OPINION - Donald Trump’s racist attack on four congresswomen who are US citizens of colour reminds me of apartheid, where we were herded into our own group areas and told to go back to where we came from.
All people are migrants and all are Africans because we all migrated out of Africa. One group left Africa about 40000 years ago and went to Asia, then over the land bridge which connected Asia with North America, and are known as the native or indigenous Indians.
The next group split off from the Asian group in the Middle East, went to Europe and 300 years ago migrated to North America.
Two hundred years ago, another group was brought directly to the US from Africa as slaves. Thus the Americas are a melting pot of Africans arriving at different times from different directions. For Trump to say the four must go back to Africa is the height of mamparadom.
This kind of racism is doing great damage to the US’s image. Besides his racist slurs, he placed a ban on visitors arriving from Muslim countries, regularly attacks the media and the LGBTI community, broke the nuclear deal with Iran, placed sanctions on it and is threatening war, recognised Jerusalem as the capital of the apartheid state of Israel without the Israelis agreeing to a full settlement with the Palestinians, is raiding US cities in search of illegal migrants, placed a ban on Huawei and accused them of spying.
Yet his National Security Agency’s secret Prism programme has access to servers of Apple, Google and Face-book, started a trade war with China and tried to roll back Obamacare.
He’s president of the European far right, not the free world.
Naushad Omar Cape Town