SCA hears AfriForum ‘yearning for return of apartheid’ in flag case
Judgment has been reserved in lobby group AfriForum’s application to overturn the ban on the display of the old South African flag.
AfriForum turned to the Supreme Court of Appeal following an earlier decision of the Equality Court declaring displays of the flag as hate speech.
In 2019, the Nelson Mandela Foundation and the South African Human Rights Commission approached the court after the flag was displayed by demonstrators at a march against farm murders.
The foundation's Advocate Thembeka Ngcukaitobi told the court on Wednesday that the display of the flag endorses crimes against humanity.
"The only contemporary meaning to the flag is a yearning for the return of apartheid, it is the rejection of the constitutional system. That is the true use of this flag, that is why when white people organise a protest about farm murders, they don't talk about the criminality of the farm murders they talk about the return of the flag?
"Anyone who continues to display the flag today endorses the crime against humanity, an attack on black dignity and the superiority of whiteness. Because that flag was a total embodiment of apartheid."
Advocate Mark Oppenheimer, for AfriForum, argued that if the old flag constitutes hate speech, then the hammer and sickle flag which symbolises communism and the flag of the British empire should be treated the same.
"In those communist regimes people were murdered, they were persecuted in vast numbers. In Cambodia, a third of the population was exterminated. We know that the Union Jack has presided over much suffering colonialism, death, torture in South Africa during the Boer war 28 000 Afrikaaner women and children were killed in camps. These are also symbols of crimes against humanity."
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