Durban - President Jacob Zuma's son Edward Zuma has lashed out at the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC), calling it a "vile dog unleashed to maul the black majority".
The commission this week found that an open letter penned by Edward Zuma promoted hatred on the basis of race and had violated the constitutional right to freedom of expression.
The open letter was addressed to former senior cabinet ministers Derek Hanekom and Pravin Gordhan, fired by Jacob Zuma in his midnight cabinet reshuffle earlier this year.
Hanekom, Gordhan bought the apartheid lie, says Edward Zuma
In the diatribe, Edward Zuma called Gordhan, former finance minister, a sell-out and “one of the most corrupt cadres of the ANC who thinks African natives are no better than just being sugar cane cutters who must be forever subservient to a master like him for sustenance”. Former tourism minister Hanekom, according to Edward Zuma, was a “white Afrikaner askari” and sell-out.
The SAHRC said it would seek appropriate redress for the contents of Edward Zuma’s open letter.
Edward Zuma's open letter 'violates freedom of speech'
In his response to the SAHRC, received by ANA on Saturday morning, Zuma said: “One is not surprised by the continuous senseless suppression, censure, bias, and native witch-hunt which is continuously wedged (sic) by institutions such as the SAHRC - as in the case against me but really in essence, broadly, the case against me is the suppression of the articulation of black pain, historically experienced by millions of natives in our country.
“I view, as I have always viewed the SAHRC, in particular its stance against me right now, as a vile dog unleashed to maul the black majority, to manage them, to sanitise their history, and to keep them in check when expressing their history and articulating their black pain,” he said.
Edward Zuma said the SAHRC had been "perverted" since its creation and now served as “nothing more than a post-apartheid champion of the exclusive protection of the minority settler rights, in the main, the white colonial settlers and their offspring the white monopoly capital”.
Read the unedited text of Edward Zuma's statement below:
In response to the Human Rights Commission's decision to take action regarding my letter directed to Derek Hanekom and Pravin Gordhan.
One is not surprised by the continuous senseless suppression, censure , bias, and native witchhunt which is continuously wedged by institutions such as the SAHRC - as in the case against me but really in essence, broadly, the case against me is the suppression of the articulation of black pain, historically experienced by millions of natives in our country. I view , as I have always viewed the SAHRC, in particular it's stance against me right now, as a vile dog unleashed to maul the black majority, to manage them, to sanitise their history and to keep them in check when expressing their history and articulating their black pain.
The SAHRC to me, although in its inception it was well intended and within the constitution - it has been perverted and is now nothing more than a post apartheid champion of the exclusive protection of the minority settler rights, in the main, the white colonial settlers and their offspring the white monopoly capital. For them social cohesion, translates to the protection of the erstwhile minority evils which now trumps the majority historical consciousness and current dire economic survival. For them social cohesion means the suppression of this black pain, their brutal history of economic and land dispossession. You cannot stop me at articulating the economic and land misery our people live in on a daily basis under this unequal and skewed reality that confronts us where our people are economically desperate and marginalised - and continue to be let down and sold out by sell-outs who pretend to be champions of their cause.
I will not buy into this warped watch dog of race relations and social cohesion while the masses of our people reside in abusive, pathetic and the most vociferous and vitriolic race relations advanced by some in the white minority and monopoly capital with its black proxies and stooges.
The narrow parasitical political elite stooge, who sold us a one sided social cohesion where it is black folks and natives that beg the white minority for peace and assimilation - when some of them maul us everyday with their vitriolic racist bile and literally unleash their dogs on our people - go as far as shooting us, claiming they mistake us for monkeys and heartlessly lock us up in coffins just for the fun of it. I will also not stop in exposing how former freedom fighters, the co-opted assimilated black buffer zone stooges have sold our native majority out for crumbs at the tables of whites for concepts like social cohesion, rainbow nation and one nation while they fatten their bank accounts - and while our racially abused native majority remain abused by these social racial hierarchies which they sit at the bottom of in a nation where all indicators show that it is far from being one and united.
Since it's inception the SAHRC has not made any dramatic material difference to end the acute and revulsive racism experienced by the black majority in every nook and cranny of our country. To them the articulation of black pain is a violation of human rights. Whose rights, the SAHRC stands for, may I ask? For them minority rights and freedom of expression deserves more illusion when it comes to the natives of this country - as in the shallow black witchhunt against me, a black voice.
The commission's role as in many of these institutions which were part of the '94 political settlement, is to lock the majority of natives and blacks in, to keep them in check with the whip of censure, to stop them from the articulation of their true pain and hurt about minority privilege, black exclusion, economic and land dispossession in their native country.
The 1994 negotiated-settlement and the institutional architecture of our current state, still benefits non Africans mostly, and is a conduit and arbiter of their aspirations in their own native country. Institutions like the SAHRC still possess a residue of the exclusionary minority mindset in terms of the cases and issues they target. Could it be, that such minority minded institutions and the SAHRC may just lead us into another race war?
Edward Zuma