Veteran ANC politician and anti-apartheid stalwart Ben Turok is the latest to attack government spokesman Jimmy Manyi, this time for saying “whites do not have to go to Australia”.
“I am beginning to believe that black chauvinism is the last refuge of scoundrels like Jimmy who have no place in our movement or government,” Turok wrote in a letter to the Cape Times.
Turok’s attack follows that of Planning Minister Trevor Manuel when Manyi suggested coloureds were over-represented in the Western Cape and should spread out to the rest of South Africa, with Manuel likening him to a racist in the mould of apartheid architect HF Verwoerd.
Turok is the newly appointed head of Parliament’s committee on ethics and members’ interests, but wrote to the Cape Times in his capacity as former national secretary of the Congress of Democrats he joined in 1955.
“I am so grateful to Jimmy Manyi. Speaking to the press with all the authority of a senior public servant, and on the occasion of presenting a report to Parliament, he is reported to have said that whites do not have to go to Australia.
“You see, for 70 years I have kept all my clothes in suitcases in case someone like Jimmy decided that whites are not ‘welcome in South Africa’ and should go to Australia. But now I can unpack my bags and put the clothes in a wardrobe.
“On the other hand, maybe Jimmy should pack some bags, because if that man sleeping in the Sterkfontein caves wakes up, he might say that all us foreigners should go to Australia.”
Born in Latvia in 1927, Turok came to South Africa in 1934. He was arrested and charged with Nelson Mandela in the Treason Trial of 1956. Charges against him were withdrawn, but in 1962 he was convicted under the Explosives Act and sentenced to three years in prison.
In his letter, Turok had high praise for the ANC: “Fortunately, the ANC is not as foolish as Jimmy. At Morogoro in 1969, the ANC declared that whites belonged to South Africa and were only ‘settlers in the historical sense of the term’.”
Manyi, he said should be given “a piece of land in the Kalahari to start his own community of ethnically pure Africans, diluted with the exact proportion of other races in what we could call Blackistan”. He said Manyi could get advice from Orania.
Called last night, Manyi laughed when Turok’s letter was read out to him, and said he would not comment. - Cape Times