Helen Zille's short-sighted tweets about HIV and Aids fuel HIV stigma.
Helen Zille has upset the nation in just 140 characters – again. South Africans have long pleaded with the Western Cape premier and former Democratic Alliance (DA) leader to put her phone down but, on Wednesday morning, people woke up to a tweet where Zille seemed to think it was okay to racially classify people in a restaurant.
The now deleted tweet read: “Why is it OK to racially classify ppl for jobs but not to identify ppl at a table by their race?”. Zille was initially responding to an article shared by Huffington Post SA editor-at-large Ferial Haffajee on Twitter.
“”What if the waiter who wrote that was black?” Zille asked Haffajee.
Mzukisi Qobo, an academic at the University of Johannesburg, replied to Zille. “Would still have not made it right. What does it matter anyway? Restaurant admitted this is against their policy. Things you defend subtly.”
Zille continued the conversation, saying race “should not matter” but the government has “reintroduced race classification for everything”. Shortly after that, she asked why race should not be used to identify people in restaurants if it was used to identify people for jobs.
Some social media users said Zille was conveniently conflating racial privilege in the economy with an incident where black people were seemingly racially classified in a restaurant.
The series of tweets came after patrons at The Bungalow, an expensive restaurant in the Cape Town suburb of Clifton, received a bill that identified them as “two blacks” instead of by their table number. It is standard practice in restaurants to identify tables by numbers. One of the patrons, Scott Magethuka, tweeted a photo of the bill after he received it.
The waiter who ignited the social media outrage is Mike Dzange. He was suspended shortly after the incident. His suspension sparked the conversation around racism in restaurants and whether it is fair to pin the blame on a black person for such alleged racism. The article Zille was responding to focused on the debate.
Dzange says it wasn’t the first time he had identified tables by race, even though it wasn’t The Bungalow’s policy.
“I’d like to apologise deep from my heart for the trouble I have caused; it happened without the intention of hurting anybody. I’d sincerely like to apologise to Mr Scott and partner,” Dzange told eNCA.
Others saw the former DA leader’s tweet as evidence that her party and its constituency need to address the racial privileges in their own thinking.
Despite the heat, Zille keeps stirring the pot.
The Western Cape ANC responded to the outrage around Zille’s tweet, demanding that the DA recall Zille “before she does irreparable damage to the province”.
“Her leadership has inevitably resulted in certain parts of Western Cape feeling like a certain version of Orania, for white exclusivity over and against interests of a unified South Africa,” it said.