Mixed Race Studies

Obama hails Mandela ‘inspiration’ in South Africa visit

BBC News
2013-06-29

US President Barack Obama has praised Nelson Mandela as “an inspiration to the world” while visiting South Africa.

The US leader, who was speaking in Pretoria after talks with President Jacob Zuma, does not intend to visit the 94-year-old, who has been critically ill for nearly a week.

But he met the Mandela family in private and spoke by telephone to his wife, Graça Machel.

Riot police clashed with anti-Obama protesters in Soweto.

The American leader was in Soweto to deliver a speech to young African leaders at the University of Johannesburg.

According to Mr Zuma, Mr Mandela remains “stable but critical”, and he added that he had “every hope that he will be out of hospital soon”.

However, South Africa’s last apartheid president and the man jointly awarded the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize with Mr Mandela, FW de Klerk, is to cut short a visit to Europe due to Mr Mandela’s poor health, his foundation said in a statement…

…Mrs Machel, who remains by Mr Mandela’s side in the hospital in Pretoria, said after their phone call that she had conveyed their “messages of strength and inspiration” to her husband.

Mr Zuma said that as the first black leaders of their respective countries, Mr Obama and Mr Mandela were “bound by history” and so “carry the dreams of millions of people in Africa and in the diaspora who were previously oppressed”…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed race vote key to Cape Town in S. Africa polls

The Citizen
2011-05-16

Justine Gerardy

Fruit seller Amien Cox will put his hopes on a white woman in South Africa’s local polls on Wednesday, 17 years after the fall of the racist apartheid regime that denied an all-race vote.

CAPE TOWN – Fruit seller Amien Cox will put his hopes on a white woman in South Africa’s local polls on Wednesday, 17 years after the fall of the racist apartheid regime that denied an all-race vote.

“No other option: DA,” said the mixed race supporter of the Democratic Alliance over the ruling African National Congress (ANC) that led South Africa into democracy.

“I’ll never vote any ANC, never. I’ll never vote for a black man, never,” said Cox, 72. “They don’t worry for us.”

Politicians have scrambled to woo mixed race voters, known locally as coloureds, who are the majority in Cape Town, South Africa’s only major city not in ruling party hands.

The battle is a two-party race between President Jacob Zuma’s ANC, which lost the city five years ago, and the DA led by Helen Zille, who is the first female leader of the party.

The coloured group is tipped to back the DA—years after many cast their first votes in 1994 for apartheid’s white minority nationalists that oppressed them but ranked them higher than blacks…

…Coloureds who have African, European, East Asian and South Indian roots had more privileges than the darker-skinned black majority in apartheid’s strict hierarchy designed to keep South Africa’s people apart and protect white power.

The divisions cut across separate housing, education and even language with Dutch settler-derived Afrikaans spoken instead of local African languages.

And while power has shifted, many still feel sidelined…

Read the entire article here.