History: get the facts right

THE Zizi Kodwa open letter to Helen Zille on June 20 refers: Kodwa writes: “I am pained to write to you as one of those who suffered and still suffer the effects of colonialism and apartheid”.

I’m sure his massive salary and lavish lifestyle – wedding of the year in the Botanical Gardens in Durban, and his wife’s exclusive birthday bash at the luxurious Syrene Boutique Hotel in Rivonia – has eased the pain somewhat.

He advocates “a clean break from… racial oppression by emphatically rejecting discrimination based on race”. Yet racist blacks who incite others to kill whites are never brought to book, while whites are pilloried and condemned.

He says “South Africa is a new nation”. Rightly so. The only problem is that it is degenerating into a banana republic.

In his defence of black contributions to civilisation he quotes Elijah McCoy. He fails, however, to let readers know that McCoy was a Canadian American, who was educated in Canada, not Africa, and sent to Edinburgh in Scotland for study. He was certified in Scotland as a mechanical engineer. He did invent the “lubricator cup”. Kodwa also mentions Lewis Howard Latimer who was born in Chelsea, a suburb of Boston, in Massachusetts. His rise to fame was in the US.

Christianity did not originate in Ethiopia but in Jerusalem, and spread to Ethiopia when King Ezana adopted the faith. Acts 8:25-39 records this. Islam was introduced to Nigeria as early as the 11th century, ostensibly through Muslim clerics, traders and the slave trade. Egyptians, by the way, are not true Africans. History must be made a compulsory subject in all schools so that the true story can be told. Sunnyridge , Germiston