People of South Africa

Judith Allen’s vitriolic castigation of South African black people (Letters, Jan. 8) is indeed frightening. She was extremely up front in letting the world know what she thinks of the people who are waging a courageous battle against the evil apartheid system. She labels them “body-burning, rock-throwing savages . . . rattling against the gates of civilization.”

If such an assessment implies, as I see it, that the black South Africans are brutal, uncivilized people, then someone had best push the alarm button. Such labeling reminds one of the open policy of white racist views of the era of slavery and colonialism, when the treatment of Africans all over the world was justified in the minds of the white oppressors by their charge that black people were really subhuman, ignorant and ugly creatures whose only earthly reason for being was to serve white people.

I question Allen’s fervent defense of P. W. Botha, leader of the racist regime of South Africa. How can she surmise that Botha would need any help protecting himself and his regime against people whom she labels uncivilized savages? Also, how could such uncivilized savages control almost the entire continent of Africa (as she allows)? And if these same uncivilized savages are descendants of the ancient Africans who built great and grand civilizations, as many historians have documented, then where was the break in the line of intelligence that would render black people today barbaric and uncivilized?

DAIMA WHITE

Compton