LETTER: ANC uses African victimhood

President Cyril Ramaphosa’s address on the 20th anniversary of the Durban Declaration given during the 76th UN General Assembly, symbolised the dysfunctionality of this organisation.

The Durban Declaration proposed “concrete” measures to combat racism. During his address, Ramaphosa stated that: “We are called upon by history to redouble our efforts to build a world free of racism.” But only last week an SA court ruled against his government for making emergency assistance to the tourism industry applicable only to black-owned companies.

Ramaphosa himself has recently doubled down on the ANC’s policy of BEE.  Unsurprisingly, this breathtaking hypocrisy went unchallenged, as did his mangled historical justification for slavery reparations.

Ignoring the practical challenges of compensating slavery’s descendants, slavery was not a particular injustice perpetrated by “imperialist whites” on “blacks”. The word refers to the Slavs, who were still being  enslaved by Ottoman Turks after black slavery had been outlawed by none other than the Western imperialists.

In Africa, slavery had existed  before the slaving ships arrived. They simply  facilitated a lucrative  export market, of which African elites took full advantage. In SA, the “white” population can probably identify more ancestral slaves than the Africans.

So why spew all this nonsense before the world’s leadership? It is the woke way of maintaining  African victimhood in an attempt to make the West feel sufficiently guilty to put more money in the African begging bowl.

For Ramaphosa’s ANC, quixotic attempts to right the perceived wrongs of the past are always safer than doing something about present corruption. Whenever this threatens to disillusion the faithful, repeated references to such previous evils have, until now, been a sure-fire way to bring the voters back.   

James Cunningham
Camps Bay

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