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01/05/2005:

"Mbeki attacks 'racist' Churchill *"

President Thabo Mbeki has made a withering attack on Winston Churchill and other historic British figures, calling them racists who ravaged Africa and blighted its post-colonial development.

The South African president was addressing the Sudanese assembly, and he was criticised for not dealing with the government's human rights violations in Darfur.

He said British imperialists in the 19th and 20th centuries had treated Africans as savages and left a "terrible legacy" of countries divided by race, colour, culture and religion.

He singled out Churchill as a progenitor of vicious prejudice who justified British atrocities by depicting the continent's inhabitants as inferior races who needed to be subdued, and pointed out that Kitchener and Wolseley had waged ruthless campaigns in Sudan and South Africa.

"To some extent we can say that when these eminent representatives of British colonialism were not in Sudan, they were in South Africa, and vice versa, doing terrible things wherever they went, justifying what they did by defining the native peoples of Africa as savages that had to be civilised, even against their will."
Full Article: guardian.co.uk

I remember when I was a little girl I read an article about Winston Churchill. I cut out all the pictures and pasted them on paper and made a book which I proudly showed my big sister, declaring Winston Churchill 'the greatest man in the history of the world.' She smiled and gently suggested that when I got older I might change my mind. Indeed. How typical that that story has the tone of 'Mbeki acting up again.' Churchill was a virulent and lifelong racist. As a young journalist he accompanied a British expeditionary force in Sudan steaming down the Nile. soldiers firing from their ships as Sudanese bodies stacked up on the shore. It was a day of champagne toasts since the Brits did not sustain a single casuality. And throughout his life, Churchill never hesitated to make his view of 'the niggers' known. Why doesn't every British schoolchild know this history? About 2 minutes on the internet would yield up the story. Virtually every hero of science, literature, and philosophy of 18th and 19th century Europe and the US held the same views. Edward Said rightly asked, how are we to understand or even fully appreciate the 'cultural treasures' of Europe since 1500 if we are unwilling to engage imperialism and racism? Why are we afraid to engage this history?