Carl Niehaus pens an emotional letter to South Africans, saying Afrophobic marches are a dangerous diversion and June 30 should be an ordinary day to build our beloved country and defend African unity.
Commissars, Fighters, comrades, fellow South Africans, dear brothers and sisters,
This morning, 30th of June, as the so-called March and March protests are supposed to unfold across our country, I insist with every fibre of my being: these marches are a dangerous diversion from the real issues that we need to fight! Today should simply be an ordinary working day — a day dedicated to production, organisation, and the hard work of building our beloved country. It must not be hijacked by forces seeking to turn South Africans against our fellow African brothers and sisters through Afrophobia, xenophobia, and wanton violence.
I, Carl Niehaus — MK veteran who joined the underground struggle in 1980, political prisoner, former national spokesperson of the ANC when it was still a national liberation movement and had not sold out, and later Ambassador to the Netherlands under President Mandela, and now EFF Member of Parliament — have seen this deadly script before. In 1992, I stood with President Nelson Mandela in Boipatong after the massacre. What unfolded there was not spontaneous “Black-on-Black violence.” It was the deliberate, calculated work of the apartheid regime’s “third force” — securocrats, Vlakplaas operatives like Eugene de Kock, and their collaborators who supplied arms, intelligence, and provocation to fracture the oppressed, derail negotiations, and preserve white minority rule.
