The University of Pretoria student who was found guilty of hate speech last year for his Facebook post from 2016 has reportedly had a transformative experience by doing community service in white informal settlements, according to a report in Times Select.

Luvuyo Menziwa, now 29, made headlines in 2016 when, as a university SRC member, he wrote: “Reasons I hate white people: white privilege, white dominance, white arrogance, white monopoly capital and white superiority. Fuck white people, just get me a bazooka or AK47 so I can do the right thing and kill these demon possessed humans.”

The Equality Court in Pretoria found him guilty of hate speech and incitement to violence in March last year, ordering him to apologise within five days, which he did, also on Facebook. He was also expelled from university for a year.

In a post dated 12 March, he wrote: “Attached is the apology letter coupled with the initial post I made in August 2016. This comes after the court has ordered me to make my apology public using the same platform I used when I made my remarks about white people.”

“Hope it is in order and that it will be received in good spirit as I apologise unconditionally.”

The court also ordered Menziwa to perform 30 hours of community service in poor white communities.

AfriForum, which brought the case, initially welcomed the court ruling, but said the sanction was lenient.

“Those, regardless of their colour, who make themselves guilty of hate speech and incitement to violence should be punished by the courts,” AfriForum said in a statement at the time.

They complained that Menziwa’s punishment was not nearly as severe as that of Penny Sparrow, even though Menziwa’s statement had contained an element of violence.

Sparrow was ordered to pay R150,000 after pleading guilty to a charge of crimen injuria for comparing black people to monkeys.

It was, however, the hours of community service that appears to have had the biggest impact on him.

He told Times Select that he’d never known just how poor some white people in South Africa are, but he saw it first-hand at several informal white settlements in Pretoria while working with the Dutch Reformed Church and Solidarity union’s charity organisation Helpende Hand (Helping Hand).

He went to five different informal settlements around the city to hand out food parcels.

Menziwa said it was eye-opening for him to see how these people seemed to have been forgotten by society. He said many of them had not known where their next meal was going to come from and that poverty “knows no colour”.

He mentioned meeting a 23-year-old man who’d never had a day of formal education.

“I was really shattered to see how they lived … in horrendous conditions,” he said, observing that these places apparently had no schools, government offices or other facilities.

The young man has since stayed away from politics and says he wants to help some of the people he met to get ID cards and apply for social grants. He apparently still has problems of his own, however, as he has struggled to find a job since his case made headlines. Helpende Hand’s spokesperson said working with Menziwa had been an amazing experience and he actually seemed like a “nice person”. (Compiled by Charles Cilliers)

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