AfriForum’s civil case against the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), its leader Julius Malema and senior figure Mbuyiseni Ndlozi over allegedly propagating hate on protected grounds, specifically race or ethnicity, is set to continue in the Gauteng high court today.
The hearing, which arises from a claim by AfriForum that the EFF, Malema and Ndlozi used hate speech during protests at Senekal (covered here in the Daily Friend), began on Monday.
AfriForum is seeking an order against the accused to pay R500 000 to a body that promotes non-racialism, amongst other remedies.
At the centre of AfriForum’s case is that Julius Malema sang ‘shoot to kill, kiss the boer’, and that EFF members sang ‘shoot to kill, kill the farmer’, at Senekal at the time of the appearance in court of two suspects for the murder of Brendin Horner in late 2020, and that this amounts to hate speech
On the first day of the hearing, EFF supporters briefly blocked AfriForum’s lawyers from entering the court, and on the second day blocked them from leaving the court – and then sang ‘kill the boer, the farmer’ as they were allowed to leave.
On the opening day, Judge Edwin Molahlehi stated that ‘any citizen of this country is entitled to participate in court proceedings without any interference, without intimidation’.
The court dwelled on Monday on a technical discussion about the legal connection, if any, between this case and an earlier instance when Julius Malema, who was head of the ANC Youth League at the time, was found guilty of hate speech for singing or chanting Dubul’ ibhunu. Dubul’ ibhunu means ‘kill the boer’ but is melodically distinct from the ‘kill the boer’ chant used at Senekal and outside the court, which is in English.
Video evidence was submitted of Julius Malema leading EFF rallies in song on several occasions subsequent to the previous judgment, during which Malema could be heard saying before crowds, ‘Shoot to kill…shoot to kill…kiss the boer, the farmer’ [in English], physically miming and vocally mimicking the action of shooting.
Also included in the montage of footage were EFF leaders calling for mass dispossession, popping champagne bottles next to a cake in front of their supporters, as well as EFF leaders calling for land invasions, and Malema’s famous ‘not slaughtering whites for now’ speech.
Many sections were shown of a long speech Malema gave at Senekal, during which he said ‘the town is ours’ and that ‘we will fight and die’ and that farm murders do not exist. Ndlozi was also shown singing a song that calls for fires to be set alight.
This and more was displayed on a screen, with audio, in the court. No protest as to this evidence’s veracity was tabled at the time.
Much of Monday and Tuesday were taken up by AfriForum deputy CEO Ernst Roets answering questions put to him by AfriForum’s counsel, Advocate Mark Oppenheimer. Roets pointed out that large numbers of people had gathered at Senekal because of the murder of Brendin Horner, a killing that rendered Malema’s farm-murder denialism at Senekal ‘very disturbing’.
The bulk of Roets’s evidence was drawn from his book of 2018, Kill the Boer: Government complicity in South Africa’s brutal farm murders. He found that roughly two farm attacks took place per day and that two of those attacks resulted in murder per week.
Drawing both on work on this topic by Politicsweb editor James Myburgh and on government statistics, Roets submitted that commercial farm owners were murdered at a significantly higher rate than the national South African average.
Roets further submitted that the average farm-murder rate tends to increase to a statistically significant degree after leading politicians sing songs like ‘shoot to kill…the farmer’.
Roets repeatedly criticised what he perceived to be the willful ignoring of farm murders, alternatively the denial of such murders, and their romanticisation by those among South Africa’s most powerful and influential leaders who claimed that ‘they had it coming’. Roets argued that this behaviour by leaders had an effect on how ordinary people thought and acted.
Asked whether farm attacks and murders could not simply be explained as robberies or robberies gone wrong, Roets argued that if one believed the existence of one motive dispelled the possibility of other motives then one had committed a reasoning error called the ‘single cause fallacy’.
In part, Roets argued against such ‘single cause’ theories via the example of a murderer’s sworn confession that he killed white farmers out of ‘hate for white people’ but who also stole from the deceased. The robbery, Roets argued, did not mean that robbery was the only cause, since the accused confessed that racial animus was a cause too.
Roets also referred to victim statistics, where almost half believed their attackers had some form of political motivation, including but not only racism, even when required to only choose one perceived motivation for the attack suffered. Roets cited other cases of confessed hate crimes against white people, including some which specifically mentioned Julius Malema as an inspiration.
Roets noted that robbers who foresaw any potential costs of being caught might seek to mitigate condemnation by targeting a victim from a stigmatized group; ‘if you want to murder someone and you do not want to be condemned so severely [in South Africa], you had better murder a farmer’.
Roets also drew attention to recorded cases of torture in farm attacks, including those that resulted in murder. The detailed discussion and recollections of torture cases continued for over an hour, during which members of the gallery, including people in red berets, became visibly uncomfortable.
Several details were included to indicate that the torture used in these cases could not be explained merely as a means to extract information for robbery. In one case Roets recounted, two white women died after being repeatedly stabbed with broken bottles in their vaginas. One of women’s breasts was cut off, and their blood was used to write ‘KILL THE BOER’ on a wall.
Roets was expected to be questioned today by the EFF’s counsel, Msondezo Ka-Siboto.