexander Fettes 110 years ago, is damaged in a vainglorious whoop of triumphalism by a group of EFF supporters riding the populist wave of anti-colonialism sparked by the students of UCT.

While these red soldiers of fortune are desecrating visible symbols of a history they consider not to be theirs, there is a massive lost opportunity for debate and exploration of our mutual past that monuments like these can trigger.

The Uitenhage memorial was erected in memory of Afrikaner soldiers from Uitenhage who volunteered to fight against the British imperialists – Rhodes’ s people, Queen Victoria’s people.

How much could the EFF youth learn from the experience of Afrikaner women and children who were placed in the world’s first concentration camps by the British?

Why did the Afrikaners in their war against the British never see the majority of black people who were also colonised as potential allies?

How different would our country have been if notions of white racial superiority were not assimilated by the majority of the subjects of the queen or the Boers who resisted British rule?

Discussions like this were provoked by a project by visual arts students at NMMU and the Nelson Mandela Bay Development Agency in 2012 titled “Conversations with Victoria”.

The third- and fourth-year students carved lifesized fibreglass statues of political figures like Nelson Mandela and ordinary people and placed them in front of the marble statue of Queen Victoria in front of the PE library.

What would Victoria have to say to Steve Biko and Madiba when confronted about how her subjects marauded and divvied up the land inhabited by the Xhosa people?

What would she say to author Charles Dickens, who like many poor British children, had to work at the age of 12 in a blackening factory during her reign?

What would the descendants of 1820 Settlers say to the monarch whose government dumped them in the tent town that was Port Elizabeth to be used as human buffer zones between the colony and the Xhosa people?

What the NMMU students and the NMBDA did is just one way of exploring our colonial history that does not require the destruction of monuments of the past to engage in a conversation of our future.

We need more creative models of dialogue like this to get everyone talking about these things that hurt and divide us to prevent the polarisation that the EFF’s acts of wanton destruction are triggering.

What the EFF fails to understand in their enthusiasm for monument bashing is that the UCT vice-chancellor, senate, SRC and student body have every right to bring down the statue of Rhodes and all it symbolises because it is not a national monument, unlike the Uitenhage Boer War Memorial and Horse Memorial, which is protected by The National Heritage Resources Act of 1999.

Those EFF members, who police can identify through their Facebook postings of their vandalising achievements in Port Elizabeth and the defacing of the statue of Paul Kruger in Pretoria’s Church Square, face fines, prison sentences or could be forced to repair the damage they caused under the provisions of the National Heritage Resources Act if caught and found guilty.

I hope the vandals are caught and are made to repair the monuments they defaced, in particular the horse memorial as this was a statue sponsored by women of Port Elizabeth in the early 1900s who were appalled by the savagery of the Anglo Boer War, indeed a colonial war, which saw the slaughter of more than 300 000 horses which were shipped in from Britain through the port of Port Elizabeth.

In this war, 27 927 Boers died in British concentration camps, among them 22 074 children, while 14 154 black people died, among them 11 323 children.

While repairing the statue, the vandals should take the time to read the inscription on the base of the memorial reminding all of us that “the greatness of a nation consists not so much upon the number of its people or the extent of its territory as in the extent and justice of its compassion”.

This view is antithetical to the imperialistic expansionist views of Rhodes. It appeals for an emotion our country needs in abundance: compassion.

-EDITOR'S OPINION, HEATHER ROBERTSON

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