But English soccer is dealing with a couple of pretty ugly cases involving alleged racist language used by a player on the field.

One case involves Uruguayan player Luis Suarez who has been banned for eight games after sports authorities found him guilty of racially abusing a black French player.

The other case involves the captain of England’s national soccer team, John Terry,who learned Wednesday that he is facing criminal charges for allegedly directing a racist insult at a fellow player.

Anchor Marco Werman speaks to the BBC Sports correspondent James Pearce about racism in soccer.

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Marco Werman: I’m Marco Werman and this is The World. England’s premier soccer league is considered the place to play for some of the game’s brightest stars. It’s certainly a premier stage for what fans like to call the beautiful game, but English soccer is dealing with a couple of pretty ugly cases involving alleged racist language used by a player on the field. One involves a white Uruguayan player who’d been banned for eight games after sports authorities found him guilty of racially abusing a black French player. The other case involves a captain of England’s national soccer team, who today learned he’s facing criminal charges for allegedly directing a racists insult at a fellow player. James Pearce is a sports correspondent for the BBC. He’s been following these stories and he joins us from London. James, how did the verbal exchange between England captain, John Terry, who is white, and Anton Ferdinand, who’s black, how did that become a case for the criminal court?

James Pearce: Well, it was during a match in the premier league in October between the Queens Park Rangers and Chelsea. It was a fairly tempestuous tight match, but there was an instance during the match which was caught on television cameras where it appeared that perhaps John Terry had been racially abusing Anton Ferdinand, that was spotted by a viewer on television. It was reported to the police and the police have been looking as a result at the evidence, at the video footage in particular of the match. And today they decided that they did indeed have enough evidence to charge him.

Werman: Right, so this video appears on the web. There’s no audio, but you can see his lips move. How does Terry respond to that?

Pearce: He says simply that the comments are taken out of context and when you see the whole context people will understand that he wasn’t racially abusing his opponent. In fact, he gave a statement very quickly after he’d been charged, John Terry, saying that he’d been disappointed with the decision and hoped to be given the chance to clear his name as quickly as possible. He said, “I’ve never aimed a racist remark at anyone.”

Werman: And is John Terry is convicted what’ll happen to him?

Pearce: Well, the maximum fine is only about $4,000. He can’t face a jail term. This is a player who earns around about $250,000 to $300,000 a week, so this is just a drop in the ocean for him in terms of finance…

Werman: Wow.

Pearce: because the damage is to his reputation. If he would be found guilty it’s certain as though the English Football Association would also charge him. Yesterday, they banned Luis Suarez for a similar offense for eight matches and fined him about $60,000. So John Terry will be facing a punishment at least as severe as that, I think quite possibly more severe simply because he is the England captain and such a role model.

Werman: Right, and Suarez is involved in the other case we mentioned. He’s an Uruguayan who insulted French defender Patrice Evra. I mean how widespread is this? Is this the tip of the iceberg?

Pearce: Well, Sepp Blatter, the president of FIFA for the world governing body, gave an interview recently which he said he didn’t believe that racism was an issue within the sport. He then later that week was made to apologize because he realized I think what he’d done, and he realized the reaction he provoked because there’s no doubt that there are major issues of racism. And yes, we’re talking here about the problems in the English game, but that in many ways is because the English authorities are doing a lot to try and stamp this out. There are other countries around the world I think where people would argue that there’s a lot less done. You have monkey chants regularly given to players, bananas thrown or whatever…

Werman: What’s a…what’s that, monkey chants?

Pearce: People who might claim that a black player you know, is like a monkey and they’ll chant monkey noises or throw bananas on the pitch to mock the player, try to humiliate them, say they’re like a monkey, or something like that. I mean it really, really is debased behavior. What you really need to have to make a difference is an attitude change within society. I think in many ways what happens on the football pitch and in the football stands is just a reflection on society in that country, and it’s very difficult for the football authorities to try to make a stand on their own when perhaps in the culture something can be accepted anyway.

Werman: James Pearce, sports correspondent for the BBC, thanks a lot.

Pearce: My pleasure.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

(Photo: Phillip Martin)

by Phillip Martin

50 years ago this month, black and white activists boarded buses in Washington and headed into the Deep South. That took courage in 1961.The year before, the Supreme Court had made segregation illegal in interstate travel. But the law wasn’t being enforced in the South. And so those bus passengers forced the issue.

They became known as the “Freedom Riders.”

This month, a racially integrated group of 40 American – and foreign – students recreated the Freedom Riders’ journey. Ray Arsenault, the author of a history of the Freedom Riders of 1961, is leading a group of 40 College students on a tour of one of Alabama’s most notorious sites. This place just outside of Anniston, Alabama, is where fifty years ago, the Ku Klux Klan attacked a Freedom Riders’ Greyhound bus bound for New Orleans. After slashing the tires, the bus was firebombed, which forced the riders into the road.

Along this highway outside of Anniston, Zilong Wang, who was born many years after 1961 in Baotou, China, is thinking about the lessons of non-violence practiced by the original Freedom Riders and how they might guide his beliefs and actions.

“This is not just a healing of the past but also it sheds a light on the future. Not just a future of the United States but also for China, because China will definitely go through a similar period,” Wang said. “How can we use non-violence and civil disobedience to bring meaningful reform into China’s social system under the condition of social harmony and stability, I think we’re learning a lot from them.”

Wang, a philosophy student at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, is one of a handful of students chosen to board a bus from DC to New Orleans, to re-create the journey of 50 years ago along with original freedom riders. They met important figures from the time along the route.

Like John Siegenthaler, who was an assistant to US Attorney General Robert Kennedy in 1961. He pointed out the contradictions of era – the Administration was pushing for freedoms around the world even as president Kennedy tolerated segregation and injustice throughout the Jim Crow South.

“The timing of the Freedom Rides and the conflagration that he (President Kennedy) hoped would never come, came at exactly the wrong time,” Siegenthaler said. “Came at the moment when’ he ‘s not able to make a convincing case about freedoms around the world, is not able to convince the Soviet Union ‘look free your people, let your people go. He’s not able to make that case because he had not let his own people go.” Siegenthaler said that the critical worldwide focus on domestic events in the USA helped to push the Administration into supporting civil rights.

Those events included attacks on Freedom Riders at this Trailways Bus Terminal in Birmingham, Alabama. This is the 8th city visited by the students on Freedom Ride 2011. Here Zilong Wang comes face to face with Freedom Rider James Zwerg, whose bloodied face peered from newspapers in 1961 helped compel hundreds of new riders to join the movement. Zwerg offers the college kids some pointers for their struggles, whatever they may be.

Follow the money: “If you want to bring about change you’re going to have to go the decision makers. In trying to change the movie theaters, it wasn’t going to happen,” Zwerg said. “In Nashville, for example, we had to make the people who owned the theaters decide to change.”
On this journey South, Zilong Wang and his fellow travelers also learned about the ultimate price that some paid for the advancement of human rights in the United States. The bus carring the 40 students has stopped in front of the 16th Street baptist Church in Birmingham. A bomb planted here took the lives of four little girls on September 15th , 1963.

Zilong Wang is only one of several foreign students on this tour of history and memory. Bakhrom Ismoilov is studying at Eastern Oregon University. He’s from Tajikistan. He equated some of the violence his country has recently experienced with the segregation of the south during the 1960’s. “It helps me a lot to see how much bigger and how much bigger scale it was. I can definitely relate this to terrorism, and actually putting a population of black Americans in fear,” Ismoilov said.

And over the din of the 16th Street Baptist Church Choir, Doaa Dorgham, a Palestinian born in Kuwait who wears a headscarf, laments what she sees as the irony of past and present discrimination in her adopted American land. “The irony of this situation is here I am celebrating how 50 years ago we made great strides to stop segregation in public transportation and discrimination, and then I’m in an airport and have to go through a body scan and have to go through a pat-down. And how is it that no one is able to see the correlation?” Dorgham asked.

As the Freedom Riders’ Tour winded down, students were asked what they will do with the knowledge they’ve collected along the way. Tanya Smith, who grew up in Haiti, and plans to return there to lead a non-violent movement on behalf of youth, spoke up.

“Just like the Freedom Riders saw the need in society for change, Haitian youth realize the power they do have and the stake they have for building Haiti’s future,” she said. “And I want to be able show that non-violence is more effective in the sense that you’re able to do what you’re doing without resorting to the same tools that your oppressors are using against you.”

Life in Russia can be hard.

The climate is punishing. Health care is not the best. And corruption is pervasive.

Russian ethnic minorities face all of these problems, and more.

Children born of Russian-and-African parents have an especially difficult time. That’s despite the fact that Africans have been going to Russia for years as part of an international student exchange program.

Even so, they face frequent discrimination.

As a result, a special program has been set up in Moscow to help them feel more at home in their own country.

At a gathering of some twenty children in the middle of Moscow, the scene is pretty typical: there’s lots of noise; running around; dirty hands and faces. One thing you notice immediately is that all of the little ones have brown skin and the adults don’t, including their mothers.

Olga, who didn’t want to use her full name, is one of the mothers.

“I have a son. We came to this charity when he was five, so we could meet with people like him, because I’ve had problems with him.”

And by problems, Olga means that her 14-year old son has an African father.

The boy was in a prestigious ballet school until the 5th grade. All of a sudden, Olga said, the school decided not to let him into the 6th grade. He was a good student, she said, a good dancer. It was incredibly stressful.

So why wouldn’t another school take him? According to Olga that’s easy to answer.

“One of the directors of the school said that he ‘would take a look’ at my son to see if he was black or white. He asked me just like that: ‘Is he black? Is his father African?’ I said, ‘yes, he’s African.’ ‘And are you the mother?’ I said, ‘yes, I’m the mother.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’ll take a look at him to see how chocolate he is.’ He said it just like that.”

It took Olga 100 days to find her dark-skinned son a place to learn. The new school is an hour and a half away from her home in the Moscow suburbs.

Marina Volkova volunteers here at the Metis Program in Moscow. She said Olga’s story is sadly part of the status quo in Russia.

“Of course there’s racism here. Everyone said there isn’t. But there is. They don’t like our children here. Russians only like Russians,” she said.

“Why? Because our borders were closed for so long. Russians got used to living only with themselves. And there are lots of skinheads in Russia. So I’m afraid for my own son.”

Volkova’s teenaged son has an African father. She said she was so worried about the safety of her son and other dark-skinned children that she asked for help.

“We asked the Orthodox Church for help but they refused. They said, ‘These are not our children.’”

So, Volkova said she searched further and finally found Metis. The program finds places for children of color, and their mothers, to gather several times a week, in a safe environment.

Alyssha Allen works with the program, sponsored, in part, by the Moscow Protestant Chaplaincy, an organization of churches based outside Russia.

“Our program is designed to give the children a sense of community we bring them together and they can interact to each other and relate with each other. They all know what they’re going through,” she said.

Even so, Allen said that a lot of the times some of the children have been so abused and bullied by other kids that they don’t even show up to the program at all.

She said some of the children don’t come because a lot of them are very shy.

“And even interacting with other children who look the same as them and who are facing the same problems they find that difficult. Often the mothers just come.”

Seventeen year-old Fatima Udayevna said it took her a long time to join the Metis program because she too was afraid.

“Its use to be even more difficult; when you would ride on public transportation and they would see a black person they would start pointing at them,’ she said. “They’d say, ‘Look, a black person!’”

But Udayevna said with help from the program, she’s really found herself and she’s comfortable in her own skin.

As for the future, the self-assured Udayevnya said she’s got big dreams, but not here in Russia.

“I play two instruments, the violin and the piano. I also work as a model and dance. My life is bright,” she said, “and in the future I hope to move to Europe and be successful there if possible.”

Métis volunteer Marina Volkova said she’s really happy that Udayevna has the whole world in front of her. But Volkova also lamented that she thinks the situation in Russia will never change. Download MP3

Jean-Marie Le Pen (Photo: Hégésippe Cormier)

Extreme right political parties have gained popularity and votes in Europe in the last few months. In France, there’s also been a resurgence of the far right. Polls show that The National Front, founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen nearly forty years ago, would place third in a crowded field of candidates if elections were held today. Observers attribute the surge to Le Pen’s daughter, Marine, who is campaigning to take over as leader when her father steps down in January. Anita Elash reports. Download MP3

• BBC profile of Le Pen

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LISA MULLINS: If you think American voters are angry these days, check out the French. More than a million people took part in a nationwide protest today against changes to France’s pension system. Rail and air services were disrupted by the strike and the Eiffel Tower was forced to close. Anger among the French has boosted the popularity of the far-right political party known as the National Front. That’s the party of Jean-Marie Le Pen, founded nearly 40 years ago, and the party that his daughter is poised to lead next year. Anita Elash sent us this report.

SPEAKING FRENCH

ANITA ELASH:  A meeting of National Front sympathizers in Versailles, just outside Paris. Nearly 200 people have come to hear Marine Le Pen explain why she deserves to take over the party leadership when her father leaves the job in January. Tall, blonde and blunt, the 42-year-old twice-divorced mother has her mostly-male, mostly elderly audience spellbound as she lays out her platform.

SPEAKING FRENCH

ELASH: She says a few weeks ago President Nicolas Sarkozy made the connection between a lack of security and immigration. We’ve been saying that for 30 years, but once again, if there’s a connection then we have to stop immigration. In a lot of ways, Le Pen sounds just like her father. She’s anti-Europe, anti-globalization, and pro strict controls on immigration. But there’s a sense of moderation and modernity that Jean-Marie Le Pen never had. Pollster Brice Teinturier says that’s drawing some people back to the National Front.

SPEAKING FRENCH

BRICE TEINTURIER: Her message is far less provocative, far less xenophobic, and she’s lost all traces of her father’s anti-Semitism. It’s not at all the same sales pitch. At the same time she pays more attention to social issues than her father did. And she’s attracting the working class with her social message, not her anti-immigrant message.

ELASH: Marine Le Pen seems to be moving the National Front into the main stream. But she’s also pushing President Nicolas Sarkozy further to the right. This summer, Sarkozy announced tough new measures to rein in immigration. And he deported hundreds of Roma who were in France illegally back to Eastern Europe. Teinturier says it’s an open secret around the Elysee Presidential Palace that the strategy was aimed at voters who may abandon Sarkozy for the far right.

SPEAKING FRENCH

TEINTURIER: The working class has two big expectations. Economic prosperity and security and the question of immigration. The economic crisis, and Nicolas Sarkozy’s policies, have prevented him from meeting their expectations for economic prosperity. Working class voters feel abandoned and betrayed. And the only leverage he has left is on questions of security.

ELASH:  It’s a risky strategy. Teinturier says that if Sarkozy moves too far to the right, he could lose his more traditional base of more moderate voters in the next presidential elections in 2012.

SPEAKING FRENCH

ELASH: That’s partly what Marine Le Pen and her supporters are counting on. At her campaign meeting, there’s already talk the National Front could eliminate Sarkozy and make it to the second round of voting. This long-time supporter says he thinks she’ll attract the women’s vote.

SPEAKING FRENCH

ELASH: He says her father promoted a mix of extremism and racism that was completely misguided. But her arguments about questions like immigration are more concrete and based on precise facts and figures. That approach could make her a threat to Sarkozy, a threat he’s already taking seriously. For The World, I’m Anita Elash in Versailles.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

• BBC coverage

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KATY CLARK:  I’m Katy Clark and this is The World.  Fifty years ago this month, Congo became an independent nation.  It used to be the Belgian Congo and it’s fair to say that Belgium’s legacy in that African nation was dubious, at best.  In the early 1930′s Belgian cartoonist Herge sent his intrepid boy reporter Tintin to Congo.  But now that book, “Tintin in the Congo” is the subject of a lawsuit in Belgium, a lawsuit brought by a Congolese immigrant.  The World’s Clark Boyd reports from Brussels.

RECORDING:  To the editor, from Tintin, famous boy reporter.  Subject, treasure hunt.

CLARK BOYD:  Herge’s Tintin, the distinctive quaff, the stylish shorts, faithful pals Snowy and Captain Haddock who went with him, literally, around the world.  In the 1930′s Tintin paid a visit to what was then the Belgian colony of Congo.

MBUTU-MONDONDO BIENVENU:  When I was young in Kinshasa, I read Tintin in Congo.

BOYD: This is Mbutu-Mondondo Bienvenu.  He was born and raised in Kinshasa.  Bienvenu read Herge’s Tintin in the Congo in the 1970′s when he was a kid.  He later moved to Belgium and has been here for more than 20 years.  Bienvenu says he trained as an accountant, but is currently unemployed.

BIENVENU: Here, to get a job is very difficult.  To get one apartment is very difficult.  Everything is very difficult.  You ask yourself what is the problem, and so you see that your problem is your color.

BOYD: Bienvenu says he hadn’t thought about Tintin in the Congo for a long time.  Then, a couple of years ago the book’s British publisher decided to put a warning label on the book.  It also included a new forward, explaining that some of Herge’s depictions of the Congolese might e deemed offensive.  That prompted Bienvenu to take another look at that book.

BIENVENU: And when I read this book in 2007, with my experience of every day the racism problem, I understood that this book is big problem.

BOYD: Bienvenu says he was deeply offended by the way Tintin in the Congo portrays his native land.  He approached Moulinsart, the company that holds the rights to the images of Tintin.  He also made contact with the publisher, Casterman.  Bienvenu says he only wanted to open a discussion about putting a warning on the French language version of Tintin in the Congo.  Neither Moulinsart nor Casterman would talk to him.  So Bienvenu got a lawyer, Ahmed L’Hedim.  L’Hedim says his client’s distaste for the book is understandable.  Black people in this cartoon book are stupid, are like children, and they are looking like monkeys and he said I can’t accept this for me and for my children.

BOYD: To be clear, the Bienvenu doesn’t have any children of his own, but he has a nephew and he says he wouldn’t want any child to read the book in its current state.  He’s now brought two lawsuits, one criminal and one civil, against Moulinsart and Casterman.  Bienvenu’s charge, that the book is racist and highly offensive.  And his solution?  To either put a warning on it, or have it taken off the shelves.

ALAIN DE KUYSSCHE:  What is happening today about Tintin in Congo is something ridiculous.

BOYD: Alain de Kuyssche is in charge of communications for Moulinsart.  He’s also the editor of a forthcoming book that argues that Herge was not a racist, but rather a keen reflector of the mood of his time.

DE KUYSSCHE: You must remember that the Belgians went there; they were convinced that they carried civilization to people to people who had been decimated by slave trade.  We had to give them the great privilege of our western civilization.

BOYD: De Kuyssche notes that in subsequent editions of Tintin in the Congo, Herge made changes that toned down some of the book’s more paternalistic elements.  For example, Tintin’s blackboard lesson to Congolese children became one plus one equals two, instead of a primer on how great Belgium is.  De Kuyssche says he doesn’t think the book needs a warning.  It stands on its own, he says, as a teaching tool.  And Moulinsart’s lawyer, Alain Berenboom says banning the book would be a huge mistake.

ALAIN BERENBOOM:  If we begin with that, tomorrow you’ll see a plaintiff with the Bible, the Koran, Kipling, Dickens, it’s impossible.  It’s not the role of the court to do that.

BOYD: For his part, Mbutu-Mondondo Bienvenu has gotten a statement of support from a French group that advocates for minority rights.  But he’s not getting the same support from some of his fellow Congolese.

BIENVENU: In my family, my mother was surprised because she heard on the radio that they are talking about this case.  She called me saying, Bienvenu, I bought this book when you was young, what you think the problem with this book?  I said Mom, now with my experience; this book is not the same.

BOYD: Bienvenu doesn’t stand to gain financially from his lawsuits.  He claims he simply wants a discussion about Herge’s book and a hard look at the Belgian legacy in Congo.  Tintin’s publisher agrees on that last point, but says attacking a Belgian icon like Herge and his beloved Tintin are hardly the best way to do that.  A ruling is expected in the civil case on Monday.  For The World, this is Clark Boyd in Brussels.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

• ‘Skin’ homepage
• Phillip Martin’s reports on albinism
• Other Color Initiative stories by Phillip Martin

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KATY CLARK: It’s been 15 years since South Africa abandoned its brutal system of racial segregation. But a new movie is reminding South Africans of the days when apartheid was the law. The film is called Skin. It’s based on the painful true story of Sandra Laing, a woman with dark skin born to white parents in 1955. Phillip Martin has the story.

PHILLIP MARTIN: Sandra Laing’s skin color didn’t matter in her early years. She and her family lived in a rural part of South Africa. It was only when her parents enrolled her in a white boarding school that her troubles began. Her older brother went to the school but he had lighter skin and was considered white. But Sandra’s skin was darker and she wasn’t welcome. Her father played by actor Sam Neill shows the headmaster documents to prove his daughter’s whiteness.

FATHER: What does this say?

HEADMASTER: A piece of paper is not going to reassure all the parents who call me everyday to complain that there’s a black child at this school. Sandra is a disruption. Sandra does not belong here.

MARTIN: Sandra is then reclassified as colored, the South African term for mixed race, and is forced to leave the school. Her father, a proud Afrikaner, challenges the classification. A 10-year-old Sandra Laing gets brought before government board. They measure her head, her torso, and the thickness of her curly hair. Her father erupts.

FATHER: I’m telling you she’s white. I’m her father. I’m as white as you are. This is her mother. Undeniably white. And Sandra is our daughter. Blood of our blood.

MARTIN: Then a genetics expert testifies on behalf of Sandra’s family.

GENETICS EXPERT: I believe there’s a plausible genetic explanation for Sandra’s appearance. The history of our country is such that many indeed we believe most Afrikaners carry black genes.

JUDGE: Silence. Please go on.

GENETICS EXPERT: So two white-looking parents can contribute enough black genes to produce a child quite a lot darker then themselves.

MARTIN: The South African government accepted the explanation and amended the constitution to recognize the children of two white parents to be white, regardless of appearance. And so Sandra Laing was reclassified as white. But she never returned to the school. At age 16 Sandra fell in love with a black man and ran away. She was then jailed for violating laws against interracial relationships. Her parents won her release and invited her home. But Sandra then pregnant chose to move with her boyfriend to a black township. She then tried to get herself reclassified again as colored. Sandra eventually left her husband and moved with her children to the outskirts of Johannesburg where she worked in a factory. Anthony Fabian, the director of skin, heard about Sandra’s story a few years ago when he was interviewed on the BBC.

ANTHONY FABIAN: I was moved to tears by her story and also very angered by it because it was clear that although Sandra’s white family had prospered Sandra was living still in abject poverty in a township. Didn’t own her home. Could barely afford to clothe or feed her children. And I felt that some kind of reparation needed to be done. And as a filmmaker I had an opportunity not only to tell her story and bring it to the world but also to make a difference at the center of it.

MARTIN: Sandra tried for years to contact her parents but her letters were always returned. Then in 2001, 27 years after she left home, Sandra was reunited with her mother who died soon after. She never saw her father again but in an interview Sandra Laing says she believes he never stopped loving her.

SANDRA LAING: My mother told me that my father died and she wanted my address to send me some money that my father left me. I just felt that my father still loved me which is angry because I left him.

MARTIN: But to this day Laing’s brothers refuse to speak to her. Directory Anthony Fabian says Sandra’s story reaches far beyond South Africa.

FABIAN: It’s about how we treat people who are different from ourselves. In the United States with a bi-racial president the racial identity debate has really come to the fore. And I think it’s very important that we keep that debate present – that we keep talking about these issues because they haven’t gone away.

MARTIN: Skin, the film about Sandra Laing, opens today in New York and Los Angeles. For The World I’m Phillip Martin.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

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MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman. This is The World. It’s fair to say that South Africa knows a thing or two about racism. For decades the country’s black majority lived under the oppression of white rule: apartheid. Now South Africa’s governing party, the African National Congress, is making a new accusation of racism against a Canadian authority. The World’s Alex Gallafent reports.

ALEX GALLAFENT: The target of the ANC’s anger is a Canadian immigration board. It’s granted refugee status to a 31-year-old South African man named Brandon Huntley. Huntley claimed he was being persecuted at home for being white. He reportedly told Canadian officials he couldn’t return to South Africa because he’d been attacked seven times by black men between 1991 and 2003. He said he’d been stabbed four of those times. But the African national Congress disputes the characterization of the attacks against Brandon Huntley and the Canadian ruling in his favor. His spokesman Ishmael Mnisi.

ISHMAEL MNISI: The African National Congress views the granting by Canada of a refugee status to South African citizen Brandon Hanley on the grounds of Africans would persecute him as racist. We find the claim by Huntley to have been attacked seven times by Africans due to his skin color without any police intervention sensational and alarming.

GALLAFENT: The ANC spokesman adds that South Africa’s government is able to protect all its citizens regardless of race. But the Canadian Immigration Board said that Brandon Huntley presented clear and convincing proof the state’s inability or unwillingness to protect him. Huntley’s lawyer is Russell Kaplan. Kaplan is a South African native who himself moved to Canada 20 years ago. He says the board reached its decision after hearing testimony from other white South Africans that they too had been attacked.

RUSSELL KAPLAN: The big question throughout was you know was this just an act of criminality or was there racial motivation part of it? And every single time there was evidence that they were not just victims of criminality. There was a racial component in the incident.

GALLAFENT: Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board also concluded that Huntley had been unable to find work in South Africa because of the government’s affirmative action policies. But this South African woman says that white people, such as herself, should have no fears about living in the country. Brigitte Lightfoot is with Homecoming Revolution. That’s a group that encourages skilled South Africans living abroad to return home.

BRIGITTE LIGHTFOOT: I myself have lived overseas for six years and I’ve been back for eight months and we really don’t feel that there is this racial prejudice against white people. We think it’s a wonderful country. We think there’s a lot of opportunity for people of all colors and we encourage those people who want to make a difference and return home to do so.

GALLAFENT: Out on the streets of Johannesburg opinions are mixed about the Canadian ruling. One man, Aluwani Matshavana, doesn’t believe Brandon Huntley’s claims of attacks against him.

ALUWANI MATSHAVANA: Actually I think this guy is sick. But even though if they’re happening to you how can you just run away from your country, where you live, where your ancestors are, and everything that you believe in.

GALLAFENT: Apartheid ended in South Africa in 1990. Almost 20 years later this black South African, Aluwani Raswini, sympathizes with white people such as Huntley.

ALUWANI RASWINI: South Africa is mostly focusing on black people too much these days. Like white people aren’t given enough emphasis. Basically they’re just paying for their sins for just too long.

GALLAFENT: Brandon Huntley has refused to discuss the details of his case. He says he fears reprisals against his family still in South Africa. But he told one Canadian newspaper that he’d “opened people’s eyes.” A Johannesburg daily took a different line. An editorial in today’s Times argues that the ruling, “says more about Canadian perceptions than South African reality.” For The World I’m Alex Gallafent.

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