Ripple of Hope

SUNDAY EXPRESS

He Arrived with closed mind - Blaar Coetzee
Reporter

SENATOR KENNEDY - the "junior Senator from America" - came to South Africa, with a closed mind to further his own political ambition, Mr. Blaar Coetzee, Deputy Minister of Bantu Administration and Development, told me yesterday.
     "I read every speech and utterance of Senator Kennedy in both Afrikaans and English papers. I am still looking for one original thought," he said.
     The few truths he spoke, Mr. Coetzee said, "my own Sunday-school teacher impressed on me much more lucidly than the junior Senator.
     "As for the platitudes which comprised 99 percent of his utterances, they have been said ad nauseum just as well, if not, better, by Hclen Suzman, Alan Paton, Laurence Gandar and others."

BETTER HERE
     He believcd the senator had asked an Afrikaans- speaking journalist: "How would you like to be a Black man in South Africa ?”
     “If he asked me that question, my answer would be clear,” the Deputy Minister told me “ I would greatly prefer to be a Black man in South Africa than anywhere else in Africa, or in the United States for that matter.
     “Of course we still have discrimination against the Black man in South Africa, but the Senator admits that they have this discrimination in the United States, but that they are trying to move away from it.”
     South Africa was also trying to move away from this kind of discrimination.
     “But Mr. Kennedy did not even try to understand our policy. He came here with a completely closed mind, not to learn, not to ask questions, but to tell us and to further his own political ambition.”