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Patriotic Alliance suspended deputy president Kenny Kunene
Sharon Seretlo/Gallo Images | Graphic: Mihle Mdashe/News24
- Patriotic Alliance suspended deputy president Kenny Kunene tried to appeal a 2023 ruling that his description of Julius Malema as a “cockroach”, as well as a “little frog” and a criminal, constituted hate speech.
- On Tuesday, a full Bench of the Gauteng High Court in Johannesburg confirmed that Kunene’s use of the term “cockroach” to refer to Malema amounted to hate speech.
- Kunene is now interdicted from using that term to refer to Malema and has 30 days to issue an apology to him.
A full Bench of the Gauteng High Court in Johannesburg has dismissed Patriotic Alliance suspended deputy president Kenny Kunene’s attempt to challenge the hate speech finding made against him for referring to EFF leader Julius Malema as a “cockroach”.
Judge Stuart Wilson found a reasonable observer would have understood Kunene’s references to Malema as a cockroach during a 2021 eNCA interview – during which he was asked about Malema labelling his party as criminals – as intended to “cause or incite harm and propagate hatred against Mr Malema because of Mr Malema’s conscience, belief or political ideology or affiliation”.
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“Whatever Mr Kunene intended, the use of the word cockroach is internationally recognised as hateful of those to whom it is directed. It is also, if not itself an incitement to do them harm, clearly indicative of an attempt to place them beyond the protection of ordinary human decency,” Wilson wrote, on behalf of the full Bench.
“The political use of the term cockroach is always and everywhere a call to treat those to whom the term is directed as objects of hate.”
Wilson confirmed the correctness of an earlier ruling made on the case by Judge Motsamai Makume, who found that “the Rwandan genocide is the dominant context in which the reasonable observer would have understood Mr Kunene’s use of the term”.
“That genocide was characterised by the use of the word “cockroach” to dehumanise and mark-out for slaughter the hundreds of thousands of men, women and children who were hacked to death in its commission,” Wilson said.
The judge rejected arguments made by Kunene’s lawyers that the word “cockroach” lacked the connotations it would have in Rwanda, in South Africa.
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“I do not think this is realistic,” he said.
“It seems to me that the use of the word “cockroach” would reasonably have been understood as evincing a clear intent to harm and [promote] hatred of Mr Malema because he was one of Mr Kunene’s political foes, and because his belief and political conscience were not those of Mr Kunene.”
Wilson continued:
The use of the word conveys that Mr Malema is not human, but deserves to be treated like a cockroach – to be eliminated from public life, perhaps together with his followers. It does not matter whether this is what Mr Kunene intended. It is plainly the meaning a reasonable observer would have attributed to Mr Kunene’s utterances.
The High Court has ordered that Kunene is “interdicted and restrained from describing the complainant (Malema) as a ‘cockroach’ in future”.
“[Kunene] is ordered to issue an unconditional written and oral public apology for referring to [Malema] as a ‘cockroach’. The apology must unequivocally retract the use of the word ‘cockroach’ to describe [Malema].” It ruled.
Kunene’s written and oral apology “must be published within one month of the date of this order”.
Wilson and his colleagues did not sustain Makume’s earlier order that the hate speech case against Kunene be referred to the country’s prosecuting authorities for a decision on “whether the impugned statements warrant institution of criminal proceedings for crimen injuria”.
