Rhodes and what he stood for.

The call to pull down the statue of Cecil Rhodes rumbles on. I listened to a woman under-graduate studying at Oxford, clearly upset that we, the "white" segment of the population should be made aware that our past, particularly in Africa is a thing to feel guilty about and we should flagellate ourselves on a regular basis because of what our forefathers did, or didn't do. She was sure in her emotional diatribe that the weight of opprobrium lay on one side and that left to their own devices, the indigenous African could make a good fist of competing in the world.
Given the state of Africa many decades after the fall of Colonialism, the wars and the genocidal attempt by one side or the other, to wring power in Central Africa or North Africa one would have thought that the old visible examples of the colonial regime, the buildings the roads, the railways and the ports, the airports and the civil structures, decaying but still visible would evoke some sort of praise but no the ideology gets in the way and even in a prestigious university setting such as Oxford, no one was going to dispel their tort.
It's a strange thing this torment which the current generation have for the past.
Living in a mish mash of values, where stricter rules of behaviour are cast aside for being against the "inalienable human right" of the individual they rail against a structure that built and provided the groundwork for progress. The inept, destructive, baleful way these things, which were gifted to a nation have been allowed to disintegrate was not on her radar. This  young woman would have nothing of this, only the mantra of 'self determination' had any validity.
Would that she could recognise that she herself was the product of her parents hand and that their guidance was crucial in her getting to where she was. And so with Colonialism, the parent body of a nation who taught the art of governance who lay down the importance of contract law and civil society, are they to be screamed at like a child screams at its parent in the supermarket mis-understanding the parents intentions, lost in its own pique.

When asked about her degree, she is reading economics and wishes to work for a bank !