Time it was told: Equality Court case shines a light on centuries of racism against Chinese South Africans

Where do all these Chinese people come from? was the rhetorical question uttered in my direction by a security guard at the high court in Johannesburg in March. He was reacting to the presence of hundreds of members of the local Chinese community at the courthouse in support of an Equality Court case against anti-Chinese hate speech.

The Chinese Association (TCA), formed back in 1903, brought the case against 12 respondents for comments they made on pages belonging to the Karoo Donkey Sanctuary, as well as on the Carte Blanche Facebook page after it aired a report on trade in donkey skins in early 2017.

The hearing continues on November 25, and I find myself wondering if the court security will again express disbelief at the presence of fellow South Africans of Chinese origin at the courthouse. This incredulity is misplaced because Chinese South Africans have been part of this country’s diverse makeup for hundreds of years.

The security guard’s response reflects a reality in which South African Chinese, and their experiences of race-based prejudice, are frequently overlooked, including in public discussions on diversity and human rights. Against this backdrop, the case is a historic one, spotlighting the anti-Chinese racism that is so frequent on social media, and which, until now, has not been challenged in a South African court of law.

TCA is centrally concerned with the harmful, hurtful and discriminatory effects of the speech on the dignity and equality of Chinese people. To understand this, one must consider the lived realities of Chinese in SA — both those whose parents and grandparents were born here and those who have more recently chosen SA as their home. This racially and ethnically marginalised community has experienced discrimination and exploitation for over three centuries at the hands of European settlers. It intensified during apartheid and continues to this day.

Today, most South African-born Chinese are fourth- and fifth-generation descendants of immigrants who arrived here from the late 1800s onwards. Prior to formal apartheid, the Chinese were racially classified in the category of “Asiatic” and subject to laws that placed restrictions on them in respect of trading, immigration and property ownership. Under the 1950 Population Registration Act, local Chinese were defined under the category of coloured and as “generally accepted as a member of a race or tribe whose national home is in China”.

Apartheid thinking, which still permeates the South African psyche, is that racial categorisation is a black and white affair. However, race classifications were imposed, not self-inscribed. The purpose was to establish hierarchies of difference. To socially engineer racial difference, apartheid legislators split people into ethno-racial categories of unequal value. White people were at the top of the value chain, with a series of racialised others being bound together under the master category of “non-white”, which included the Chinese.

This is the context in which hate speech against Chinese people is perpetrated. What is striking about the speech in the case currently before the courts is its violent content. Some of the speech being challenged is plainly genocidal, threatening the killing of Chinese people and their children.

Moreover, it falsely communicates that Chinese people are naturally predisposed to harming animals. In reality, animal cruelty is not the preserve of any one nationality or ethnic or racial group. The conflation of isolated acts of cruelty with the entire Chinese population portrays them as “all the same”, namely as people with an uncivilised and cruel culture, and so fair game for discriminatory treatment.

One of the hallmarks of racism is to paint those who are seen as racially inferior with the same brush, so to speak. Reducing an entire social group to a set of negative and violent descriptors is dehumanising. Notably, all the respondents accused of hate speech are white. For centuries the violence and cruelty of racism have been a defining feature of white and Western cultures and identities.

Anti-Chinese sentiments have become commonplace in the South African social media landscape and remain mostly unchallenged. Against this backdrop, the coming Equality Court hearing will draw necessary attention to a form of racism that has persisted over centuries and continues into the present.

The case gives voice to local Chinese and so counters their silencing within dominant narratives of democracy, diversity and nonracialism. As the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie puts it: “Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign … Stories can break the dignity of a people. But stories can also repair that broken dignity.”

There is much to be told of the indignities that Chinese people in SA have had to endure, and in the pursuit of social justice these too are stories that matter.