I'll race you one ...

Slapping down the race card is a much loved pass-time in South Africa. Usually it is the ANC hysterically denouncing honest criticism as a racist attack. Occasionally it is the white population responding in kind. This week it was the mixed race population's turn to bear the brunt.

In her column 'Bitches Brew' (Miles must be spinning), Kuli Roberts, a journalist (ahem) for the Sunday World - think The National Enquirer meets the News of the World - wrote a charmless, humourless piece about Coloured women in which she characterises them as toothless, alcoholic, trailer trash, sex addicts. Her rationale: It's OK, I can say this because I'm black and anyways I was raised in Athlone (a coloured suburb in Cape Town) by coloureds and besides my children are coloured.

And it was game on ....

Deal in government spokesman Jimmy Manyi, a man who should know that no-one in the public eye is ever out of it. A comment he made in an interview last year - that there was an "over-supply of coloureds" in the Western Cape; resurfaced this week (surprise surprise). Prompting Trevor Manuel, one of South Africa's most respected and powerful ministers, to accuse Jimmy, in Parliament, of: "the worst order of racism".

For the record - the coloured population has been part of our fair province ever since the first lonely sailors landed at the Cape and eyed the local lovelies. The Nationalist Government (aka the architects of apartheid), in a breathtaking demonstration of collective denial, reclassified their forefathers' offspring as being non-white. Presaging Shaggy with their own version of "It Wasn't Us".

Manuel, our ex-Minister of Finance and current Head of SA's Planning Commission is not a man to mess with. He is a struggle veteran, an ANC stalwart credited with saving SA's economic ass by furiously resisting the quick buck of sub-prime mortgages ... and he is of mixed race.

A full-house of bad taste and bad judgement. But in both cases - freedom of the press worked just as it should have. Both of these people got to say what they thought. Both got the result they deserved.

Jimmy was very publicly rebuked by Manuel: "I now know who Nelson Mandela was talking about when he said from the dock that he had fought against white domination and that he had fought against black domination - Jimmy, he was talking about fighting against people like you" (ouch). And Kuli, a single mother, was fired.

An anecdote about Winston Churchill comes to mind. A woman once accused him of being drunk. He responded: "Yes Madam, I am drunk. And you are ugly. But in the morning, I will be sober."

Kuli, Jimmy - it's time to look in the mirror