On 12/21/2020 5:14 AM, Gary MacLennan wrote:
It is a standard exercise in Imperialist propaganda and the lies therein and the evil being defended squeeze out all aesthetic value.
The painting and ongoing tourist recreations <https://www.sa-venues.com/things-to-do/kwazulunatal/rorkes-drift-battlefields-tour/> of those late-19th century battles in KwaZulu-Natal (where I lived more than a dozen years until 2016) are fascinating. But if you're curious about an incident just over a quarter century later on similar terrain - the 1906 Bambatha Rebellion (by indigenous Zulu people against colonial Britain, the last gasp of their resistance) - then there would be one other battle-scene figure on that sort of imperial-propaganda stage: the medical assistant known as the stretcher-bearer.
My friend Ashwin Desai and co-author Goolam Vahed spent ages in the archives at Pietermaritzburg (the Natal capital) and in old newspaper collections no one had earlier consulted (or chose to ignore), and they learned just way too much about the way the leading stretcher-bearer of Empire contemplated the Zulu people. It's written up in a 2015 Stanford Press book, here <https://bunker4.zlibcdn.com/dtoken/7e8e5a557c6453493dccdd8ab9b55a86>: /Gandhi in South Africa./
Statues have fallen across the world, as a result. In an interesting CGTN spin <https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-06-18/Revered-but-racist-Gandhi-next-in-statue-hit-list--RqFzd2rrji/index.html> a few months ago, the Mahatma's great grandson endorses "Gandhi Must Fall" activism: "I am also not a big fan of cult statues. If removing statues help the cause they seem to be subscribing to, then absolutely remove them. If Bapu (Gandhi) was here, he would have supported these petitions and said, 'Please remove my statues.'"
Beyond symbolism, a very healthy rethink of strategic alliances of that era also helps to clarify why these kinds of British divide-and-conquer strategies (that my own ancestors engaged in, but in Asia) were so damn successful for so long, and why neocolonialists revert to similar class-privileging methods today, nurturing misguided compradors especially within this continent's Treasuries and central banks, who - like Gandhi a century and more ago - argue that whatever London or Washington have in mind for Africa is absolutely fine. (Thank goodness he finally changed his mind about Empire and led the anti-colonial forces back home in India, but as Arundhati Roy shows <https://www.thehindu.com/books/literary-review/the-doctor-and-the-saint/article5740369.ece>, on caste oppression Gandhi's support faded only at a "glacial pace.")
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#4670): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/4670 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/79120746/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
