A series of Tweets on Friday by Nelson Mandela's former personal assistant, Zelda la Grange, complaining that whites were being made to feel unwelcome in South Africa triggered a torrent of racial abuse on Twitter over weekend.
ANC President Jacob Zuma recently remarked that all South Africa's troubles began "in 1652 when Jan van Riebeeck landed in the Cape." The decision by the City of Cape Town to rename a small stretch of the N1 after former National Party President FW de Klerk has also provoked sustained criticism.
The attack on Van Riebeeck, the founder of the Dutch settlement in South Africa, touches on Afrikaner sensitivities as it suggests that the ANC has a basic problem with the very presence of whites in South Africa - rather than with the specific wrongdoings committed by past regimes.
Equally, the attempt to deny De Klerk some small recognition for his role in dismantling apartheid, unbanning the liberation movements, and launching the multi-party constitutional negotiations that led to the current dispensation, is perceived, by many, as an effort to negate the role played by the majority of white South Africans in the transition to non-racial democracy.
In response La Grange, who last year published a memoir of her relationship with Mandela, tweeted (under the name "Zelda van Riebeeck") that these controversies:
Makes white people really feel welcome in SA. I think I'm calling Jan today to ask him what de hell he was thinking sailing to Africa.