We have a monthly book club in our home. Our group is fairly diverse, and we try to read significant literature (ergo, we avoid the Oprah Winfrey Book List!). We recently read and discussed John Carlin's book, "Playing the Enemy", which describes the 10 years between Nelson Mandela's release from prison and his retirement from the Presidency of South Africa.
The world was so caught up in the end of a wrong - but effective - system of government called 'apartheid' that they completely ignored what any student of post-colonial Africa saw coming as soon as the world gave credence to the ANC. I remember even as a young man, I feared for the white Africans, the boer or Afrikaner, because of the retribution that I knew would come when the African socialists came to power.
Did Nelson Mandela play a key part in ending apartheid? Certainly. Was he also a socialist terrorist responsible for thousands on thousands of black and white African deaths? Absolutely.
Support for the ANC and Mandela then and now comes down to the old addage, "If the ends justify the means, then the means must be just." This is simply not so. Ends cannot and will never justify means of any type. Means must be just in themselves.
The outcome of the South African Socialist experience remains to be seen, but to date the fruit of the ANC is bitter indeed. It cannot be argued by any reasonable person that South Africa is, as a nation or as a people, better off today than they were in 1986. Their economy is in shambles. Their society has disintegrated. The crime rate - especially the violent crime rate - has soared. And the immense volume of scenes of cruelty and wholesale barbarism make any snapshot from the apartheid era look tame.
I don't support apartheid in any way, but I believe that revolution without a well-considered direction and outcome will always lead to tyranny more brutal than the one it replaces.
This book was a reminder that we have friends in Zimbabwe from whom we have not heard in years. They are - or were - white farmers. When they were first married we got photos of their idyllic citrus groves and cropland. As time went on, pictures were fewer and signs of stress showed in their messages. Now, I believe they are dead.
I guess that reading put me to thinking about Kipling's oft-maligned poem, "The White Man's Burden". It's a sad reflection on the price a colonial power pays in blood and treasure in trying to better the world, and the thanks it receives in the end.
The White Man’s Burden
by Rudyard Kipling
Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.
Take up the White Man's burden--
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain
To seek another's profit,
And work another's gain.
Take up the White Man's burden--
The savage wars of peace--
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought.
Take up the White Man's burden--
No tawdry rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper--
The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go mark them with your living,
And mark them with your dead.
Take up the White Man's burden--
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard--
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:--
"Why brought he us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?"
Take up the White Man's burden--
Ye dare not stoop to less--
Nor call too loud on Freedom
To cloke your weariness;
By all ye cry or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent, sullen peoples
Shall weigh your gods and you.
Take up the White Man's burden--
Have done with childish days--
The lightly proferred laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years
Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers!
For those interested in the state of South Africa today, I invite you not to miss this website in your research. It - like South Africa - is disturbing.
www.genocidewatch.org/southafrica.html
Now for some thoughts on this poem.
Many – especially liberals – find this poem jarring in its patriarchal approach to indigenous peoples living in lands colonized by European powers.
It certainly reads like an ode to soft tyranny. Or to benevolent dictatorship.
But how does it read when we say, “Take up the Socialist’s burden--”?
Or, “Take up the Progressive’s burden--”?
Or, “Take up the Enlightened and Understanding Person’s burden—“?
Now we are not talking of saving people of a different skin color. We are talking of “saving” people of a different ideology – people whose ideas of individualism or personal liberty are remnants of a dark and distant time from which, although he does not now know it, the Conservative longs to be liberated.
I think that the guilty white liberals who hate this poem are simply not reading it in the proper light. Indeed, this poem should be the anthem to all those would-be masterminds who are so much smarter than the average person.
And to the Conservative it should be a sobering warning that those not willing to invest in their own liberty and well being will never appreciate something handed to them on a plate. They will take it from you.
And they will hate you for it.
They may not understand why they hate you, but they hate you for taking away their humanity; for taking away their dignity; for making them dependent; for your condescending benevolence; for your plunder of others in their behalf.
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