It’s been a busy few days on Twitter, what with Jessica Leandra coming down with foot in mouth disease to be quickly followed by Tshidi, and now the prospect of Jessica and Tshidi having dinner with DA national spokesperson Mmusi Maimane to kiss and make up. Tshidi has deleted her profile and Jessica has gone to ground, presumably to think in cursive strings of words, but without necessarily sharing whatever her explosively creative mind comes up with. Twitter will move on, as it always does, to be distracted by the next brand to step into the dwang, as always happens.
But as it turns out, this story is taking another turn, because another atom bomb of a tweet has surfaced, one that manages to take racism and sexism and combine them into a statement so breathtakingly offensive it has left many people who have seen it feeling quite ill. I’m uploading it here for two reasons:
1. People on Twitter have asked what I’m referring to and because he’s deleted his profile, I can’t send them there to see for themselves and
2. People should be accountable for what they say and do online, and there’s no accountability if there’s no record.
I scrolled through Itumeleng’s timeline for a sense of the person who could come up with this kind of bile, and found very little of interest. It was utterly banal: meeting up with friends, studying, one reference to a sexist hip hop track. Overall, nothing about his profile suggests a likely candidate for this kind of outburst. He’s a B.Com Accounting student with dreams of being a CA. Greatness personified indeed:
In one of his tweets, he links to his blog, so I went along to check it out, and what I found left me gobsmacked, because nothing in it indicates that this is the kind of person who’d come up with the kind of hate speech he directs at Jessica. Here’s a quote from an entry he wrote on Father’s Day last year (he makes reference to the fact that he grew up without a father – possibly there is a clue in that):
This brings me to the very reason why I decided to write this blog in the first place; to express my gratitude to the father of democracy,Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela.In the year 1994,amidst all the racial discrimination and warfare in South Africa,a baby called Democracy was conceived.This baby,with support from it’s dad,Mr Mandela,successfully brought an end to the Apartheid regime.It is because of Mr Mandela’s ‘fathering skills’ that our country now enjoys racial equality and decent human rights policies. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Mr Mandela for excellently playing his role as a father to his beloved son,Democracy.
Apart from the willful refusal to punctuate correctly, there’s nothing offensive in that; just the opposite in fact. (He’s a fan of Julius Malema, but that’s hardly a smoking gun.) Later on, he posts a transcription of a discussion with Kerwin Lebone of the South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR) on the subject of fatherless households. It’s all thoughtful, considered and evidence of somebody who is interested in human rights.
So what’s going on here? Why would somebody self-immolate online in the way that Itumeleng appears to have done? (This kind of thing, where a racist rant has led to dismissal, has happened before, but on Facebook.) He’s been reported to Unisa, and because Google has a long memory, he can probably kiss a future career in a nice accounting firm goodbye. Since his tweet was discovered, he’s deleted his Twitter and Facebook profiles and I’m guessing the blog is going to follow too, but it’s all in vain.
But something funny is going on here. There’s such a contrast between those tweets and the blog that I wonder whether Itumeleng’s account had been hacked. That second tweet, the one about ‘Tata Madiba’ is the really intriguing one, because it suggests that its author and the writer of the blog is one and the same. @LifeisSavage has reported that there are ‘damning Facebook pics’ but the account had been deleted before I had a chance to look, so I don’t know what to make of it.
If he has been hacked, then I feel incredibly sorry for him, because this is an exceptionally nasty case of sabotage at a time when racist tweeting is such a hot button issue (and so is gender-based violence).
But if it hasn’t been hacked, what’s his excuse? Alcohol? Drugs? A really bad day? If that’s the case, the guy clearly needs therapy. So, yes, I’m horrified. But I’m also curious, because there’s more going on here than a simple case of a hateful racist pig venting online. There’s a story behind those tweets. Whatever the truth, I hope it comes out.
