EDITORIAL | There are precedents to the latest hate speech on Twitter, they should be enforced

South Africa’s latest “Penny Sparrow” moment hit the social media airwaves on Sunday morning, in the form of a Twitter user called Nicole Barlow. She essentially expressed regret that energy minister Gwede Mantashe had not been assassinated Chris Hani-style. Or in her exact words: “We missed an opportunity to do a Chris Hani on him.”

She was responding to a tweet promoting a Sunday Times story that Mantashe had snubbed a meeting hosted by President Cyril Ramaphosa with European leaders to sign a memorandum of understanding on a green-energy initiative. Barlow removed her tweet a while later, but the damage was done. Her sorry-not-sorry response and subsequent lame attempts at justifying her tweet caused South African-loving citizens to plead with the SA Human Rights Commission and police for swift action against her.

Thanks to the likes of the late Penny Sparrow and more recently Vicki Momberg, there is precedent for dealing with matters like this. Sparrow back in 2016 described black people on the beach as “monkeys” in a Facebook post around New Year’s Eve. She earned herself the unenviable reputation of being the first person in democratic South Africa to be found guilty of crimen injuria for a racist slur. Sparrow ended up in the equality court, where she was ordered to pay R150,000 to the Adelaide and Oliver Tambo Foundation. Soon after that, she was taken to the Scottburgh magistrate’s court, where she elected to plead guilty to a charge of crimen injuria and was fined another R5,000. She had to pay off the money over two years as she was living on a government pension after losing her job. She died of colon cancer in 2019.

Barlow, in a two-page statement issued on Monday morning, insisted her tweet did not consist of hate speech or incitement to violence. She bizarrely compares her own comment to Julius Malema’s singing of “Kill the Boer”, arguing if the equality court could declare that song not hate speech, then her tweet attacking Mantashe cannot be hate speech either. The court ruling on the song cannot be likened to her comment on social media; in that case, the court came to its decision for several reasons, including the historical context of the song and the applicants, AfriForum, not presenting evidence in court directly linking the singing of the song to farm attacks. Barlow’s flippant response does not seem to consider the definition of crimen injuria: the act of “unlawfully and intentionally impairing the dignity or privacy of another”. Perhaps even worse, she does not even begin to consider the hurt she caused with her thoughtless one-liner. She seems completely oblivious.

Crimen injuria is the same charge that saw Momberg receive a three-year jail sentence, suspended for one year, for her rant, peppered with the k-word, against a black police officer who tried to help her after she was the victim of a smash-and-grab. Another example of such vitriol ending up in court is Gauteng woman Belinda Magor, who, in a voice note defending pit bulls, called for black men to be killed and banned and black women’s uteruses removed. The SAHRC has demanded a public apology from Magor, and she was arrested on a charge of crimen injuria. 

In April, the SAHRC said it was still awaiting her apology.

Perhaps that is what is bolstering Barlow.

Magor’s comments were made in November and nearly six months later, the SAHRC was still awaiting her apology. The court matter will probably drag on for a while. It took at least two years before Momberg was sent to prison. This is more than enough time for the Barlows of this world to spread their hatred. According to a news report on the SAHRC’s website, it received dozens of complaints of incidents of racism between April 2022 and January 2023. The Western Cape led the pack with 123 complaints, followed by 78 in KwaZulu-Natal and 73 in Gauteng. Most of these cases were solved through mediation. It is important we seek mechanisms to deal swiftly with such complaints, be it the SAHRC, the equality court or a criminal court. The SAHRC’s role is to assess and report on the extent to which unfair discrimination happens on the grounds of race, gender and disability and make recommendations on how best to address these. It has done incredible work on many levels and does not only deal with matters of racism. If it needs more resources to keep up, that should be considered.

Barlow’s tweet is offensive on so many levels. It shows a complete disregard for the trauma and heartbreak Hani’s callous killing caused to his family and friends and colleagues, not to mention the fact that his assassination nearly plunged the entire country into a civil war. It shows disrespect to Hani’s legacy and without a doubt impaired Mantashe’s dignity, as per the definition of crimen injuria. But more broadly speaking, it gives us an alarming glimpse into the dark world of right-wing thinking, a phenomenon that should be publicly challenged and sanctioned before it causes greater damage.