President Thabo Mbeki deflected a question about the relationship of rape and the spread of HIV/Aids by accusing a Democratic Alliance MP of not understanding the scourge of racial oppression.
In a lively debate in the National Assembly on Thursday, Mbeki repeatedly accused DA health spokesperson Ryan Coetzee, a parliamentary backbencher, of not listening.
Coetzee had asked whether the government “is in possession of any information which suggests that rape is not pervasive in South Africa and that rape does not, in part, account for the spread of HIV in South Africa”.
In a prepared text — which Mbeki read throughout several intervening questions and interjections, including one in which DA chief whip Douglas Gibson accused him of spreading racial epithets — Mbeki said: “I would like to assure the Honourable Coetzee that the millions of Africans in our country, in Africa and the world did not fight against apartheid racism and white domination to create space for them to continue to be subjected to dehumanising, demeaning and insulting racism.”
Asked by Coetzee if he was going to withdraw statements about two writers — including South African journalist Charlene Smith — Mbeki said: “Clearly the honourable member is not listening to what I am saying.”
He said in a prepared text that he had cited two instances of people — one of them a white South African woman (Smith) — “who have written that our cultures, religion and social norms as Africans condition us to be rampant sexual beasts, unable to control our urges, unable to keep our legs crossed, unable to keep it in our pants”.
Mbeki said this is what Coetzee had in mind — “the rapists that … in large part [account] for the spread of HIV in the country”. — I-Net Bridge