Is 2017 the year of the terrifying black racist?

A casual observer of the headlines might be quick to conclude that 2017 is perhaps going to go down as the year of the frightening black racist.

Many of these black guys would seem to make Penny Sparrow seem like a girl scout selling cookies in Khayelitsha.

Over the weekend we were introduced to Obatala Mcambi, who appeared in photos posing with guns on Facebook and saying he uses these guns to rob and kill white and Indian people and would like to ensure that he and his black brothers also rape and infect Indian and white children with Aids.

Just last week we also had the curious case of Obakeng Mothupi, who told us on Facebook about how he also has a thing against kids (he said he took great pleasure in splashing water on white schoolchildren when he drove past them). He also celebrated the death of a white motorcyclist, apparently wishing all white people should expire in a similarly gruesome fashion.

Then, of course, there’s Riaan Lucas and his racist meme celebrating the death of Joost van der Westhuizen.

That now seems pretty tame in comparison with Obatala Mcambi, who appears to encapsulate the quintessence of what white South Africa for decades used to call the “swart gevaar”.

It wasn’t the talk about murder and robbery that made me doubt whether Mcambi could be real, though. It was (rather obviously) the Aids part. If a white troll had to sit down, think for a while and then construct the most scary version of a black man to terrify the white (and Indian) community, they could do a lot worse than Mcambi.

White people, male and female, by and large are terrified of the predatory black male and his supposedly inexhaustible sex drive (not to mention the prejudice that “all” black people have Aids and the various stigmas that surround that, too, in the black community). Not coincidentally, it’s exactly this which has given South African prisons their horror-movie aura.

But it’s also why I would be surprised if Mcambi ever turns up and gets arrested. To me, I doubt that he is real. If he is, then he certainly needs to face justice for what can only be described as some of the worst hate speech we’ve seen disseminated on Facebook in a long time.

But if he isn’t real, I’d stake my bottom dollar that he was created by a white troll, who is currently revelling in all the uproar and chaos he or she has created.

Yusuf Abramjee even went and opened a case against Mcambi at the Brooklyn Police Station. I can imagine that the troll in question was in front of their computer cackling with glee when that happened.

And if Mcambi indeed is a creation, he’s truly a work of staggeringly stupid genius. The fact that his profile image features him holding and looking rather bemusedly at a gigantic .45-calibre revolver is either just a coincidence or a reference to the fact that black men in the townships (and Daily Sun subeditors) refer to penises as “4-5s”.

Cue the phallic terror.

Even if Mcambi and his profile are fake, not for one moment am I saying that we should now simply always be fine with anyone who posts anything as disgusting as what was written on Mcambi’s (now deleted) profile. But we also need to keep in mind that the white right has a huge interest in fuelling racial tensions and they would love to confuse the whole issue of racism in general.

Why? Because if you can prove that black people are unfathomably more racist, hateful and awful than your Penny Sparrows, then white racism stops seeming like such a big problem. White people become the victims, and the white right would love nothing more than that.

If you don’t believe me that they have (for years) been creating false profiles of black people on social media in order to spread whatever message they would like to through these “puppet” fake profiles, then keep in mind that we’ve looked into this before. It happens.

Some of these fake black people are basically the opposite of Mcambi but also serve a more subtle white agenda. Despite not even existing, they have tens of thousands of fans, most of them white. They’re basically Facebook celebrities.

So, yes, let’s condemn the Obatala Mcambis and the Obakeng Mothupis (let’s not even get into how similar both of those names are), while also keeping in mind just how easy it is to create a false Facebook profile and troll an entire society using that profile.

There’s already more than enough REAL racism from ALL sides in this country without the need to create any fake people peddling false racism.

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