Colonials and Colonists

A new buzzword--  Decolonisation.  Actually this word is not at all new to me, It was very popular in Zambia in the sixties and seventies. It is always evoked when people want to change names of public buildings and streets. I approve of it in this context. We don't want to be reminded by signposts and maps of many of the rather awful people who have given their names to avenues and airports. Decolonising school and University curricula is also  justified. There is probably too much emphasis on European literature and African History should be taught far more from an African point of view than it is at present. But nowadays  colonist  colonialist   colonisation. have become dirty words. A lot of bad things have been perpetrated by colonists in the past, of course, but I am afraid very often anti-colonial is used to mean  not against being taken over and exploited by foreigners, but actually simply anti-white.

I have recently read the opinion that it is important to define what a colonist is. My dictionary simply defines a colonist as somebody living in a colony, which in turn is defined as a settlement abroad controlled by the founding country.How does a colony come to be and how does somebody become a colonist. A group of people might be sent out (as some of ancestors were sent to the island of St Helena) to establish a settlement which would be a colony of their mother country. The land might be uninhabited like St Helena was, or there might have been other people already living there, but it would be land that had not previously belonged to those who were colonising it. So you might define a colonist as someone who settles on land that did not previously belong to him. An appropriator of
land.in other words.

White settlers  in many cases, simply moved onto land in various parts of Africa, built houses and farmed land.. These certainly fulfill that  definition. There are also those who have acquired land through conquest. British people have been very successful in doing this. One can  also say that white people from the Western Cape colonised most of Transkei and the Eastern  Cape. I believe that  people who are now using the term, think of a colonist as a white person who has settled on land that did not belong to him(but probably to an innocent black person) However the definition above can also apply to Zulus who in the past acquired land through conquest, and what about the numbers of  people from the Eastern Cape who have settled on land in the Western parts of this country that never belonged to them. So if you are deriding colonists and colonisation (and in fact there is good reason for deploring the exploitation that has accompanied colonisation) you ought to refine the definition and say exactly which colonists you are talking about.