Open letter to Western Cape Premier
Dear Helen,
The proverb says that ‘two swallows don't make a summer'. Regrettably though your recent racist "refugees" comments were not said in flight nor is it seasonal or unintended. Over the past decade or so you have on more than one occasion revealed your mind, laying bare what amounts to blatant racism personally and organisationally. What this exposes is the pale underbelly of DA ideology rooted in its legacy of white privilege and the triple oppression through racial, class and gender discrimination that you continue to perpetuate and institutionalise.
Much has been said in newspaper hallowed columns regarding your statement that amounts to designating citizens of this country as inferior refugees in the land of their birth. Your utterance is not only a malapropism for the reason stated, its timing on the eve of the centenary of the Native Land Act of 1913 smacks of the type of insensitivity that has become characteristic of your actions and utterances and that of the DA in general.
This heinous piece of legislation - like your refugee comments - sought to alienate and isolate blacks from the land and found its culmination in the Native Administration Act of 1927, the formalization of apartheid in 1948, the subsequent creation of Bantustans, the promulgation of racist legislation including the Reservation of Separate Amenities Act No. 49 of 1953, the Group Areas Development Act of 1955 and the subsequent legislation effecting Forced Removals.
May I remind readers of the dirty petticoat of racism that hides under the suave media and Botox regime that you so liberally apply? Three illiberal examples suffice to illustrate how you personally have embodied racial, class and gender discrimination.
Addressing the provincial legislature on 20 October 1999 (Hansard page 597) and referring to black women MPs in the National Assembly you said: "They take up space there, earn a salary, eat a big lunch, pack in ‘padkos' and drive-off..."
Your insensitivity was further demonstrated in your twitter exchange with musician Simphiwe Dana on the subject of racism in Cape Town when you said: "You're a respected black professional. Don't try to be a professional black." And your subsequent denial in your reply to your Budget debate on the 23rd March 2011 when you said: "I have never called anybody a professional black. I never have - never ever!" This was denied despite the public record of your blatant racism.
In 2009 you appointed a virtually all white male cabinet and defended your actions under the guise of "wit for purpose" defying all criticism, public debate and rebuke. This return of pseudo white rule in the Western Cape has signalled a number of significant developments including the preservation of white privilege, perpetuation of old skewed ‘apartheid style' spatial planning patterns, re-enforcement of the state bureaucracy and apparatus with apartheid era dinosaurs, securocrats and apparatchiks, prioritization of resources and projects towards pre-dominantly white areas aka bicycle lanes and rapid public transport system and placating and patronizing blacks with the distribution of "blue bag food parcels".
This behaviour and the above-mentioned utterances resonate the ethos of arrogance and false racial superiority that characterized centuries of colonization and decades of Apartheid culminating in a pamphlet distributed by the forerunners of the DA on the eve of South Africa's first democratic elections in 1994 and selectively distributed in some coloured townships saying: "if Mandela takes over you will lose your house, furniture and car".
Despite all the DAs window dressing you deplorably have repeatedly pulled out this tactic of playing up "coloured fears, pandering to white insecurities and deepening black Africans' sense of isolation. The intent of the recent refugee slur becomes apparent and places it in its broader context. Far from being an incidental and fleeting bout of foot and mouth disease you have deliberately touched and stomped on a raw nerve. It should therefore be no surprise when such callousness and insensitivity results in communities protesting and standing up to the DA as it is merely a case of the birds coming home to roost.
Marius Fransman
Western Cape ANC leader
4 April 2012
Isssued by the ANC Western Cape, April 4 2012
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