I stumbled upon a spectacularly stupid tweet on South African X, on the same day that I chanced upon What Is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea, a new book by Fara Dabhoiwala. We might as well get the tweet out of the way first, before we delve into what the concept of free speech has come to mean.
Though I do hate feeding the trolls, sometimes you need a good example of the shoddy sort of nonsense that free speech advocates have chosen to defend.
Incidentally, like the term free speech, “don’t feed the trolls” is a mantra that appears to have evolved over time. It comes from those faraway, halcyon days of early online communities, and especially the early forums, and was intended as practical advice suggesting that users should ignore people who were being deliberately provocative so that they could attract more attention. The theory then was, I think, that these trolls thrived on attention, so if you ignored them they would get frustrated and move on. Now that attention is not just psychological but also revenue-generating, this is perhaps a much more complex problem.
You might think that the term troll referred to the ugly creatures, beloved of Scandinavian folklore, that lurk under bridges and bother people trying to cross. Which is a great metaphor, actually, for those idiots who lurk in your social media stream and jump out to interrupt your flow with one of their annoying hot takes. But it also refers to the angling technique of dragging bait behind a slowly moving boat to catch fish. That’s what the trolls love to do: stick rotting ideas onto a hook and drop it into your twitterstream.
And on to the particular rotten idea in question, which comes from (according to his X bio) that “Christian, husband, father, part-time musician, currently on tour in the US” — that muzak of intellectuals, The Kiffness: “If you persecute people of colour, it’s called apartheid. If you persecute white people, it’s called transformation or equality.”
Incredibly, this wasn’t even the stupidest take of the day. Weerlig_za’s X bio is “Vryheid vir die Wit man, vryheid vir die Boer volk!” (For our fellow American freedom fighters who haven’t yet learnt Afrikaans, that means “Freedom for the White man, freedom for the Boer people!”) Anyway, Weerlig_za wrote: “Apartheid was not based on the persecution of blacks, it was an attempt at allowing them to develop on their own esteem and at the pace of their ability.” Reader, you’re not going to believe this, but even that wasn’t the stupidest take.
No, that honour goes to The Kiffness’s reply, which was: “I think that was supposed to be the original intention — ‘good fences make good neighbours’. But let’s be honest, it didn’t end up very good.”
The egregious misuse of the word “think” is bad enough. But the idea that apartheid, officially categorised as a crime against humanity by the UN, was a naive but faulty attempt to turn South Africa into a happy community of neighbours is utterly dumbfounding. Are we really being honest when we describe (and this is an incomplete list) murder, torture, extrajudicial killings, assassinations, forced removals, segregation, destruction of communities (though they were given some damn nice barbed-wire fences, to be fair), banning orders and millions of acts of violence as … “it didn’t end up very good”?
“It didn’t end up very good.” Sigh. In the world of blinkered racism inhabited by The Kiffness and his oppressed white followers, apartheid was a beautiful dream, created by white people and ruined by black people, the same way they broke all those lovely trains we gave them so that they could get to work on time from the faraway townships we built for them. Bru, this is why we need Cape Independence! So that we can rebrand apartheid as building good fences. Which, now that I think about it, is actually also a much better way to spin building walls to keep out foreigners. See, already South Africans are making valuable contributions to Trump’s America.
I could keep mucking through the trough of responses to the original tweet. Like @net2sent’s “no-one ever mentions guardianship which cost white taxpayers a fortune.” Or Weerlig_za again, who really must be a very unpleasant human being: “The apartheid government spent billions of rand on developing black homelands. Today the blacks deny us the right to have our own homeland after taking what we built. They always go on about the ‘Slegs blankes’ benches and lines without mentioning that blacks had their own benches and lines that serviced them. Nearly everything mentioned today about why apartheid was bad is not based in fact but instead relies on omission to make things look worse than it was.”
So the question before us is, how do we define free speech in South Africa? And does it include, for example, the right to be an apartheid denialist?
That last one is truly amazing in its cognitive dissonance. He (or she, I suppose) seems to believe that black people oppressed by apartheid claim it was evil because, uh, they didn’t have their own benches. Is it truly possible to be this stupid?
And it’s not just stupidity, of course. As with The Kiffness’s original tweet, it must also be extremely hurtful to people who had everything stolen from them during apartheid, including land, loved ones and dignity. Writer Khaya Dlanga’s response perhaps captures this best. “This statement is not just historically illiterate, it’s morally bankrupt and lacks any empathy or understanding.” But as X user @akiMokoena7 said: “The ugly Kiffness has free speech to be openly racist.”
“Proprietary eponym” is the technical term for a brand name that has become synonymous with a general product or service category, like Tipp-Ex, Tupperware or Band-Aid. I can’t help thinking that “free speech” is one of those brands, and like the examples already cited above, it’s imported from the US.
You could probably say the same about what some people think the definition of democracy is. When the mouthy members of the pale resistance movement talk about their “human rights”, they make the same mistake the “folks” (another imported term that I can’t abide) over in the US do, of thinking that human is a synonym for American. This is why gibbering South African podbros demanding their rights appear to believe that bearing arms is one of them, and why they wear MAGA hats.
So the question before us is, how do we define free speech in South Africa? And does it include, for example, the right to be an apartheid denialist?
In What Is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea, the author describes the shock of waking up to the news that his fellow Americans had chosen as president “a dangerously unhinged demagogue — a man who appeared to have catapulted himself into the most powerful office in the world mainly by broadcasting outrageous and hateful lies to tens of millions of people on social media … no-one could stop it, it seemed — it was all bound up with the sacrosanct right to free speech.”
He also points out that what is distinctive about the US definition of free speech is “the extent to which this is not a matter of reason but essentially of faith. The meaning of the First Amendment is a complicated legal doctrine, but it is also a kind of secular religion, with its own shifting dogmas and hagiography.”
There are two reasons that free speech is a dangerous concept. The first danger is one that we celebrate, namely that it liberates us to challenge the status quo, and to enable change for good. The second danger, though, is not a positive one. As Dabhoiwala writes: “Throughout history, this resonant ideal has also been perpetually manipulated by the powerful, the malicious and the self-interested — for personal gain, to silence others, to sow dissension or to subvert the truth.” What The Kiffness might call “not ending up very good”.
In South Africa, we have our own definition of free speech, and our constitution allows for reasonable and justifiable limitations, including one on advocacy of hatred based on race, ethnicity, gender or religion, and especially if that constitutes incitement to cause harm.
We’re always going to argue about what the limitations of free speech should be, and about what constitutes harm. I don’t think we should make the same mistake as the US and choose to believe that it’s a god-given right that excuses almost everything (which, to be clear, it doesn’t in US law either). We need to make our own Revenue-generating Racists™ work a bit harder for their freedom of stupidity.
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