I would like to question whether Dennis Brutus has the necessary credentials to address the United Nations World Conference Against Racism.
His past suggests he is not without racial bias.
In the Seventies Brutus was a prime instigator in an unsuccessful attempt to have my grandfather, a veteran foe of apartheid and coauthor of the United Nationssponsored publication, This Is Apartheid, ejected from a professorship he held at the black American university, Howard, near Washington DC.
The only motive for his McCarthy-like vilification of Senator Leslie Rubin was that he was a white South African and a member of the non-racial Liberal Party.
Brutus’s campaign to oust my grandfather sought to play off the origins of the college and the campus undergraduates against my grandfather’s place of birth and colour.
He orchestrated a campaign of walk-outs by students that eventually culminated in a student throwing objects at my grandfather, and the mass picketing of his lectures.
His efforts initially resulted in the university acquiescing and my grandfather was removed from his post. Fortunately, academic colleagues rallied around and, once it was shown that Brutus’s accusations were false, and based on race alone, he was reinstated.
The tragedy was that my grandfather was forced to prove his innocence, while Brutus, like McCarthy, could provide nothing but innuendo.
That Brutus should wish to demonstrate and campaign against a conference that wishes to repudiate his type of anti-social behaviour is, ironically, true to his convictions. Clive Rubin, Cape Town