Penny Sparrow’s daughter speaks.
As Penny Sparrow is fined R150 000 for hate speech her daughter reveals the fallout of the drama on her family
WHEN her mom came to her in a panic one day in January saying she was in trouble because of something she’d said on Facebook, Charmaine Cowrie told her not be ridiculous.
Her mom, Penny Sparrow, said she’d made a comment about litter on the beach and it had gone viral. “She said, ‘I’ve made a terrible mistake.’ And I was like, ‘What are you talking about, Mom?’ I couldn’t understand what the problem was,” Charmaine (50) says.
But then Charmaine’s eldest daughter sent a screen grab of her grandmother’s Facebook post to her via WhatsApp – and Charmaine was flabbergasted. “I said, ‘Ma, what have you done?’” The storm unleashed by Penny’s social media post, in which she compared black people to monkeys after Scottburgh Beach in KwaZulu-Natal had been littered on New Year’s Day, has turned the family’s life upside down, Charmaine tells us. Her mom is still in hiding, too afraid to return home.
On 10 June the equality court found Penny guilty of hate speech and ordered her to pay R150 000 within 60 days to the Oliver and Adelaide Tambo Foundation for her racist comments.
She understands why people were angry about her mom’s comments, Charmaine tells us at the nursery she owns in Scottburgh on the KwaZulu-Natal South Coast. She was furious too. “[My mom] never gave a thought to the consequences of her words. But I couldn’t turn my back on her,” she says, weeping and burying her face in her hands.
In her heart she believes her mom isn’t racist and was only expressing her disgust about the mess on the beach. She doesn’t recall her mom ever behaving in a racist manner, adding she often helped staff at the nursery. Penny (68), a former estate agent, worked there before her remarks saw her flee town.
“She’s the first one to buy gifts for my staff ’s children,” Charmaine says. Her employees were shocked when it happened because they love her, she says. One sent Charmaine a message on WhatsApp saying, “I can’t believe [it]. Is that gogo?”
“That’s what they call her. I said ‘yes’, and he said, ‘There’s no way.’”
THE sky is overcast and there’s a brisk wind outside as we talk in the restaurant at the nursery, which opened for business in November last year. Charmaine could ill afford the bad publicity that resulted from her mom’s racist rant on Facebook.
Penny started getting calls from strangers who got her number from Jawitz Properties, the estate agency she used to work for. But Charmaine’s phone also started ringing off the hook – someone had posted her business profile on Twitter and word had spread that Penny was now working for her. She started getting death threats.
Soon their home address was all over social media too. She and Penny lived in separate houses on the same property.
When the backlash began, Penny went to stay with friends. Charmaine, a divorced mom of two, took her youngest daughter to her ex-husband and went to stay with a friend. Her eldest daughter lives elsewhere. “We feared for our lives,” Charmaine says. “I was terrified.”
The pals Penny was staying with were so scared someone would find out she was there that she was asked to leave. “They chucked her out on the street in the middle of the night,” Charmaine says.
Charmaine has never been terribly interested in social media. “I’m a gardener – give me a spade and some soil and I’m okay. I’m not very good with technology and I was even worse with Facebook.”
But she had a crash course in it that day in January and couldn’t believe how quickly things exploded.
“There were 150 messages per second. It was incredible.”
Charmaine says she went to the police to report the death threats but it didn’t help. “They said, ‘You can’t call someone a monkey and ask them to protect you’.”
A mob came to the nursery chanting, “Penny Sparrow must fall!” Penny fled to Port Elizabeth, then Joburg soon after, and has been in hiding ever since.
She says she didn’t know she had to appear in the equality court. She maintains she’s not racist despite the overwhelming criticism and court ruling.
“It’s so unfair and disappointing,” she tells YOU. “I’ve been given a heavy sentence for something . . . I’m not a racist at all. I was just making the point about filthy beaches and nothing to do with everything else. The white way is to say to kids, ‘You little monkey’. With white peo- ple, we use monkey all the time because it means you get up to mischief. You do naughty things but monkeys are cute.
“I didn’t mean to insult anybody, anybody at all. It’s the term I used with my children, grandchildren, and many white people call their kids monkeys. It’s not hate speech to us.” (Go to you.co.za for more on what Penny has to say.)
PENNY, who’s been moving from one family friend to another, used to be bubbly but is now quiet and fearful and cries a lot, Charmaine says.
“She can’t even go to the hospital to get her diabetes medication because she’s scared of what might happen. She longs to feel safe again and to be able to go to the shop to buy milk and bread.”
Penny has lost a lot of weight and the stress of the past several months has aged her, Charmaine says. But she finds solace in her pets – she’s taken her cats and dogs with her – and keeps herself entertained by watching her favourite soap, The Bold And The Beautiful.
Charmaine speaks to her mom as often as she can but has saved Penny’s number under her second name so people don’t know it’s her. “She keeps saying what a terrible, terrible mistake she’s made,” she says.
Yet Penny didn’t show up for her court case. It was Charmaine who took the stand on her behalf before a packed gallery and with four cops guarding her.
Asked by the magistrate why Penny wasn’t there she replied that her mom was unwell and also couldn’t find a lawyer as nobody would represent her.
Charmaine wishes people would forgive her mom. “Hasn’t she paid enough?”
She doesn’t know how Penny will pay the R150 000 fine and believes it would have been of more benefit if she’d been given community service and training on racism. Penny wants to appeal the judgment, she says. She’d also give anything to come back to Scottburgh. “It’s her home.”
People’s jaws drop when they hear Charmaine is Penny Sparrow’s daughter and often want nothing to do with her. “I want to hide under a rock,” she says.
It’s been a taxing journey that has caused unhappiness for everyone involved, she says. She’d been looking forward to 2016 but a few hundred words on social media put paid to that. “Mom loved being on Facebook – now there’s no way we’ll let her get near it.”