Johannesburg - Comedian and actor Siv Ngesi took a video posted by TikToker MrSub_DJ (who has conveniently since deleted his account) and reposted it on his own micro-media blogging site formerly known as Twitter.
MrSub_DJ filmed himself gleefully commenting that the taxi strike had cleared Cape Town of traffic. In fact, he mused, Capetonians should find a way of keeping them on strike more often if not even permanently, because then life would be better for all.
The rub, of course, is that it wouldn’t be better for all, only for those privileged enough to not have to use the taxis and/or live on the outskirts of Cape Town due to the toxic legacy of spatial apartheid.
This week the lives of tens of thousands of ordinary people – all of them Capetonians – were massively disrupted because of the strike and the stand-off that ensued with the local government. It was lawless, it was terrifying. Five people lost their lives.
MrSub_DJ might not have been as overtly racist as Adam Catzavelos or Penny Sparrow, but the sentiments he shared certainly put him in the same WhatsApp group. Thanks to Ngesi creating a wider audience for MrSub_DJ’s video-ed musings, the TikToker attracted a lot of deserved ire from people who didn’t share his sanguine view of life with most of Cape Town’s population.
Indignantly, he threatened Ngesi with legal action for “stealing” his video. And that’s perhaps where the kids in the back of the classroom need to sit up and pay attention: your thoughts are free, but you have to carry the consequences of people’s reactions when you utter or publish them – and people can’t steal what you put in the public realm.
The sooner we realise that, maybe we’ll start being a little less self-absorbed and a little more plugged into the bigger world in which we live.