The Sunday Independent

Coloureds need to be ‘handled with kid gloves’

A RESPONSE to the concluding paragraph of the review of my latest book, The Great Pretenders: Race & Class under ANC Rule, by Don Makatile, in last week’s edition.

In it Makatile states that what he did not like in the book was that “Harvey wants to portray the coloured people as a special-needs category of South Africans who need to be handled with extra velvet kid gloves. This is dangerous – and a false alarm”.

I was honestly even more alarmed at these remarks by Makatile than he claims he was, especially when as a journalist I would have expected that he would know what has happened in coloured workingclass townships, especially in Cape Town, over the past few years.

After all sister newspapers, the Cape Argus and Cape Times, have been full of such stories over this period, during which about 4 000 people have been killed through gang and drug-related crimes, including children. So shocking has been the extent of these killings that we need to ask what has happened in Cape Town, especially when Parliament is based not far from those killings. Is it possible that because the opposition DA governs Cape Town, as a result of the wishes of voters, that not enough has been done to put an end to those killings?

The ANC-controlled state would never have allowed these mass killings, unprecedented in the entire history of South Africa, if they had taken place in Soweto, for example.

Against this background how on earth can Makatile admonish me for wanting coloureds to be “handled with extra-velvet kid gloves”, especially when leading figures of the ANC have conceded that they have seriously neglected the interests of coloured people, which is precisely why they’ve lost much support in coloured townships to the opposition DA, not only in Cape Town but around the country? Against these facts I regard such admonishment as an insult to injury. | EBRAHIM HARVEY Constantia Kloof, Johannesburg.

METRO

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2021-06-13T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-06-13T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://thesundayindependent.pressreader.com/article/281762747201418

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