Roof exposed

Herald Reporter
The 21-year old white supremacist accused of shooting dead nine black worshippers last week at a historic African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina, Dylann Roof’s Rhodesian links have been exposed through his website <lastrhodesian.com> where he posted a racist manifesto justifying why he targeted the South Carolina church worshippers.

This development came as hundreds of people yesterday morning thronged the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal church for a memorial service, the first since last Wednesday when Roof gunned down nine worshippers attending a bible study at the historic church.

Addressing a mostly black congregation, the Reverend Norvel Goff said, “We are reminded this morning about the freshness of death that comes like a thief in the night.”

The website’s name refers to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and shows the dominant view of white supremacy where Roof donned a jacket with racist symbols of Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa flags.

On lastrhodesian.com, Roof claims that he chose Charleston because it was the most historic city which at one time had more blacks than whites: “I have no choice. I am not in the position to, alone go into the ghetto and fight. I chose Charleston because it is most historic city in my state, and at one time had the highest ratio of blacks to whites in the country. We have no skinheads, no real KKK (Ku Klux Klan), no one doing anything but talking on the internet. Well someone has to have the bravery to take it to real world, and I guess that has to be me.”

Political analysts have described Roof’s actions as a reflection of how Rhodesians treated blacks as second class citizens whom they could exploit.

They said the inequalities started during slavery when whites saw blacks as sub-humans who were only good to be used by whites.

Professor Sheunesu Mpepereki yesterday said Roof’s actions demonstrated that whites have a pre-consciousness to enslave blacks: “We are reading the signs of the historical injustices where whites hated blacks. This is where people like Roof are coming from,” he said.

“During the Berlin Conference in 1885, Africans were treated as sub-humans. Their land was seen as empty and this is the reason why the British colonialists came and took away the land and subjected the owners to hard labour on that land.”