Zille has struggle credentials: iLIVE

I read an e-mail by Sandile Luthuli written on May 8 2011 and posted in i-live under the heading "Zille's Arrogance Disgusting". I am an ex-patriot South African lady who made the choice to escape the racial tension that pervades the society in South Africa.

However, I do remember Helen Zille's pedagree as a "hero" of the struggle. It is clear that the writer Miss. Luthuli has no knowledge of Helen Zille's history and her actions in a South Africa that was at the height of Apartheid. Unless you lived it you cannot understand the grip that the government of the day exerted on the country at the time.

Zille began her career as a political correspondent at the liberal and anti-apartheid newspaper, the Rand Daily Mail, in 1974. During September 1977, Minister of Justice and the Police J.T.Kruger announced that anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko had died in prison as the result of an extended hunger strike.

Zille and her editor Allister Sparks were convinced Kruger's story was a cover-up, and through fearless investigation Zille obtained concrete proof of this after tracking down and interviewing various doctors involved in the case.

The Rand Daily Mail's lead story, headlined "No sign of hunger strike - Biko doctors", sent shockwaves through South Africa, and Kruger threatened to ban the paper, while Zille received many death threats.

Zille and Sparks were represented at the subsequent quasi-judicial Press Council by leading defence lawyer Sydney Kentridge, but the two were found guilty of "tendentious reporting", and the paper was forced to issue a "correction". Kentridge later helped confirm the accuracy of Zille's account when he represented the Biko family at the inquest into his death. That inquest found Biko's death had been the result of a serious head injury, but failed to find any individual responsible.

Zille resigned from the Rand Daily Mail along with editor Allister Sparks, after the paper's owner, Anglo American, demanded that Sparks tone down the paper's equal rights rhetoric. While Sparks fled the country in fear of his life Zille decided to remain. In fact Zille became heavily involved in the Black Sash movement during the 1980s fighting for the rights of the triply oppressed, the black female.

Miss Luthuli, she has given her time and her placed herself in many situations of danger to fight for the very rights that you take for granted today. She served on the regional and national executives of the organisation, and was also vice-chair of the End Conscription Campaign in the Western Cape.

During this time she was arrested for being in a "group area" without a permit, and received a suspended prison sentence. Zille and her husband later offered their home as a safe house for political activists during the 1986 State of Emergency, and she was temporarily forced into hiding with their two-year-old son. She has known veteran Anti-Apartheid politician Harry Schwarz since she was a child.

Zille was also actively involved in the South Africa Beyond Apartheid Project and the Cape Town Peace Committee. She later gathered evidence for the Goldstone Commission which investigated attempts to destabilise the Western Cape before the elections in 1994. Her courage and her guts in the face of the potential alienation that she risked from her own community when her behaviour was considered a betrayal of her own people was commendable. She has always strode forward without fear and challenged every vestige of racial inequality.

She has a proud record and rather than her statements being disgusting they are totally warranted as she has a record of anti-apartheid activism unparalleled in the white South African community. Far from being a settler as Julius Malema has accused her of being she is the daughter of refugees that fled from being murdered by the Nazi's before the second World War and she has nowhere to go. This is her country just as surely as any other South African's as she has fought for that right and has risked her safety and her family's safety to free her people.

Well, Miss Luthuli, I have detailed Helen Zille's struggle pedigree. What is your pedigree; and how do you justify your trashing a woman who deserves only our respect and love.