The high court in April granted commercial farmers in the Eastern Cape an interdict against farm workers and non-governmental organisations in the area. But it has been described by some of South Africa’s leading constitutional law and freedom of expression experts as an attempt to criminalise social justice activism and muzzle the voices of a working-class community.
He claimed that Dada had written and distributed an A4-sized notice, which was prominently displayed in the towns of Hankey and Patensie, making “injurious and defamatory falsehoods” about him that had incited farmworkers to march to the Endulini farm packhouse outside Patensie, near Baviaanskloof, on 2 November last year.
It also bars the respondents from “writing to or communicating with any person, including but not limited to the purchasers or prospective purchasers of the [farms’] products, or their customers, in any manner whatsoever about, or in connection with the applicants or their business interest.
“Does it not open up endless possibilities for the applicants to say they have had their free movement interfered with just because any of the respondents happen to have showed up or have been in the same vicinity or direction as them? Interfering in any manner should not be inserted in any interdict,” Nkosi says.
Duncan says such interdicts that ban people from saying anything before they have even said it amounts to a prior restraint on speech, which is “almost always a bad thing. It means that the respondents cannot raise their issues about the conduct of the applicants, even if they have legitimate grievances and do so in a non-threatening way.
Right2Know campaign organiser Thami Nkosi says it is common for a business to interdict workers and activists “from essentially raising their concerns or voicing dissent about malpractice”. Right to protest
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