The arts and culture minister claimed yesterday that early Cape settlers were 'directly' responsible for the anti-apartheid militant's execution.
The arts and culture minister claimed yesterday that early Cape settlers were ‘directly’ responsible for the anti-apartheid militant’s execution.
In order to accept Mthethwa’s logic, however, you would have to abandon a fair amount of common sense, possibly by smacking your own head into a wall 327 times. No doubt it is true that if Van Riebeeck had never arrived, Mahlangu would never have been hanged. But that’s probably because Mahlangu would never have been born in the first place. And neither would you or I.Van Riebeeck’s arrival, along with that of hundreds of thousands of Europeans in his wake, set the tone for the future unfolding of events in southern Africa, and no one can honestly say for sure what this place would be like today if it had never happened.
Why not go even further back in time? Why not blame Alexander the Great’s invasion of Persia for Solomon Mahlangu’s hanging? Because every historian knows that Alexander’s hasty creation of an empire set up many of the conditions for the rise of modern Western civilisation. That in turn much later allowed Van Riebeeck’s Dutch East India company to begin to navigate the globe in search of profit.
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