No excuse for racist language

On 18 December 2023 a CCMA commissioner upheld David Nemushungwa’s dismissal for having referred to his fellow employees in Zulu as “monkeys”.

He conceded that he did so. Initially he said he was joking. In a second version he told a fellow employee that he called them “monkeys” because he was angry after they only received a 7% salary increase because they didn’t work well and because they didn’t want to join the union.

At the arbitration he presented a third version.His explanation was now that he had uttered a Tshivenda idiom, “mapfene o tsitsa vhana”, which meant that “people are happy”.

He discovered too late that it was futile to change the reasons for his utterance. It didn’t matter why he called them “monkeys” – it mattered that he did so.