01/02/2026
You see here, this is the same woman who called a South African police officer born in Limpopo a Kwerekwere because he didn’t speak isiZulu. But here she is speaking in English to an Indian cop who doesn’t speak isiZulu.
Those defending her are defending tribalism, and that should trouble their conscience if they have any. The same woman speaks comfortably in English to an Indian police officer who lives in KwaZulu-Natal, in the same province.
Yet when she speaks to a black police officer born in Limpopo, she calls him a kwerekwere, and some adults, rise to defend that behaviour. Are they not ashamed, or have they lost all sense of shame?
It is always easier for some of them to insult their own black brothers than to direct the same contempt towards other races. That hypocrisy is not accidental. It is learned. It is conditioned. It is the residue of apartheid still living inside them, not as law, but as psychology.
It is the baas mentality recycled and internalised, where blackness is ranked, policed, and humiliated by fellow blacks, while deference is reserved for others.
This is not about language at all. It is not about geography too. It is about a sickness of the mind, where colonial hierarchies continue to dictate who deserves respect and who can be casually dehumanised. A black person deserves insults according to this rotten mentality. But someone from another race deserves respect.
And as long as they defend this behaviour, apartheid does not need to return, because it never really left, it lives in such rotten minds.
People like myself get insulted for raising these issues. And yet, people like myself should never be afraid to raise them. We should not be intimidated by insults or noise. What we are dealing with is a vocal minority that shouts loudly and tries to bully society into silence.
There is a silent majority that does not support tribalism, that does not believe in it, and that rejects it outright. That majority often stays quiet, not because it agrees with hatred, but because it assumes that decency should speak for itself. History shows that it never does unless someone gives it a voice.
And as long as people like myself stop speaking out against these evils of tribalism, as I consistently do in Zimbabwe, then we will have failed in our duty. We will have failed as public intellectuals, failed as journalists, and failed as people of moral conscience. Silence in the face of tribalism is not neutrality at all. It is surrender to bad and unacceptable behaviour.dime
