Mbeki Attacks 'racist' Churchill

President Thabo Mbeki has made a withering attack on Winston Churchill and other historic British figures, branding them racists who ravaged Africa and blighted its post-colonial development.

The South African president made the remarks to the Sudanese assembly, in a speech which critics faulted for not dealing with the Sudanese government's human rights violations in Darfur.

South Africa's president said British imperialists in the 19th and 20th centuries treated Africans as savages and left a "terrible legacy" of countries divided by race, colour, culture and religion.

He singled out Churchill as a progenitor of vicious prejudice who justified British atrocities by depicting the continent's inhabitants as inferior races who needed to be subdued.

Instead he devoted much of the speech to attacking Britain's colonial record in Sudan and South Africa, noting that Lord Kitchener and Viscount Wolseley had waged ruthless campaigns in both countries.

"To some extent we can say that when these eminent representatives of British colonialism were not in Sudan, they were in South Africa, and vice versa, doing terrible things wherever they went, justifying what they did by defining the native peoples of Africa as savages that had to be civilised even against their will."

The president made the speech on New Year's Day, but the full text was made available in South Africa only this week.

As an exile in Britain in the 1960s Mr Mbeki was educated at Sussex University and worked in the London office of the African National Congress.

Once considered an Anglophile, his admiration for South Africa's former colonial power seems to have cooled in the wake of spats over the Iraq war and strife in Zimbabwe.

Mr Mbeki flayed the reputation of the cigar-chewing prime minister who was named in a BBC poll as the greatest Briton for his leadership during the second world war.

Before reaching Downing Street the young Churchill served in Africa as an army officer, worked in the colonial office and wrote articles and books about the continent.

Mr Mbeki quoted to the assembly a passage from The River War, Churchill's account of Kitchener's campaign in Sudan, which detailed shortcomings in "Mohammedanism", or Islam.

"Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy.

"The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live.

"A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity."

Mr Mbeki said this attitude conditioned the behaviour of British empire-building in South Africa, including the crushing of the Zulu people and the scorched earth policy and concentration camps of the Anglo-Boer war.

He was in Sudan after attending last week's signing of a peace accord between the Khartoum government and the Sudanese People's Liberation Movement in Kenya.

Before addressing the national assembly he visited Darfur, where Khartoum is accused of massacres and ethnic cleansing, prompting what aid agencies consider one of the world's worst humanitarian crises.

Mr Mbeki said he had witnessed the "challenges" in the region and thanked the government for cooperating with the African Union and moving towards peace and reconciliation.

South Africa's main opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, said the speech was a missed opportunity to pressure Khartoum to rein in Arab militias, the Janjaweed.

"Mollycoddling the Sudanese government is hardly appropriate in the face of its failure to put a stop to the Janjaweed terrorism."

Douglas Gibson, a DA spokesman, said: "It amazes me that President Mbeki feels that he should insult the memory of the greatest Briton by associating him with British colonial policy of 120 years ago.

"All this in order to create some superficial similarity between Sudan and South Africa. There is no similarity at all. South Africa has a liberal democratic constitution ... Sudan is a country which is hardly governed and where the Arab north dominates the African south and west."