Comedian and ventriloquist Conrad Koch will on Thursday oppose Afrikaans singer Steve Hofmeyr's interim protection order against him in the Randburg Magistrate's Court.
On November 10, Hofmeyr secured a court order against Koch, known through his puppet "Chester Missing", to prevent him from harassing the singer on Twitter.
The order prevents Koch from threatening, harassing, or making defamatory statements against Hofmeyr. He was also not allowed to tag him on social media websites like Twitter or mention him in television and radio interviews.
Hofmeyr said that until Koch explained the "hate speech" in court on Thursday, the ventriloquist was not allowed to contact him, his sponsors or his business partners directly or indirectly, said Beeld newspaper.
Beeld reported on November 6 that Koch said it was "fundamentally" wrong to take legal action against a satirist.
The newspaper quoted Koch as saying that his tweets against Hofmeyr were not hate speech because he never said anything hateful about the singer or told people to boycott his sponsors or the festival.
Hofmeyr said in a tweet on October 23: "Sorry to offend but in my books blacks were the architects of apartheid. Go figure."
Pick n Pay and Land Rover found themselves the subject of a war on October 30, over whether they should be sponsoring an Afrikaans music festival at which Hofmeyr was due to perform.
This followed a column in The Times by Koch titled "Dear white supremacists..." in which he questioned the retailer and Land Rover sponsoring the "Afrikaans is Groot" festival.
Hofmeyr recently had a sponsored bakkie withdrawn by Williams Hunt in Port Elizabeth after the tweet.
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