Former SA president and global icon Nelson Mandela's private secretary Zelda la Grange caused a racially-charged uproar on Twitter this weekend following a series of statements that were construed as racist.
La Grange, who was Mandela's personal assistant (PA) for 19 years, lined newspaper headlines and topped Twitter's SA trends list this morning, following tweets she posted yesterday indicating she felt president Jacob Zuma was anti-white.
The Sunday Independent, which features a front page article on the Twitter outburst that went viral, and which it says "backfired" on la Grange.
The tweet that appeared to spark it all read: "If I was a white investor I would more or less leave now. It's very clear from Jacob Zuma whites are not wanted or needed in South Africa."
The "whites are not wanted" tweet - which was followed by a number of follow-up statements around Zuma's attitude towards whites and foreign investment - elicited a slew of angry responses, including from SA media personalities Redi Tlhabi and Ferial Haffajee.
The word Zelda, along with #ZeldaDoesntEvenKnow, soon started trending in the wake of the flurry of retorts, including: "Now that Tata is gone @ZeldalaGrangeSA is showing us the real her. She couldn't pretend forever #ZeldaDoesntEvenKnow".
The Sunday Independent cites Wits academic ad SA's foremost scholar on "whiteness", Melissa Steyn, as saying her rants were "tedious".
"There's a way in which white South Africans want history to be presented in a way that makes them feel good, (but) an hnest appraisal of South Africa's past can't and shouldn't make white South Africans comfortable."
La Grange later apologised: "I want to apologize to everyone who was offended by my tweets this am, even my apology tweets got taken as me justifying me hurting people" (sic) - although the online debate and commentary continued well into Sunday morning.
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