SA keeps legacy alive

DEAR SIR — The debate about apartheid and its legacy (Zuma takes swipe at Manuel on apartheid, April 11) needs to go to what government itself can do.

For example, to change the spatial arrangement of apartheid cities is indeed a huge task. Surely, though, areas where the state and its allies have direct power should have changed dramatically.

I think of the ways that black working class people are treated in state hospitals, how their children are handled in schools, how the police treat protesters, how official secrets are handled and how foreign Africans are treated by official agencies.

Here the question must be: why it is that the relationships of apartheid continue to be recreated, 20 years after its collapse? We should instead have been seeing the gradual but systematic and conscious reshaping of the apartheid legacy.

Crispin Hemson

Durban