Black S. African scholars urged to correct white historians' distortion

by Ndumiso Mlilo

JOHANNESBURG, Dec. 9 (Xinhua) -- South Africa's National Heritage Council (NHC) has called on the country's black historians to make an effort to correct the distortions of history in some books by white historians.

This was said on Friday night by the NHC CEO Advocate Sonwabile Mancotywa at the launch of Black Sacrifice, a book about British warship SS Mendi which sank in 1917, killing 646 soldiers with the majority being black South Africans.

The book was written by Gladstone Sandi Baai who passed away in 2012 after submitting the manuscript to the NHC. Mancotywa said the book is the first one written by a black scholar about the sunken troopship.

"This book will remove some distortions and contradictions about SS Mendi by white scholars. We do not know a lot about ourselves. This is the decolonization of the African heritage narrative and participation of the Africans in the World War I," said Mancotywa.

He said South Africans were recruited as slaves and laborers and used as soldiers in some wars which were not theirs. Mancotywa said Africans were segregated when fighting alongside the British while they also staged their own in the ship. He said about 150 wars were fought against the British and called on that to be documented.

Jeanny Morulane, general manager of the Constitutional Hill, one of the country's heritage sites, agreed that history needs to be corrected to tell the true story about the black participation in the World War I and local ones against the colonizers.

"The sinking of the SS Mendi remains one of the worst tragedies of World War I. We continue to mourn as South Africa and many generations to come will do so. There was no compensation by the British for the loss of the black, some who had never seen the sea," she said.

Professor Muxe Nkondo said there had been a fundamental antagonism between Africans and the Europeans, and liberation movements in the continent have failed to address it.

Nkondo said Europe failed to apologize and compensate Africans for their sacrifice in fighting their (European) wars. He said there are still many questions about why and how the ship sank because some lies were peddled about it.

Another South African scholar Nomboniso Gasa Gasa said there is a frosty relationship between Africa and Europe. She criticized some white historians for mysticizing the tragedy, blaming the blacks for doing death rituals before the sinking.

"These are not closed chapters, black historians should continue researching and write the correct history. The SS Mendi is more than a historian's memory, it shows the border interaction of Africa and Europe and the entire colonial history and the annihilation of the African people," She said.

Gasa added that Africans should demand compensation from Europe for colonization. Enditem