The Guardian
By David Smith
4 October 2011
Guy Scott says post-colonial condition is behind Zambia and urges other African states to move beyond race.
Guy Scott believes his appointment could push other African nations to come to terms with their colonial histories.
He is outspoken, has the popular touch and just became the second most powerful man in Zambia. He also possesses something now rarely seen at the top of African politics: white skin.
Guy Scott, born to British immigrants in what was then Northern Rhodesia, believes his appointment last week as vice-president could push other African countries to come to terms with their colonial histories and move beyond race. One senior Zambian figure described it as “the crossing of the political Rubicon”.
Effectively just a heartbeat away from the presidency, Scott is believed to be the first white person to hold such high office on the continent since the demise of apartheid in South Africa in 1994.
Unlike that coercive regime, Scott won his home constituency by a landslide in last month’s national election and was subsequently named as deputy to the country’s new president, Michael Sata.
In his first international interview since the move, Scott, also a regular columnist and blogger, said: “It feels rather good, especially as it turns out to be a very popular appointment, which is flattering. There’s been no hint of any resentment of a white man being made vice-president.”
The 67-year-old grandfather is an anomaly in Africa, where decolonisation saw the widespread establishment of black majority governance and the dwindling of many white populations. But Zambia, he suggests, is opening a fresh chapter.
“I have long suspected Zambia is moving from a post-colonial to a cosmopolitan condition,” Scott said. “People’s minds are changing. They are no longer sitting back and dwelling on what was wrong about a colonialism. There’s a Caribbeanisation, there’s a range of colours – so what?”
Asked if he could imagine a white vice-president in neighbouring Zimbabwe, which became independent in 1980, he replied: “We’ve been independent since 1964 so maybe we’re a little ahead in the forgive-and-forget game. I don’t think racism has much mileage in Zimbabwe. Maybe it’s a lesson that will push a few others in Africa.”
The impact of colonialism remains a key faultline in African politics. Some commentators have pointed to corrupt dictatorships and crumbling infrastructure to argue that liberation movements betrayed their promise of a better life.
Others contend that the artificial boundaries drawn by colonial powers, and their continued pursuit of Africa’s natural resources today, sowed a disastrous legacy not easily undone.
Perhaps at the risk of controversy, Scott opined: “People are nostalgic, not for exploitation and division, but for the standards of colonial times. When you went to the hospital there was medicine, when you went to schools there were books, when you went to the shops there were goods to buy.
“There is a sense of these as being ‘white man’s standards’. Whether rightly or not rightly is another matter.”
Born in Livingstone, Scott’s background is intertwined with Britain’s imperial age. His father, from Glasgow, emigrated to Northern Rhodesia in 1927 and worked as a doctor on the railway conceived by Cecil Rhodes, as well as becoming a leading politician, lawyer and newspaper publisher.
His mother, from Watford, moved there in 1940. Scott studied maths and economics at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, gained a doctorate in cognitive science at Sussex University, and lectured and researched in robotics at Oxford. He has two sons living in Britain, a daughter studying there and another son working in Zambia. Scott has spent years working for the Zambian government. He is a former agriculture minister credited with steering the country out of a food crisis after a drought in the early 1990s.
Mark Chona, former special assistant for political affairs under Zambia’s founding president Kenneth Kaunda, said Scott was popular because “he followed in his father’s footsteps.”
He explained: “His father, Dr Alexander Scott, was a politician who represented African interests when they could not represent themselves in the colonial parliament. The family have been identified with African interests for years. So Guy Scott won massively against many ‘native’ Zambians in his constituency.”
Of the significance of Scott’s appointment, Chona said: “It shows people are colour blind and what they are looking at is performance, not colour. To that extent, it’s not strange and surprising, but for others it probably is. Here colour doesn’t matter.
“It very much indicates that Zambia has moved very far. It is the crossing of the political Rubicon in the thinking of Zambians that we are getting used to having a white vice-president.”
Scott’s high profile is unusual but not unique.
Despite the mass eviction of white farmers and president Robert Mugabe’s fiercely racial rhetoric, Zimbabwe has a white education minister, David Coltart. Roy Bennett, a senior ally of prime minister Morgan Tsvangirai, is also white. In South Africa, numerous white activists joined the fight against apartheid and some went on to hold posts in the African National Congress government.
The continued economic power of the white minority remains a highly contentious issue.
Blessing-Miles Tendi, a Zimbabwean political analyst and expert in African history and politics at Oxford University, said: “Zimbabwe has already gone down the road of racial inclusiveness in government. Mugabe followed a policy of reconciliation in 1980. A number of white Rhodesian elements were in government while the colonial era heads of intelligence and the military were retained.
“Other African countries simply lack signficant numbers of local whites so its a hard example to replicate. In other countries the memory of white domination is still too recent and whites control disproportionate amounts of economic wealth (South Africa and Namibia are good examples) to the degree that replicating Zambia’s example is a bit far-fetched for now.”