#race row

New Post has been published on http://www.therakyatpost.com/world/2015/01/18/mandelas-former-aide-sparks-south-africa-race-row/

Mandela's former aide sparks South Africa race row

CAPE TOWN, Jan 18, 2015:

Nelson Mandela’s former personal assistant, Zelda la Grange, has apologised after sparking an online race row with comments that white people were being made to feel unwelcome in South Africa.

La Grange, who published Good morning, Mr Mandela last year about her close relationship with the late anti-apartheid hero, attacked President Jacob Zuma for blaming all the country’s problems on whites.

“I’m sick of Jacob Zuma’s constant go at whites every few months,” she tweeted on Saturday.

“Why can’t we co-exist without it having to be at the expense of one another?”

Zuma, under fire over an ailing economy and government mismanagement, had told a rally of the ruling African National Congress: “All the trouble began in 1652 when Jan van Riebeeck landed in the Cape.”

Van Riebeeck was a Dutch colonial official who established the first white settlement in South Africa.

La Grange, raised as a conservative member of the Afrikaner group descended from Dutch settlers,became something of a poster girl for Mandela’s famous policy of racial reconciliation.

But she briefly changed her twitter name to Zelda van Riebeeck to launch her diatribe.

She was soon the target of a storm of tweets under the hashtag #ZeldaDoesntEvenKnow accusing her of being a racist who still did not understand the suffering of blacks under the former white apartheid regime.

Tsietsi Mashinini tweeted: “#ZeldaDoesntEvenKnow that we’ve never felt welcome in our own country since they arrived!”

La Grange later issued an apology “unconditionally and without reservation to all South Africans who were offended by my tweets this morning”.

“Colonisation was a terrible thing that happened to our country, but I cannot erase or change it,” she wrote.

“We are all frustrated and angry about the state of affairs for different reasons. But that frustration is not limited to race or culture.”

She said all that the racial “blame game” achieved was to distract from the real problems 20 years after the end of apartheid.

“These are corruption, mismanagement, inequality and the delivery of basic services.

No sooner had I left my house for my fortnightly grocery-shop-buy-travelcard-in-advance-squeeze-funds-out-of-bank-rigmarole, had the first Twitter storm of the year erupted. The first black female Member of Parliament in the UK, Diane Abbott, 58, tweeted today, “White people love playing ‘divide & rule’. We should not play their game.#tacticsasoldascolonialism.”

Just a day after the momentous sentencing of Stephen Lawrence’s killers, a time when people in the UK reflect on the terrible lateness of justice and state of race relations in the UK. Now Diane Abbott, the Shadow Health Minister for the Labour Party, risks being sacked from the shadow Cabinet and her reputation -built over many years.

Her tweet was in response to a tweet from a freelance journalist Bim Adewunmi who criticised black leaders for being out of touch, “I do wish everyone would stop saying ‘the black community’ though.” “Clarifying my ‘black community’ tweet: I hate the generally lazy thinking behind the use of the term. Same for ‘black community leaders’.”

After Abbott realized the gravity of her initial tweet she followed it up, stating it was “taken out of context. Refers to nature of 19th century European colonialism. Bit much to get into 140 characters.” This riposte has failed to save her from a lethal race-row at a delicate time in the UK, where several scandals about race are still in the fore. Top Chelsea premiership soccer player John Terry now faces a criminal charge for alleged racist abuse against Queen Park Rangers defender Anton Ferdinand in a match on 23 October and Liverpool striker Luis Suárez has been banned for 8 matches for using the word negro seven times during a row with Patrice Evra from Manchester United. If a Caucasian MP had made those comments, they would be most surely dropped, without question.

She (or should I say we?) can’t have it both ways, she can’t play the race card when she is usually the first public figure to call out individuals for their racist remarks. I am astonished at the Cambridge educated Abbott’s maladroitness.

It is irresponsible for Diane Abbott, MP for Hackney North & Stoke Newington to say such things on a social media platform.

One prime-time news show ended their report with, “She could have avoided a race-row, by just adding ‘some’.”

Maybe politicians shouldn’t tweet at all? They’re all too opinionated to be able to govern their own 24 PR machine–essentially, the function of Twitter.

I’m pretty peeved.

This twitter storm makes me want to sit in sackcloth and ashes.

Diane was on the verge of something big: moving up in her career, emerging as a the sage black female voice, civil rights campaigner… with the prospect of finally, after long graft, sweat and tears, serving in the next Labour Cabinet –as a government Minister- if Labour could get their act together for the next general election in 2015.

Sadly it looks like there will be more tears.