One is told to
put oneself in others’ shoes. What does
this mean during the time of Trump and little Englanders and hatred of
foreigners and directionless rage? (I’ll
leave short attention spans and ignorance out of it because they’ve always abounded.)
Basic rule:
assume our first response is emotional and that we go on to rationalise our reaction
with more or less sophistication.
So I am a white
man from Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe.
I loved the country and later found that I could no longer live there,
which makes me angry. This is also the
starting point of my alter ego, Clone.
Clone likes many
individual black Zimbabweans – who could fail to? – but he thinks they cannot en masse run anything bigger than a
village or perhaps a rural bus company.
There’s lots of evidence for his view: look at Zimbabwe now, look at its
neighbours (corrupt South Africa mismanaging its resources or dirt-poor
Mozambique).
Clone looks
deeper into history and he finds that before the British came to Zimbabwe its
wealthy rulers, centred on the Great Zimbabwe complex, had long lost control of
their country and it had broken into smaller provinces. The powers in the land were ruthless
warlords, some half-Portuguese, some black.
He might have read about early European traders and hunters or even
heard that at one stage the Shona tribes were well organised – mixed farmers
with irrigation systems and some stone buildings, alluvial goldminers,
ironworkers.
And, being a
reader, he would certainly have read that the land was terrorised by several
waves of offshoots from the Zulus, who’d taken over large parts of the east and
south – and that not long before Clone’s grandfather came on the scene. These invaders were horrifically cruel. Moreover, slavery was still practiced in the
north.
Clone’s family
was originally English and he knows that for better or worse the Germans and
Belgians and a renewed Portuguese state were trying to take over today’s
Zimbabwe. Rhodes pre-empted them with an
audacious plan to bring order and commerce to the country, part of a grander
plan to build a railway from Cape to Cairo, extending the vision. Even the British Government, consistently averse
to taking on more colonial responsibilities, backed him, if reluctantly.
Clone’s parents
and their generation, after a sticky beginning, did ensure that Rhodesia became
peaceful and productive, with flourishing farming and mining sectors and a spot
of secondary industry. A system of land
apportionment insured that, unlike the peasants in Britain itself, the black
people could carry on farming in traditional ways and they became the
best-educated Africans (though only to a certain level) and by far the healthiest,
on the continent.
Then the British
lost their nerve, handing over Zimbabwe to African rule; Clone and his kind
were made unwelcome. The country
descended into ruin. Clone now despises
blacks and the British. Being a
Rhodesian, he is enterprising and energetic but everywhere he feels like an
alien.
In what way is Clone
different from me? In only one, the extent of his rationalising. I cannot rationalise away the fact that,
though my kinsmen did so many good things, they tended to treat their black
countrymen as something less than human, would not give them a fair share of
the land, would not give them a proper chance to build the country
together. They made some moves in the
right direction, but far, far too late. Clone
passes over that. I cannot.
Clone is a nice chap but the fact he did not sjambok
his servants was not enough. And history
is history but it’s only as good as its last generation.
