It’s understandable that a group feeling its loss of status would want to reach back for icons and moments in history to be proud of. But, aside from the fact that chanting a general’s name is a strange habit in a democracy, the cause that De la Rey fought for was less than commendable. Sure, the Boers were resisting British imperialism, but it was for the sake of their own right to marginalize and exploit the African population without British interference. – Thursday Video: Rock song rekindles ethnic tensions in South Africa – FP Passport

Michael Cognato’s expression of the “cause they fought for” may be an unconscious slight of the American and Canadian causes which motivated self-government in these countries. A mimetic desire to defer guilt or at the very least, a sense of responsibility, for our American and Canadian past upon the Boers is a curious, but I believe real phenomenon in North America. The Boers/Afrikaners are so well known by their critics here on the North American continent, because the Boers are a vivid image of themselves.

But there is great cause for self-doubt, problems for the language which we decide to frame the past of South Africa and for assuming that the Boers do not share a common history with their Canadian and American counterparts: Milnerism is one (which mhambi puts out well), but another problematic phenomenon to be wrestled with is the “race conciliation” discourse of Louis Botha’s first government of the Transvaal and subsequently of the Union. That discourse, albeit referring to white – white race relations, ought to jar our ability to wholesale blame the past – for there is something there that sounds very similar to the most progressive or perhaps simply the conscientious of us.

H/T: mhambi

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