DA reports Lwazi Lushaba to Human Rights Commission over Hitler comments

9 April 2021

The DA will lodge a complaint against UCT lecturer, Lwazi Lushaba, with the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) following his racist comments regarding Adolf Hitler on a pre-recorded lecture. 

Reports confirm that Lushaba made the following comments: “Hitler committed no crime. All Hitler did was to do to white people what white people had normally reserved for black people.”

The Holocaust was unequivocally a crime against humanity orchestrated by Hitler. The DA therefore strongly condemns the comments made by Lushaba.

His comments were not only racist, offensives and vile, but also completely insensitive to the victims and survivors of the Holocaust and the Jewish community as a whole. 

South Africa’s Jewish community will today observe Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. In remembering the victims of the Holocaust, we must place a renewed sense of responsibility on those in positions of power and influence to defend the truth and to defend our democracy against any racist or anti-Semitic sentiments. 

Lushaba has a long history of offensive and controversial actions. In 2019, he allegedly took exception to one of the contender’s in UCT’s election of its Dean of Humanities being Tanzanian and not South African. In an interview with Power FM, Lushaba stated that “reason and rationality are white”.  Lushaba was also suspended by Wits back in 2015 for “participating in activities which were not conducive to free and fair elections and were intolerant to a democratic society”.

The DA has taken note that UCT will probe Lushaba’s comments and we urge the institution’s Vice-Chancellor Mamokgethi Phakeng to place him on suspension pending the investigation. 

Must Watch: The critical point here is Political science as a discipline didn’t see genocides/massacres as criminal as long as they occurred to the colonised. Only when Hitler did to Jews, what’s had been reserved for the colonised, did it become a crime!#HandsOffDrLwaziLushaba pic.twitter.com/5kxr2fcnA5

— Mbuyiseni Ndlozi (@MbuyiseniNdlozi) April 10, 2021

Issued by Natasha Mazzone, Chief Whip of the Official Opposition, 11 April 2021