Malema's speech last month, taken on its own, was a call to "kill" racists or white supremacists, who are not a protected group under our constitutional equality law. I do not believe that the term "racists" or "white supremacists" is coded language for white people as a race. Like in Masuku's case, the speech was not "based on prohibited grounds" and cannot constitute hate speech under South African law.

109-year-old Pon Ng Shue Chee, a beloved matriarch of Johannesburg's close-knit community of Chinese South Africans recently died but not before seeing the end of the five-year-long legal fight against online hate speech.

Advocate Ben Winks joined Eusebius McKaiser on Eusebius on TimesLIVE to explain the judgment handed down on Thursday in the Equality Court, in which AfriForum's case against the EFF was dismissed.

The fight against hatred in South Africa would have been much better off if, at least twenty years ago, the government had passed a simple amendment to the existing law, stating that hateful motive must be counted as an aggravating factor for sentencing. This would have been passed with no controversy or constitutional challenge.

But we must now be alert to the reality that, post-Qwelane, there is apparently greater room for bigots to escape legal consequences for insults and "jokes" that wound not only individuals, but whole groups at once – be they Muslim women, transgender people, refugees, or people with disabilities.