Issued by African National Congress Western Cape
Cape Town 20 March 2000
Mr Gerald Morkel
Premier: Western Cape
7 Wale Street
Cape Town
Per facsimile - fax #: 424 5650
2 Pages inclusive.
Dear Premier
INVITATION TO TREE PLANTING CEREMONY
Thanks very much for the invitation to attend the Tree Planting Ceremony against Racism and Racial Discrimination. Such symbolic actions will indeed always be important, and planting trees is always an action we should be encouraging given our fragile environment.
I believe, though, that what the people of our Province require more urgently than anything else is concrete action on those matters where we indeed have authority. The ANC has consistently highlighted such areas for concrete action. I remind you of a few:
1. Your cabinet remains dominated by members of the white community while your side of the Legislature (NP and DP) contains not a single Black African. Surely charity should begin at home.
2. The senior structures of the Provincial Administration remains the domain of white males while the numbers of people of colour are, in fact, declining at that level, with Black Africans almost non-existent. Again an area for concrete action if one is serious about the issue of race.
3. The distribution of the police remains a source of great inequality with stations in former white areas remaining advantaged relative to the black areas where gang violence, violent crimes and rape occur at an alarming rate. In a place like Citrusdal, for instance, Coloured and White police go on shifts based on their race. At the entrance to the Legislature itself, an ANC MP visiting me was referred to as a "donnerse hotnot" by a police member. These are things over which the Provincial Government can assert itself if it concretely wants to fight racism and racial discrimination.
4. I am concerned that your government, Mr Premier, has been over-sensitive to the farmowners, often at the expense of farmworkers who are the victims of violence for "crimes" such as eating an apple. The intrinsic worth of a Coloured farmlabourer is completely reduced in the slave-like relationship they have with the white farmowners. Yet you remain silent!
5. Not a word of condemnation from you, Mr Premier, when Coloured people are refused haircuts in Porterville, when your NNP Council in Blaauwberg make the people of Atlantis and Mamre pay for the use of the Silwerstroomstrand while their Southern (mostly white) neighbours enjoy a well-developed beach for free at Bloubergstrand, and when Black African women are barred from a linen store sale in Darling street, Cape Town.
6. Mr Premier, you are joining the chorus of uncritical praise over our 79% matric pass rate while you know that the white youth with their exemptions, maths, science and computer literacy will find the technological age open to them while most of the Coloured and Black African youth will be condemned to a life of unemployability and gangs.
These are but a few examples where we require your political will. This has been sorely lacking and renders meaningless any symbolic gestures. I fear that by participating with you in such a ceremony, you may leave with the impression that you have won more time to delay fundamental change.
At the same time as you will be planting a tree, I will be meeting with the ANC's Provincial Working Committee to finalise our plans for a Civil Rights Campaign against Racism for the Western Cape. This, you will recall, is not something new. I invited all people of goodwill to join us in this campaign in response to your speech this year when you opened the Provincial Legislature.
I am not ready to join you in the tree-planting ceremony because I do not believe that your party or your coalition has shown any will to even understand the hurt which people of colour experience in this Province. In fact, your constant denigration of people from the Eastern Cape contributes to this hurt.
Charity begins at home.
Sincerely
EBRAHIM RASOOL
CHAIRPERSON: ANC WESTERN CAPE