Vicki Momberg got what was coming to her and we have no sympathy for her. She has not apologised to David Mkhondo, the policeman she racially abused. Nor has she apologised to South Africans for peeling off the scab on the slow-healing wounds of racism and white superiority.
Potential moments for self-reflection or redemption came and went without even a half-hearted gesture of apology. She has shown so little remorse she is even seeking to appeal the Equality Court's ruling that she pay Mkhondo R10,0000, make an unconditional written apology, and undergo sensitivity training.
She is a relic of a more spiteful time in our history. More dishearteningly, she is also a poison-tipped arrow pointing us back to a past that is receding but not yet dead.
Most South Africans have deplored her racist rant and have endorsed the maximum sentence - three years in prison, one of which was suspended for three years on condition that she is not convicted of the same offence - imposed by magistrate Pravina Raghoonandan for crimen injuria.It is reportedly the first time a person has been sent to jail in South Africa for crimen injuria, an injury to a person's dignity, usually by means of obscene or racially abusive language.
In Momberg's case, it was no common or garden variety of the crime. She used the K-word 48 times on a police officer who tried to help her after a smash-and-grab in 2016. She also refused to talk to a 10111 phone operator because she was black. By anyone's standards this is extreme and hateful behaviour.
At the same time, some commentators have raised questions about freedom of expression and the wisdom or otherwise of driving racists underground, where their prejudice can fester unchallenged and unlanced.
Freedom of expression is the bread and butter of newspapers, and we will not easily relinquish the ground we have gained since the constitution enshrined the right for all citizens. It is a right that, by implication, extends to the right to make mistakes and to be wrong.As Justice Edwin Cameron said in The Citizen v Robert McBride: "An important rationale for the defence of protected or 'fair' comment is to ensure that divergent views are aired in public and subjected to scrutiny and debate. Through open contest, these views may be challenged in argument. By contrast, if views we consider wrong-headed and unacceptable are repressed, they may never be exposed as unpersuasive. Untrammelled debate enhances truth-finding and enables us to scrutinise political argument and deliberate social values."
The "fair" in fair comment has an elastic quality that embraces "extreme, unjust, unbalanced, exaggerated and prejudiced" comment, according to the judgment.
What it does not embrace is hate-filled invective designed to hurt.
We also recognise that freedom of expression is valuable precisely because it facilitates a deepening of democracy through the free flow of ideas. It enhances our ability to reach the best solutions to the many problems our society faces. Momberg's rant has no value to add to any conversation. It would in fact tend to torpedo the efforts of braver and better people to build a just and prosperous South Africa.
Predictably, AfriForum greeted the news of Momberg's sentencing by raising questions about double standards. Others have raised questions of equivalence with comments by Julius Malema about slitting the throat of whiteness.His comments are ugly, and crudely expressed, and we do not endorse them. But excusing one culprit by pointing fingers at another does nothing to elevate the tone of public debate. In any case, Malema's words have the virtue, if one can call it that, of referring to the condition of white superiority.
Momberg's comments, no matter which way you slice them, deliver no such ambiguity.
It would be a shame if we gave her and her toxic views the power to derail efforts to build a South Africa united in diversity, as envisioned by the founders of our democracy...