SAHRC’s prosecution of a journalist over k-word is more damaging to free speech

Ah, the poor SA Human Rights Commission (SAHRC). It’s a once-admirable concept that’s descended into bleak surreal irrelevance.

The often superficial and contradictory findings of the “hate speech” cases it’s brought before the specially convened Equality Courts are having a torrid time with regular appeal challenges and reversals. But the SAHRC is as indefatigable as an untrainable puppy.

Despite repeated slap downs with a rolled-up newspaper, they’re still pissing on the carpet and crapping in the kitchen.

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While Julius Malema and thousands of attendees at EFF rallies chant “Kill the boer, kill the farmer”, the SAHRC has set its gunsights on an often annoying but essentially peaceable journalist for a tweet made more than four years ago.

This week, it served summons on outspoken political commentator Kanthan Pillay for alleged hate speech. It’s a serious charge that previously has reduced others, whether guilty or not, to social disgrace and lost employment.

That the musings of a journalist on social media are the focus of a criminal action is chilling. It appears to be a significant attempt by the ANC, in the form of the supposedly independent SAHRC, to extend the scope of what the state can censor, prohibit and punish.

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Pillay stirred the interest of SAHRC when he dared describe himself in a tweet as a “k****r” and urged others to embrace the term.

Possibly the SAHRC would have found his ideas less objectionable had he stuck to his designated lane and described himself as a “charro”, a pejorative description of those of Indian descent.

“Can we stop this fearful use of the ‘k-word’? Pillay wrote in this 2019 tweet. “The word is ‘k****r’ and means infidel.

K****r, nigger, Voldemort … words acquire power when you are afraid to use them … I am a k****r and proud of it.”

This kind of contrarian thinking – the tweet is about a philosophical position and no shape or form an affirmation of abuse and violence – is typically Pillay.

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It seems to me (I’ve not discussed it with him, although we’ve been friends for decades) to be both deliberately intellectually provocative and inadvertently Quixotic. Pillay embraces as a badge of honour the label with which the racists seek to humiliate.

It’s going to be interesting to hear the SAHRC explain how self-identification with a term of abuse to neutralise its sting can somehow be equated to the call for scorn, exclusion and harm that constitutes actual hate speech.

A further impediment to the SAHRC’s case is that Pillay has embraced being a k****r on public platforms several times before.

In May 2012, he wrote in a Post column arguing against people defining themselves in terms of racial identities: “I have said it before and I will say it again: I’m a k****r and proud of it. The word comes from Arabic and is used by the Islamic world to refer to infidels and I am firmly in the ranks of non-believers.”

The SAHRC says Pillay’s 2019 use of the k-word and views “constitute hate speech and unfair discrimination against black people, black Africans in general”.

They want the court to order an unconditional apology, prohibit him from “further hate speech”, impose damages of R250 000, and despatch him for race sensitisation training. But this prosecution is even more damaging to free speech.

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Pillay’s views may be naive or even mischievous, but they are part of a legitimate and ongoing adult conversation we should be having regarding the toxic flotsam of the past.

Personally, I rather like the idea that we should, whatever our outward ethnicity, embrace the sense of the word. Not as a badge of nonbelief, but rather in the spirit of solidarity like the Je Suis Charlie slogan adopted by freedom of speech supporters when 12 journalists were murdered by Islamist fanatics at the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo. I am you. We are one.