Columnists' views on apartheid are way off base

To the editor:

I have to respond to the Jan. 11 column by Walter Williams concerning Africa and many of the countries there. His views border on the obscene. Any person who condones apartheid and says it was not an evil is seriously deluded.

As an African-American, I am saddened by the conditions in most of the African nations. Many of these countries have been basket cases economically as well as socially. Many of the problems facing Africa are due to corruption and a lack of laws. Many of these African countries were doomed to fail from the beginning. In 1953, with the continent just beginning to arise from the colonial system, the emerging nations of Africa decided to keep the boundaries that the colonial powers drew up, which served to split tribes and perpetuate tribal rivalries. Most African nations have been ruled by their native people for less than 70 years. What other nations have not gone through tribulations and civil wars after obtaining independence?

I am not going to minimize the massacres that have occurred in Africa by Africans, and I agree that the liberal media gloss over these atrocities just like they gloss over the facts about black-on-black crime. However massacres have not just occurred in Africa: the inquisition in Spain, the pogroms of Russia and Poland, the massacre of the American Indians by the English and later by Americans or the rape of Nanking by the Japanese during their Occupation of China.

ALLEN LEWIS JR.

Cape Girardeau