Blackman Ngoro, who was ousted this week as media adviser to the mayor of Cape Town, has bounced back with a new approach to race relations.
He has offered space on his website for ”Khoisan intellectuals” to write about their history, and urged that the term ”coloured” should be buried ”once and for all”.
Ngoro’s dismissal from the mayor’s office followed a furore over an article he posted on his Online Africa Asia News website in which he said Africans were culturally superior to coloured people, and that coloureds would ”die a drunken death” if they did not undergo ideological transformation.
The article has since been removed from the site.
He says in the newly posted piece that the ”editorial line” of the website has been ”restructured”.
”There were many readers who wrote that ‘coloured’ is a deragatory [sic] term used by the apartheid regime on many people in the Western Cape, including the Khoisan,” he says.
”We would therefore like to invite any Khoisan intellectuals to write about their history on this site.
”Perhaps through fragmentation we can make sense of what the Khoisan people believe, what the others of Malay origin, of Chinese origin, and other nationalities have to say.
”Would it therefore be improper to suggest that as in the USA [United States] where different people have claimed identities such as Afro-American, Japanese American, etc we can see in South Africa people with such identities as Xhosa, Zulu, Khoisan, Malay-South African, [or] Chinese-South African in order to bury once and for all the term ‘coloured’ and all its negative connotations?”
Ngoro also says on the website that because information from the site has been ”abused by the mainstream media”, it will in future be restricted to approved password holders.
”Mainstream media may not use articles from this site without prior approval,” he says. — Sapa