It is becoming increasingly expensive to be racist, as a Lephalale, Limpopo, man has discovered.
The Equality Court has ordered Andrew van der Westhuizen to pay his colleague Elliot Senwamadi, at Nashua in Lephalale (formerly known as Ellisrus), R10 000 after Van der Westhuizen shared an e-mail ”recipe” with fellow staff members on how to ”create black people”.
According to the e-mail, written in Afrikaans, one needs ”a wheelbarrow of water, a wheelbarrow of mud and a wheelbarrow of faeces.
”Mix everything well together and make a form you desire. Place it in the sun and wait until it has dried up. WARNING: You must not add a lot of the faeces because you will get a Gauteng Lions [rugby] supporter.”
The Equality Court stems from the Promotion of Equality and Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act, a piece of legislation described by former education minister Kader Asmal as ”a comprehensive assault by the government on the shaken and broken, but not yet finally demolished, edifice of apartheid”.
Van der Westhuizen sent the offending e-mail to white colleagues, including Senwamadi’s manager, Adriaan Engelbrecht, after a workplace squabble with Senwamadi. Engelbrecht forwarded the e-mail to his subordinates, including Senwamadi.
In spite of the Nashua Limited policy, which states that employees found guilty of ”unfair discrimination by any employee against another employee solely on the grounds of race, sex or creed or the making of derogatory remarks against another employee based on such employee’s race, sex or creed” would be summarily dismissed, Van der Westhuizen kept his job after a disciplinary hearing conducted at Nashua Lephalale.
Nashua Limited marketing manager Dave Hallas told the Mail & Guardian: ”We do not condone that type of behaviour. We are a totally non-racial organisation but unfortunately you sometimes cannot police individuals with regard to what they do over the Internet.”
Hallas said Nashua businesses are franchises and individual shop-owners are responsible for disciplining their staff. Nashua Limited, he added, is responsible for staff at its headquarters.
Van der Westhuizen was found guilty of misusing company property and given a final written warning but not fired ”because it was found that he had not written the e-mail, but had circulated it”, said Michael Cooper, managing director of Nashua Rustenburg, under which the Lephalale branch falls.
”Nashua does not condone such behaviour. Unfortunately we were drawn into this [case] because our equipment was used. But we are glad with the outcome of the Equality Court case.”
Van der Westhuizen said he needed time to speak to his lawyer before deciding on whether to comment on the judgement.
Senwamadi, who had originally asked the court to order Van der Westhuizen to pay R200 000, based his case on the provisions of the equality legislation, which empower a court to, among other things, make ”an order for payment of any damages of any proven financial loss, or in respect of impairment of dignity, pain and suffering or emotional and psychological suffering, as a result of the unfair discrimination, hate speech or harassment”.
A lawyer who asked to remain anonymous said unless a plaintiff could prove how he or she had arrived at the amount claimed, the court was inclined to follow precedents set by other courts in similar cases.
The Lephalale case is the most recent to come before the Equality Court.
In February, the Sliver Bar, frequented by gay men in Green Point, Cape Town, was slapped with a R10 000 fine and two bouncers were fined R1 500 each after they allowed a University of Western Cape law professor, Pierre de Vos, into the bar, but barred his coloured partner, Marcus Pillay, on the grounds that Pillay was not appropriately dressed.
Sliver and the bouncers were ordered to pay the money to Siyazenzela, a Cape Town-based gay- rights lobby group.
The bouncers and the owners of the bar were found to have excluded other black patrons before Pillay.
In April the Equality Court in Blue Downs, Cape Town, ordered a parent, her daughter and the girl’s boyfriend to pay R10 000 after they assaulted and defecated on a black learner and called her a ”kaffir who did not belong” at the formerly whites-only Edgemead High School.
The three were also ordered to attend a diversity and racial sensitisation programme run by the Human Rights Commission.