Gayton McKenzie is trending after old tweets with racial slurs resurface, exposing hypocrisy amid his legal battle against stereotyping podcast remarks.
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| Minister of Sports, Arts and Culture Gayton McKenzie faces public backlash after old tweets containing a racial slur resurfaced, challenging his recent anti-racism stance. Photo credit: Andrea du Toit |
In South Africa’s often combustible political landscape, reputations can be built and undone at the speed of a trending hashtag. This month, Minister of Sports, Arts and Culture Gayton McKenzie has found himself at the centre of a rapidly shifting storm.
It began with a moral stand that seemed, at least at first, to be a political slam dunk. McKenzie, known for his outspoken style and unapologetic defence of the Coloured community, took aim at the Open Chats Podcast after a clip went viral in which the hosts made offensive and sweeping remarks about Coloured South Africans. Within hours, he was promising legal action, vowing that the Coloured community would “get its justice” and framing the case as a fight against blatant racism.
For a moment, it worked. Social media lit up with praise for the minister’s swift and uncompromising stance. Civil society groups applauded his willingness to take a hard line, and political allies framed the move as an example of strong, values-driven leadership.
But in the relentless churn of the online age, every moral high ground is subject to excavation. And soon, what began as McKenzie’s crusade against racism had taken on an entirely different flavour one that has left him accused of hypocrisy and double standards.
The Open Chats Fallout
The trouble began when a Open Chats Podcast episode, shared widely on TikTok and other platforms, featured two hosts trading in harmful stereotypes about Coloured South Africans. The remarks calling Coloured people “crazy” and linking them to incest and mental illness were met with swift condemnation.
McKenzie responded as only he can: with speed, with volume, and with legal threats. He announced that the Patriotic Alliance’s legal team would be instructed immediately to sue the podcast’s hosts personally and to target the show as an entity. He also made it clear that platforms carrying the content, such as YouTube and TikTok, were not beyond the reach of his determination to “use everything at our disposal” in the fight.
The pressure campaign yielded quick results. MultiChoice, which had an expired contract with the podcast, distanced itself entirely, confirming it would not renew. The podcast producers issued a formal legal apology, describing their own comments as “irresponsible, reckless, un-African, and tantamount to hate speech,” and promised to self-report to the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC).
McKenzie had positioned himself as a defender of dignity, making his stand not only a legal one but a symbolic one that in modern South Africa, public platforms cannot be allowed to normalise racial prejudice.
The Past Comes Back
But as McKenzie’s public stock rose in the wake of the Open Chats controversy, something shifted. Social media users began circulating screenshots of old tweets from McKenzie’s earlier days, when he was still a businessman and leader of the Patriotic Alliance but not yet a government minister.
In one such tweet, McKenzie appeared to use the highly offensive racial slur “k*ffir” while discussing the term “Black Diamond” a colloquial phrase often used to describe upwardly mobile Black South Africans. The language was unambiguous, and for many, deeply shocking.
It was not long before those tweets became the story. The same man who had, just days earlier, been threatening legal action over racist remarks was now being confronted with his own use of some of the most loaded racial language in South Africa’s history.
Accusations of Hypocrisy
For his critics, the resurfaced tweets were not an isolated slip but part of a larger pattern. They pointed to past episodes in which McKenzie has courted controversy with his words defending a DA MP accused of racism, making inflammatory remarks about Zimbabwean immigrants, and comments about Miss South Africa finalist Chidimma Adetshina that were widely read as prejudiced.
Against that backdrop, his sudden role as a champion of racial justice struck many as opportunistic. Political opponents wasted no time painting him as a selective moralist: quick to defend his own community against racial slurs, but apparently untroubled by deploying racial insults toward others in his own past.
The word “hypocrisy” began appearing alongside his name in trending topics, and the Open Chats debate once firmly in his corner started to take on an ironic undertone.
Silence from McKenzie and the PA
McKenzie himself has not addressed the resurfaced tweets, and the Patriotic Alliance has remained equally silent. That silence has been interpreted in two ways: by critics as a tacit admission that there is no defence to be offered, and by supporters as a wise refusal to dignify politically motivated mudslinging.
The absence of a response, however, has not stemmed the tide of commentary. If anything, it has given more oxygen to those eager to frame the story as a test case for political consistency.
In a country where racial wounds remain raw, the optics of such an unaddressed contradiction are damaging. As one political commentator noted: “You cannot be the face of the anti-racism fight one week, and then have credible allegations of racial slurs from your own hand floating around the next, without at least attempting to explain yourself.”
The Battle of Narratives
McKenzie’s defenders have been vocal in their pushback. They argue that political transformation is real, that people can and do change, and that dredging up old tweets from years ago does nothing to address the present-day realities of racism. For them, his stand against Open Chats is proof that whatever his past language, his current commitment to fighting prejudice is genuine.
Critics reject that framing. For them, the issue is not whether people can change it is whether McKenzie’s selective outrage suggests he has not changed at all. They point out that he did not take similarly vocal or legal steps when other communities were targeted, nor has he expressed public regret for his own past words.
Both sides have taken to social media with their arguments, each convinced the other is missing the point.
Race and Politics in South Africa
To understand why this controversy has struck such a nerve, it is important to place it in South Africa’s broader racial and political context. Nearly three decades after the end of apartheid, the country remains deeply stratified along racial lines. The Coloured community occupies a unique space in this landscape, often feeling overlooked in national race debates that focus predominantly on Black and White dynamics.
McKenzie, himself Coloured, has made the defence of his community a central plank of his political identity. This has made him both a celebrated voice and a lightning rod for criticism, with detractors accusing him of neglecting other communities’ struggles.
In this context, being accused of having used apartheid-era slurs against Black South Africans is not just a personal failing it risks undermining the very political platform on which he stands.
The Age of Digital Accountability
One of the lessons of this episode is how the internet has changed the rules of political survival. In the digital age, a person’s past statements no matter how old can be retrieved, screenshot, and shared at any time. Political careers have ended over far less than the language McKenzie is accused of using.
Internationally, leaders from Canada to Australia have faced similar reckonings over old posts or comments, often decades old, that resurface in moments of political vulnerability. In each case, the question is not only about the offence itself but about the response whether there is contrition, explanation, or denial.
What Comes Next
Whether McKenzie can weather this storm may depend on what he does next. A direct acknowledgment of the tweets, coupled with a credible explanation or apology, could at least shift the conversation towards redemption. Continued silence risks allowing the “hypocrisy” label to harden in the public mind.
For now, the story remains unfinished. The Open Chats Podcast has been diminished, the SAHRC will likely move forward with its own processes, and McKenzie’s initial goal of defending the Coloured community has been partially achieved. But his own reputation has taken a hit that could have lasting political consequences.
The Gayton McKenzie saga is a cautionary tale about the double-edged nature of moral leadership in the age of social media. His stand against the Open Chats Podcast won him early applause, but the resurfacing of his own past racial slurs has left him exposed to the same moral scrutiny he sought to apply to others.
In South Africa’s complex and often volatile racial landscape, consistency matters. Leaders who hold others to high standards must be prepared to meet those same standards themselves. In politics, as in life, the past is never as far behind as we’d like to think and the internet never forgets.
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