Amongst the slew of racist and hate-filled twitter messages, self-styled poet Ntsiki Mazwai, makes a strident assertion that “we have a group called coloured who come from white men raping black women…so erm…about white people”. Her rampant anti-white tweets continue with one message going as follows, “white people have had a very violent effect on black people…on many levels” and “teach the black child about her own heroes…because white heroes don’t mean @#$% to us…even white celebrities mean dololo to us”.

References to white people as trash and coloured people as products of rape culture must be condemned in the strongest terms. Mazwai’s diatribe has no place in our constitutional democracy with its emphasis on equality, freedom and dignity for all. The country has come a long way to retreat into a racist, intolerant and historically ignorant debate.

Mazwai’s tweet about the role of mother tongue language, while nasty, reinforces the imperative to encourage use of mother tongue. She writes that, “though one of her weaknesses was her inability to be fluent in her mother tongue, she was proud of herself because even the best white schools in the country had not won in trying to make her “worship whiteness”. Teaching, learning and speaking in mother tongue languages is an inimical part of the richness and diversity of South Africa and should be encouraged.

Mazwai’s despicable attempts to stir anti-white sentiments, including by dismissing and reducing the origins of coloured people to passive products of “white men raping black women”, have no place in South Africa.

By Ms Zohra Dawood: Director, Centre for Unity in Diversity 

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