South Africa’s DA Party Suspends MP Over Racist Remarks In Old Videos

Emmanuel EjioforJune 21, 20241 Mins read169

The suspended Member of Parliament, Renaldo Gouws

South Africa’s Democratic Alliance (DA) has suspended a newly sworn-in member of parliament on Thursday after an old video resurfaced showing him making comments about killing Black people.

The video, which reappeared on social media on Wednesday, featured a young Renaldo Gouws, who is white, making the racist remarks. Gouws sly served as a councillor in the Eastern Cape province.

In the video, Gouws claimed he was not serious about his remarks and was instead giving context on the then-African National Congress youth leader, Julius Malema, who sang an apartheid-era song that called for killing white farmers. Malema, now the leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters party, was found guilty of hate speech in 2011 for singing the song.

The Gouws video has sparked outrage in South Africa, a country still grappling with racial tensions decades after the end of apartheid. The DA, South Africa’s second-largest party, confirmed the video’s authenticity.

The party’s federal council chairperson, Helen Zille, announced Gouws’s suspension from all party activities.

“His case has been referred to the Federal Legal Commission, and if he wants to state his defence, he will be able to do so there,” Zille said. “But till then, he is suspended from all party activities, and we await the outcome of his disciplinary hearing.”

South Africa’s Human Rights Commission announced it would take Gouws to court for alleged hate speech. Although the original video was deleted from YouTube, Reuters found an archive from 2011 using the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.

Over the weekend, a different video snippet that was posted by Gouws in 2009 emerged, which was tagged as racist, leading to more calls for Gouws’s resignation or dismissal.

In response, Gouws posted an apology on X (formerly Twitter), expressing regret for “the actions” of his “younger and immature self” and denying any racist intentions.

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