‘Your anger is unmatched’: Twitter reacts to Zille saying ‘Ubuntu is bogus’

Helen Zille is tweeting again, much to the ire of ordinary South Africans who happened to stumble upon her ‘Ubuntu is bogus’ tweets on Monday morning.

It started off innocently, with Zille penning a few thoughts about 2021 Booker Prize Winner Damon Galgut’s novel The Promise.

Zille’s ‘The Promise’ review

Zille said she rarely has time to read novels, and prefers to “save them for the Christmas holidays”.

“I always read reviews first, so that I make considered, enriching choices. I read a review of Damon Galgut’s The Promise and initially decided to give it a miss.”

Zille said the review “made it seem like one of those caricatured novels about the racist Afrikaners vs the virtuous rest – the kind of ‘four-legs-good-two-legs-bad’ race essentialism that dominates current thinking in the Anglosphere”.

‘Bogusness of notions like Ubuntu’

She decided, however, to read The Promise after a friend “rated it an excellent book”. Zille said the writing is supreme, and she found herself “reading sentences over and over again”.

ALSO READ: SA writer Damon Galgut wins 2021 Booker Prize

And instead of concluding here, Zille said she’s looking forward to the writer who is “great and brave enough” to write the novel that will expose the myths we believe about South Africa.

More specifically, a writer to “truthfully examine why they turned to dust, including the sentimental bogusness of notions like Ubuntu”.

South Africans react

This last tweet, of course, didn’t sit well with many South Africans.

One netizen, Palesa Morudu Rosenberg, said it is a mystery how Zille “switched from that great book to ‘the bogusness of Ubuntu’.”

Zille responded: “Shouldn’t be a mystery. The candy-floss confected use of the concept of Ubuntu is bogus. And we need a brave book exposing all the sentimentality that blinded us to the great unravelling. That is all I am saying. That novel remains to be written.”

Another netizen, @DavidNavaya the ‘sentimental bogusness of notions like Ubuntu’ is “equivalent to saying the sentimental bogusness of love or of respect”.

“Just because you are personally devoid of it and others manipulate, abuse and pervert it, doesn’t mean it’s necessarily bogus”, Navaya added.

Another said Zille’s “anger is unmatched”.

Your anger is unmatched, Helen. That you still manage to breath with such anger inside you, will forever remain a mystery????????

— Philani Sikho (@SikhoPhilani) December 27, 2021

There is Ubuntu practiced every single day across this land.

The real question is why anyone would believe that with the material, social & cultural deprivation & trauma faced by South Africans until today, that Ubuntu would manifest continuously, or even manifest at all.

— Sar Drac 🇿🇦 (@samued5r) December 27, 2021

You started well Madame Zille but I guess the ‘them against us’ spirit could not carry all the way to the end. Ironically, ‘reviewers’ are a shade lighter than politicians because they are victims of their cognitive bias.

— Iam_Isay (@KGRGalactic) December 27, 2021

Closest thing ZA has to Ubuntu is unity in everyone having a robbery or mugging story

— JackOrleans, oceans interactive’s great flop???? (@JackduORleans) December 27, 2021

I always suspected white South Africans like Ms Zille, dont know ‘Ubuntu’ mean humanity. Which is a universal philosophy, white supremacist writers abuse the term like they do with CRT to discredit African people as a whole.

— Tshepo mohale (@tshepom35622623) December 27, 2021

Difficult concept for white people to grasp…. The destroyers of the philosophy of Ubuntu

— Delene Pillay (@pillay_dee) December 27, 2021

Aren’t you supposed to be away and give us a break from your silly writings ?

— Marco Mwamba (@Mwatshi) December 27, 2021

GogoZille i never expected and your pinkbracist cronies who shared your similar sentimental altitude
Those still yearn for the repeat of old record Jan van Rebieck, Paul Kruger, Verwperd, Vorster apartheid privileges to understand the meaning of UBUNTU
Go to hell

— NkosinathiV_kaMepho (@Nathi_kaMepho) December 27, 2021