The men in white (lab) coats

Tony Leon, the erstwhile leader of the Democratic Party, once launched an election campaign under the slogan “Fight Back”. His political opponents inserted a couple of letters to read “Fight Blacks”. Last week he had lots of angry blacks fighting him when he referred to Mmusi Maimane, the first black leader of the DA, as an “experiment gone wrong”. One of those angry at the remark was former Joburg mayor Hairman Mashaba, who penned a piece for the Mail & Guardian bemoaning what he described as “mad scientists” in the DA “conducting experiments [and] deepening the racial distrust at a time when we need to be coming together”.