I was one who was born in Rhodesia, and was forced to emigrate whilst still a child (as this was my parents’ decision, not mine). Regrettably, I found my ‘welcome’ into the First World to be anything but. To this day, I maintain that the general levels of moral reflection and self-discipline among much of the populace in my current milieu are frighteningly low. I wonder if it could cross the minds of some of the moral pontificators on the evils of colonialism that acting upon their unchecked assumptions about colonial whites could give the colonial white immigrants, to whom some denizens of the western left are pleased to give short thrift, imputing to them collective guilt. This only leads to the blindsided newcomer learning complete contempt for those who wish to punish us for nothing we had done wrong. To act to punish without even the preliminaries of an introduction to the individual whom you are punishing is quite without morality or decency, in my view.
Ashis Nandy, the Indian post-colonial theorist and intellectual cautions us against making monsters out of the ex-colonials. To do so, he says, is to reinforce colonialism as a psychologically potent force. These disempowered colonials as victims of Modernity, dwarfed in relation to the gigantic mechanisms and devices of modern warfare.
Nandy’s position on colonialism lends itself to a truly moral appraisal of the colonials, who and what they were, and how they are really situated in relation to contemporary manifestations of power. The children of the white colonials are particularly vulnerable, even compared to their uprooted parents. My generation is also the victim of colonial secrecy about what went on, and religious shame, which prevents free communication, and makes us victim to both right wing and left wing propaganda.
Hastings position, by contrast to Nandy’s more enlightened position about the colonialism of the past, only contributes to a highly immoral and destructive blaming of the generation of the white colonials’ children, who did not play any part in the politics of the era. Hastings is reinforcing the violent psychological legacy of the colonial era, and is creating more of the anguish which the astute Zimbabwean writer, Dambudzo Marechera, railed against:
“We are refugees fleeing from the excesses of our parents,” he said.
Marechera, hardly a partisan for the nativistic order that preceded colonialism, went on to say, “Tradition, on closer examination, always reveals secrets we prefer to flush down the toilet.”
Exploring Black Sunlight, psychology, politics and history and how these intertwine 