THE SITUATION is all too familiar. A 25-year-old black man Thabiso Danca, found that he was welcome and able to enter a Cape Town pub whenever accompanied by white colleagues. But without the gift of whiteness, he wasn’t even recognized at the door. The situation escalated when Danca, upset at being denied entry on Friday 1 December 2022 appealed to fellow lifesaver, Christopher Logan for assistance. According to a statement by the Pub, “the door personnel requested Danca’s identification to verify his age”
Frank’s door policy, like most pubs, is not under 21, “he failed to produce a valid ID and was denied entry to the pub.” It is clear from photographs that not only was Danca an adult, but he looked like an adult. This is not exactly a case of a ‘baby-faced’ teen appearing at a City venue and being denied entry, or a 22-year-old being confused with a 21-year-old, but rather an adult being told to beat it, because, well he isn’t white.
Given the context of ongoing race-based discrimination, (yes for all practical intents and purposes structural apartheid didn’t end in 1994, it merely lost any legal basis for its existence), Danca was rightfully upset at being treated as a minor. The words patronising and patron both have a similar pedigree, deriving from the Latin Pater, meaning ‘Father’. So we all get the gist of the central complaint, and the sequence of events which resulted in Logan ticking off staff and management in front of social media the very next day. The incident resulted in an altercation in which Logan was accused of ‘being the instigator, and the side-bar drama of who videoed who, from what angle, is of little consequence and absolutely not the crux of the matter.
This week owners of Hank’s Olde Irish Pub in Bree Street were ‘awarded R1.25 million in damages by the Western Cape High Court for ‘false accusations of racism on social media’
In retrospect, given Hank’s Pub’s ability to muster legal forces, it might not have been a good idea for the two friends to confront the Irish establishment directly. But here’s the rub, the entire ‘anti-racist’ movement which characterized the nation’s campuses for the past decade has literally advocated ‘confronting racism wherever and whenever it occurs‘. Yet the wobbly left have been rather silent on this account because the man being accused of defamation isn’t black?
This is not a lesson in how to go about filling out a discrimination claim, but one would have expected there to have been some effort made at tackling the central case, in this respect the SAHRC failed miserably, as the entire matter ended up coming a cropper on the strange assumption that video material of the later Saturday confrontation, the second incident, was somehow ‘the evidence’ of the first and vice versa, and of course, a ‘white person cannot experience racism’. Clearly Logan wasn’t the one being discriminated against here, he was acting out of solidarity with his companion. The fact of the denial of entry is not in dispute.
I very much doubt if one could ever persuade a jury comprising 12 peers that a Saturday was the Friday in question, but we shall never know?
So once again our justice system turns out to be nothing more than an obstinate legal bureaucracy, in which the only issue for consideration was whether or not a ‘right of admission policy’, trumped any objections raised about the arbitrary application of a rule according to race-based criteria? All this while our law has been hijacked by libel lawyers intent on expanding the definition of libel law to include influencers and political activity?
Social media influencers not subject to press freedom?
The court has perversely ordered Christopher Michael Logan to pay the damages because he “accused John Papadakis of racism and shared a video on social media, claiming that his friend, Thabiso Danca, was denied entry to the pub because of his race.”
The social media outrage, according to the court, “led to significant reputational harm, financial losses and emotional distress for the pub and its co-owners, the Papadakis brothers”. The damages were awarded to Latari House (the operating company for Hank’s Olde Irish Pub) and brothers Viron and John Papadakis who, at that stage, were co-owners of the pub.:”
Since I have been unable to find any reference on SAFLII to the case, I am unable to read the exact wording of the decision, (anyone willing to assist here?) but from my own experience of dealing with the Western Cape division, the context in which racism occurs in our country has turned out to be of little consequence. This is the self-same division which trashed the TRC Report in 2010 and again in 2018, in the process dumping our Preamble. The Constitution is only in force when it comes to the Constitutional Court, and available to citizens at great cost it seems? The portraits of Judge President’s reaching all the way back to the old Cape Colony still line the High Court’s vaulted halls. Clearly such portraits belong in a museum?
More concerning is the manner in which ‘Papadakis and Co’, (or at least their supporters), have run a campaign before the courts, objecting to the pair’s membership of various student political organisations. You read that correctly, the latest tweets on X.com go so far as calling Logan an “EFF plant”, when the facts are both were members of DASO on campus, and so what? Our Constitution protects the right to membership of political parties irrespective of one’s race or social status?
The resulting miscarriage of justice is all too reminiscent of the manner in which apartheid officials banned student organisations and their members en masse during the 80s, without any opportunity for appeal, as officials continue to defend petty apartheid in our City.
Yes, our justice system has once again demonstrated that it lacks capacity to assess the facts when it comes to capital crimes and defamation cases. Where the West has a jury system, our legal system abolished jury trial in 1969, citing international embarrassment at the appearance of black persons before all-white juries. Closing down public participation in the justice process, lay-assessors are rarely used, the more so when tricky issues such as racism arise. Our courts all too often resort to a strategy known as ‘obfuscation of law’. The Logan decision merely bolsters this perception.
Then again, most Fridays are already Saturday when it comes to the Cape Bar?