It isn’t funny anymore. But we know what it’s about. It’s about old prejudices — long-standing cultural tensions between different groups in this country — and it’s about playing to the gallery. Some so-called liberal writers mock people who have applied for asylum abroad, writing about them in a disparaging, almost sneering tone. Meanwhile, the reality on the ground is suffering, fear, violent crime, and families whose lives have been torn apart. It is simply not right to speak about killings and trauma in a way that turns human pain into clever material.
If we look honestly at South Africa, we see a society struggling with extremely high levels of violent crime. Recent news tells the story: people shot in a Somerset mall in Cape Town, a 16-year-old wounded in Hanover Park, an Air Force employee killed in the northern part of the country, a 60-year-old farmer murdered, a Jeffreys Bay store manager killed during an armed robbery, and five suspects appearing in court in connection with a farm murder in Humansdorp. These are not abstract talking points. These are shattered families. And this violence is not limited to one group. It affects everyone. That makes it even more inappropriate for journalists, writers, and commentators to generalise, to mock, or to hide behind satire and irony as though this is all harmless wordplay.
It isn’t harmless. It’s insensitive. It’s performance for a particular liberal audience. Yet what can be done? Very little, because it falls under “creative expression.” Still, it often functions like hate speech, just heavily disguised with clever phrasing, polished irony, and intellectual-sounding arguments. So it’s worth asking why this kind of writing rarely crosses the legal line, and why we might be better off refusing to give it oxygen.
The Shield of “Clever” Writing
These writers “get away with it” because of the narrow legal corridors of the South African Constitution. Section 16 protects freedom of expression and specifically makes room for artistic creativity and academic freedom.
When a columnist mocks an Afrikaner family seeking refugee status in the United States, they usually aren’t using crude slurs. They use irony. They frame their disdain as satire or social commentary. That allows them to sidestep hate speech laws, which require a clear intention to incite harm or promote hatred. A skilled writer can argue they are merely critiquing a political narrative. This kind of linguistic gymnastics makes it possible to punch down while claiming to be punching up.
Much of the mockery appears linked to the 2025/2026 U.S. refugee discussions involving South Africans. International politics have turned the issue into a symbolic battleground. For some commentators, the people applying are reduced to a political talking point, a way to score points in a global debate.
In the rush to be “right” about the politics, the human beings behind the applications disappear. People who are frightened, who have experienced violence in their communities, who have watched their towns change, become characters in someone else’s satirical script. That detachment is part of the problem.
There is also a long-standing, often unspoken tension between sections of the English-speaking media establishment and Afrikaans-speaking or rural communities. Mocking those who want to leave can become a way of signalling membership in a certain cosmopolitan, urban elite. Crime “affects everyone” is used as a rhetorical weapon to dismiss the specific fears of groups they don’t sympathise with.
This is a form of double-speak. The crime is acknowledged in theory, but the fear is ridiculed in practice. A murdered farmer or a family traumatised by violence is not just a statistic. It is the collapse of a household’s sense of safety and stability.
Perhaps the most effective response to this thickly disguised hostility is not a courtroom battle but a withdrawal of attention. Writers who trade in mockery thrive on engagement, outrage, and applause from their gallery. When readers stop treating clever puns as profound and start recognising a lack of empathy for what it is, the influence of that writing weakens.
Teenagers are being shot. Workers are being killed. Families across all communities are grieving. We don’t need cleverness for its own sake. We need solidarity — the simple recognition that pain is pain, no matter which cultural group is mourning today.
