Prince Harry killed 25 Afghans – he did not think of them as ‘people’

Henry Mountbatten-Windsor, known to fans of the British monarchy as ‘Prince Harry’, has casually acknowledged that he killed 25 peoplew hile piloting an Apache attack helicopter in Afghanistan. He did not, he writes in his new autobiography, think of them as ‘people’.

When former United States Secretary of State Madeleine Albright died last year numerous obituaries described her as trailblazer for women, as some sort of feminist icon. In a 1996 television interview she was asked the following question by an interviewer: “We have heard that half a million [Iraqi] children have died. I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?” Her response was “I think that is a very hard choice, but the price, we think, the price is worth it.”

One can only try to imagine how an African or Arab woman who had made a similar comment about the deaths of white children would have been treated in the Western media.

All of this raises an uncomfortable issue for South Africans. It is clear that the majority of our white compatriots have a very strong identification with the West, seeing it as a force for good and assuming that South Africa should identify itself fully with the West.

Of course there are black people who share these pro-Western views but this is far from uniformly the case and the sympathies of many black people are with the victims of Western violence – from Palestine to Vietnam.

In our media Greg Mills is often taken as an important voice on international affairs. Mills, who worked as a ‘special advisor’ to a NATO commander in Afghanistan, runs the Oppenheimer family foundation, the Brenthurst Foundation. Its board includes the former Chief of the Defence Staff in the UK and the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the US. The Brenthurst Foundation could hardly be more embedded with NATO and the US and UK military.

Unsurprisingly, as Clayson Monyela has noted, the foundation is deeply concerned with the war in Ukraine, in which the US and NATO are involved by proxy, but does not share the same concern for the war in Yemen, or the ongoing oppression of the Palestinians. We could add that there is a similar silence on the war in Ethiopia.

Robert Sobukwe of the PAC, one of our great intellectuals, looked forward to a future in which being African would not be a matter of skin colour. Today this vision of the future seems like a romantic dream. Not only are many if not most of our white compatriots stridently pro-West but critics of the West are often treated as irrational and immoral, even as supporters of odious non-Western regimes as if one cannot, for example, by simultaneously critical of the US and Russian states. This drives a serious wedge into our nation making it seem that many whites are, in terms of their political identities, permanent settlers identifying as part of the West. Very few than identify with Africa and the broader non-Western world.

The news about Mountbatten-Windsor’s ‘kill count’ is deeply sickening. How will our white compatriots respond? Will there be evasion or even justification? Or will there be some sort of acceptance that the West is not, as it claims to be, the enlightened force to which we should all pledge our allegiance?

*Dr Buccus is editor of Al-Qalam.