18/11/2025
JUKE MAPLANLA REAPONDS TO Jacinta Zinhle MaNgobese Zuma
"Jacinta, we both know that you have been expecting my reply to your silly interview. You must learn to wait in line like the failure that you are. Looking at your life, it’s clear to see that you are an expert in failure. Your Xenophobia is the only thing you’ve ever managed to excel at.
The frightening truth is that your tirade in that silly interview or podcast is no longer an outlier but a symptom of how deeply hate speech has been normalised in South Africa’s current political climate. What should be universally recognised as dangerous, dehumanising rhetoric has been repackaged as “activism,” applauded by gormless anti-intellectual crowds who have forgotten, or never learned, that this is precisely how societies slide into sanctioned brutality. In any nation with functioning guardrails, with institutions that still remember the cost of history’s darkest chapters, the language you used would not be defended as free expression. It would be criminally prosecuted as criminal incitement. Because calling entire nationalities a threat, vilifying migrants as parasites, and suggesting they are undeserving of dignity is not commentary, it is the textbook language of ethnic hostility, the kind of speech that, in healthy democracies, is stopped before it metastasises into violence. The tragedy is not only that you said it, but that you felt safe enough to say it publicly, confidently, knowing the country’s moral immune system has grown weak enough to tolerate it.
So let me speak to you without politeness, without the courtesy you neither deserve nor understand. That interview was a masterclass in intellectual limitation, an exhibition of the smallness of a mind that can only make sense of the world by punching downwards. You delivered your xenophobic rhetoric with that hollow confidence you mistake for conviction, spewing cheap insults about my people, Zimbabweans as though hatred were wisdom. It was embarrassing to watch. Painful, even. Not for you, you’ve long lost the capacity for shame, but for the country forced to endure your noise.
Let’s stop pretending there is substance beneath your rhetoric. Your entire political persona is built on the flimsy scaffolding of resentment. You failed at everything you tried before anti-migrant sentiment became fashionable, and when the father of Xenophobia, Nhlanhla Lux handed South Africa’s angriest citizens a vocabulary for their frustrations, you leapt at it like someone who had finally found a personality. Then the other failure in life, Zandile Dabula, came along and added more fuel to the fires of South African Xenophobia, and you, ever opportunistic, ever desperate for relevance, grabbed the flames with both hands and set your entire identity alight.
That’s who you are, not a leader, not a thinker, certainly not a patriot. Just an opportunist who realised bigotry was the only skill she possessed that could attract attention.
And before you mistake this for some polite critique, let me be brutally clear. I do not respect you. I do not rate you. I do not consider you worthy of serious intellectual engagement. Your brand of hatred is so predictable, so crudely constructed, a clear display of low-level thinking. Your views are not merely offensive, they’re simplistic to the point of parody. Every time you speak, it becomes painfully obvious that you are out of your depth in the shallowest of intellectual waters.
Your silly interview sounded less like political commentary and more like a tantrum from someone who has no capacity to grapple with a complex ideas and economic, political and social concepts. You talk as if migrants broke the country, as if corruption, misgovernance, and decades of failure suddenly appeared with a Zimbabwean passport attached. It’s laughable. If your arguments were any more simplistic, they would collapse into single syllable grunts.
And what really PI**ED me off it that, somehow, you find the time and audacity to march into the comments section of my own columns, uninvited, unprepared, and utterly classless, to regurgitate your usual xenophobic clichés. You barge in like an angry toddler desperate for attention, splashing hatred around with all the sophistication of a child trying to figure out how to use a spoon.
Let me spell it out. Your contributions aren’t insightful, they aren’t challenging, they aren’t provocative. They were exactly what I expect from you, empty, loud, and embarrassingly dim.
By the way wena nkazana, your bigotry is not a sign of strength. It is, in my opinion, a clear reflection of your intellectual limitations, limitations so glaring that they shine through even when you believe you’re being clever. Hatred has always been the last refuge of the unimaginative, and you cling to it like someone who knows they have nothing else to offer the world.
You like to present yourself as the voice of a generation. You aren’t. You’re the echo of fringe weirdos that mistake fury for clarity and scapegoating for political strategy. Your rhetoric carries the unmistakable stench of historical ignorance, the same tired logic used in places where humanity once faced its darkest hours. But you’re too busy and too stupid performing your newfound persona to realise the ugliness you’re spewing.
And yet you strut around as though you’re delivering revelations, when in reality you’re recycling ideas whose intellectual shelf life expired decades ago.
Understand this, I will confront you every time you drag your hatred into my spaces. I will dismiss your commentary that attacks my people because that is all it deserves, dismissal. I will certainly not pretend your xenophobia is a political position worth debating.
Because your kind of bigotry doesn’t challenge minds, it insults them. It doesn’t provoke thought, it reveals the absence of it. And as long as you continue to mistake your prejudice for purpose, I will continue to treat your entire stance with the contempt it has so thoroughly earned.
Jacinta, you are not dangerous because you are powerful.
You are dangerous because you are small minded and loud.
And people like me will always stand between your noise and the humanity you hope to trample."
