The jaundiced emptiness of decoloniality

WITH his belief that South African history began only in 1994, Julius Malema would endorse Professor Dasarath Chetty's view that in order to cleanse and deodorise the present, reminders of the past in the form of statues and monuments should be toppled and removed (the POST, October 1 - 5).

- DR DUNCAN DU BOIS

Given his academic mooring as a sociologist, it is puzzling that by advocating the erasure of reminders of past eras, Chetty does not appreciate that such action erases a sense of identity.

For it is only against the past that an identity can be profiled and understood. Every week, the POST newspaper carries articles celebrating the lives of individuals whose achievements are a measure of how they navigated the difficulties of the past.

Progress cannot be gauged without antecedents. The removal of all optical relics erected in South Africa before 1994, would diminish if not cancel the meaning of liberation since 1994. If in that historical limbo new statues and monuments were erected to celebrate the role of those who brought liberation, what people had been liberated from would be a blank page.