OWN CORRESPONDENT, Durban | Saturday
DURBAN Unicity Mayor Obed Mlaba has lashed out at the city’s ”coconuts”, saying they needed to be cracked once and for all for their colonial hang-ups and un-African attitudes, the Independent on Saturday newspaper reported.
”It’s high time black South Africans stopped being coconuts,” the newspaper quoted Mlaba as saying on Wednesday night.
Last week the mayor attacked Cape Town’s ”moffies and gays”, saying the Mother City was welcome to keep them.
At the reception dinner at the Playhouse theatre to honour a delegation largely comprising African-Americans from Chicago, Mlaba said it was sad the majority of black South Africans had lost their pride and dignity.
”You are black outside and you are white inside – you are two-coloured. You must kill that little white man inside,” he said. Mlaba said blacks had to allow ”the big black person to get up” with pride and self-respect.
He said his ”comrade in the ANC”, Cyril Ramaphosa, had once noted a feeling among black South Africans that they were inferior to other race groups, the newspaper reported.
This inferiority complex made it hard for the African Renaissance to be realised in South Africa. Meanwhile ”the rebuilding and remoulding of this continent” remained a challenge.
Mlaba said he agreed with this week’s episode of the television drama Yizo Yizo 2 in which pupils attending a Model C school were described as ”coconuts” by those attending a township school.
Durban and the City of Chicago have had a bilateral agreement to promote economic ties, arts, culture and tourism since 1997.
ZA*NOW:
‘Let the moffies have Cape Town’ April 12, 2001