There was NO Positive, and even if there had been - what Zille did is exactly as insensitive and terrible as if I was to tell her "Hey, at least the Holocaust led to the invention of Fanta and Fanta is pretty delicious".

And unlike anything in her list of examples - at least my example is actually true. There are a million conceivable ways to build railroads without colonialism, and we didn't even GET an independent court system until after 1994 (we sure as hell never got one from the colonists). But Fanta really was a result of the holocaust and without it there is no conceivable way it would have been invented.

Nevertheless if I did that I could not blame her, with her personal family holocaust history, if she never ever wanted to see me again. Likewise she cannot blame anybody with a history as a survivor of colonialism for never wanting to see HER again after doing exactly the same thing to THEM.

Any upsides to colonialism is worth less than Fanta by comparison.