Who speaks for Black people?

IT WAS inevitable that it would come out. In the Anele Mdoda interview with DA mayoral candidate for Johannesburg, Helen Zille, it landed on the studio floor like a bag of poisonous pus. It might well become the election question for 2026 and 2029. For over 300 years, Black people have suffered the indignity of having White people think and decide for them. Over the last 30 years, they had a corrupt ANC abuse them and had every ounce of recovered dignity drained from their souls.

- LORENZO A DAVIDS

In a history where they have been made to exist like diseased dogs in the land of their birth and denigrated to voting fodder by all parties, while their lingering poverty and sewage-filled townships continue to be never-ending hellholes, it is right to ask: who speaks for Black people?

With journalists, NGOs and their politician comrades all donning saviour hats to comment on the lives of Black people over the last 30 years, while they completely ignore the lived experiences of black people in the previous 300 years, and hold up a set of standards for and a superiority over Black people, it creates a revulsion bordering on a violent revolution in the deepest recesses of ones being. It’s a miracle that the country hasn't burnt yet.