{"id":10472,"date":"2026-05-18T13:22:17","date_gmt":"2026-05-18T11:22:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.mediaforjustice.net\/?p=10472"},"modified":"2026-05-18T13:22:17","modified_gmt":"2026-05-18T11:22:17","slug":"judge-belinda-hartle-and-the-faceless-protection-of-white-judicial-power","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thecounterhegemon.kre8tifley.com\/?p=10472","title":{"rendered":"Judge Belinda Hartle and the Faceless Protection of White Judicial Power"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By: Gillian Schutte<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Judge Belinda Hartle stands accused of using the K-word against Thozamile Semekazi, a registry clerk in the Office of the Chief Justice. Semekazi alleges that Hartle directed racist and abusive language at him in chambers at the East London High Court in May 2025. Hartle denies using the racial slur. She admits using a swear word and claims Semekazi misrepresented the encounter. The Judicial Service Commission has resolved that her suspension would be desirable while a Judicial Conduct Tribunal investigates allegations of incapacity, gross incompetence and gross misconduct.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That is the legal surface. The deeper story lies in the image.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Or rather, the absence of her image in mainstream reports of this case.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Search the coverage by News24, IOL, Business Day, Sunday Times, TimesLIVE, The Citizen, GroundUp and SABC News, and Hartle largely vanishes into visual abstraction. The public gets court signs, legal illustrations, stock photographs, buildings and institutional placeholders. The accused white judge\u2019s face disappears into architecture while the allegation against her carries the most violent racial word in South African English. (see screenshots below).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Newspapers make choices. Editors choose the image that accompanies a story. They choose whether the public sees a face, a building, a robe, a gavel, a court sign or a blank institutional substitute. These choices teach the public how to feel before it reads a word. They tell the reader who must be recognised as danger and who must be absorbed into the respectability of the institution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Power lives in that disappearance. Power lives in what editors withhold. It lives in the face removed from public recognition, the name handled with care, the white body protected from the scene of racial violence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have argued this for decades. South African racism operates through speech and through what is left unsaid. Silences, omissions, delays and euphemisms signify the careful withdrawal of whiteness from its own violence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The silence around Hartle shows how thoroughly neo-neocolonisation has bamboozled the public imagination. White privilege now passes through the public sphere as normality. It has become editorial instinct, legal politeness, photographic restraint and institutional camouflage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The public silence is as telling as the editorial silence. There has been no national moral eruption, no rolling outrage, no chorus of pundits asking what it means when a white judge stands accused of using apartheid\u2019s core racial weapon against a Black court official. That absence tells us how normalised white privilege remains in the public mind. South Africans have been trained to recognise Black misconduct as national crisis while reading white misconduct as unfortunate incident, misunderstanding, personality clash or due process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A white judge accused of using the old word of conquest against a Black court official receives visual protection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A Black judge accused of misconduct receives immediate public exposure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

South African media knows exactly how to find a judge\u2019s face when the judge is Black. Newspapers know how to build a public image of disgrace. They know how to repeat a face until the face itself becomes shorthand for scandal. That same machinery suddenly becomes visually restrained when the accused judge is white.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Judge President John Mandlakayise Hlophe and Judge Nkola Motata became public images of disgrace long before many South Africans understood the full legal record behind their removal. Parliament adopted reports recommending their removal in February 2024. President Cyril Ramaphosa removed both men from judicial office in March 2024, making them the first judges removed through impeachment in democratic South Africa.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Motata\u2019s case shows the racial grammar clearly. The public saw him in his crashed Jaguar. The media tracked his long special leave with full pay after the 2007 crash. IOL reported in 2016 that he had remained on special leave since 2007, had not served on the Bench for a day since the incident, and had cost the taxpayer nearly R16 million by then. The Black judge remained a visual and financial scandal for years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Judge President Selby Mbenenge received the same punitive visibility. His face travelled with allegations of sexual harassment, WhatsApp messages, tribunal testimony and career-ending speculation. News24 carried Ray Hartle\u2019s stories on Mbenenge\u2019s JCC hearing and referral to a judicial tribunal. Ray Hartle also wrote the story on a death threat allegedly left on Andiswa Mengo\u2019s desk, with Mengo identified as a judges\u2019 secretary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ray Hartle is Judge Belinda Hartle\u2019s husband.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That fact cannot sit in the margins of this story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A white judge accused of racist abuse receives the shelter of abstraction. Her husband helped shape the public record around a Black Judge President in the same provincial judicial terrain. Here marriage, media, race, judicial discipline and institutional power meet inside the Eastern Cape judiciary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The public does not need gossip. The public needs to understand how a media voice attached by marriage to a white judge accused of racial abuse helped narrate allegations against a Black Judge President whose image circulated relentlessly through the public sphere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

City Press later apologised to Judge Lindiwe Rusi after a Press Ombud ruling over Ray Hartle\u2019s commentary on the Mbenenge complaint. The apology recorded that Hartle had omitted Rusi\u2019s version of her interaction with the complainant. That correction did not erase the earlier public framing. It confirmed the danger of narrative power when one version travels before the other appears.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whiteness cannot bear the sight of itself as aggression. It moves the charge elsewhere. Black male authority becomes the screen for the fears the liberal order refuses to own: corruption, appetite, menace, disorder, sexual danger and constitutional decay. The white judge disappears into robe, stone and procedure. The Black judge becomes a body for collective punishment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This split runs through South African media. White power preserves itself through disappearance at the moment exposure would disturb its authority. Black authority receives visibility when the system wants discipline. The Black judicial body becomes evidence before judgment. The white judicial body becomes process before recognition. That is the sanctity of whiteness in South African media.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hartle\u2019s alleged slur comes from the deepest archive of colonial violence. The K-word carries land theft, labour command, domestic servitude, apartheid policing, farm violence, prison violence and the psychic formation of white rule. A judge accused of using that word against a Black official cannot receive visual delicacy while Black judges are thrown before the public as cautionary figures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mbenenge\u2019s visibility demands a more serious political reading because the system did not expose a random Black judge. It exposed a Black Judge President whose judicial record had already unsettled the old settlement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He wrote the Shell Wild Coast judgment in the Makhanda High Court, setting aside Shell\u2019s exploration right for seismic surveys off the Wild Coast. The Legal Resources Centre described the ruling as a victory won by Wild Coast communities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He also acted in the terrain of naming. Reports record that Mbenenge directed that court processes and documents for the former Grahamstown High Court should use Makhanda, and that the Port Elizabeth seat should use Gqeberha. Colonialism seized land and renamed it. A court that says Makhanda and Gqeberha returns African memory to the formal language of law.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That is the judge the system has worked to reduce to scandal. His visibility was never innocent. It belonged to the same machinery that makes Black judicial authority available for punishment while white judicial authority retreats into institutional shelter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The same media that made Mbenenge visually available has not done the same with Hartle. The same newspapers that placed Black judges before the public as faces of crisis now hide a white judge accused of racist abuse behind buildings, court signs, legal graphics and stock photographs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So let us ask the question directly. Are they protecting Judge Belinda Hartle because she is white? Are they protecting a racial order inside the Eastern Cape judiciary? Are they protecting a media and legal formation that wants decolonising judicial force weakened while white judicial authority remains untouched by the public gaze?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hartle\u2019s case exposes more than one alleged racist outburst. It exposes the racial unconscious of South African media. Whiteness receives disappearance. Blackness receives display. Whiteness receives procedure. Blackness receives spectacle. Whiteness receives the institution as shelter. Blackness receives the headline as punishment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If Hartle used the K-word, she has no place on the Bench. If the media can show Black judges during allegations, tribunals and impeachment battles, it can show the white judge accused of speaking the language of white domination in chambers. Anything less tells us that mainstream media still serves the old empire project while pretending to defend constitutionalism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Bullrushes News platform was the only article on the matter that showed Judge Belinda Hartle’s face.<\/em> (see above image)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gillian Schutte<\/strong> is a South African writer, scholar, filmmaker, public intellectual and Editor-in-Chief of The Counterhegemon<\/em>. Her work moves across political analysis, media critique, critical race theory, decolonial thought, African sovereignty, culture, law, memory and power. Over several decades, she has written, filmed, spoken and intervened in some of South Africa\u2019s most contested public debates, often from positions that confront liberal consensus, white power, corporate capture, donor politics, imperial influence and the unfinished violence of the post-apartheid settlement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Schutte\u2019s intellectual and creative practice draws from journalism, film, literature, political theory, psychoanalysis, Marxist and decolonial traditions, and long-standing community-based work alongside those resisting structural dispossession. Her writing has helped shape national conversations on race, whiteness, media power, gender, state violence, judicial politics, cultural erasure and the global machinery of anti-African control.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fearless, anti-imperial and intellectually independent, she writes against managed thought, institutional cowardice and the language systems that protect domination. Her work insists on historical memory, political courage and the right of African and Black-aligned thought to speak outside the permissions of liberal respectability. The Counterhegemon<\/em> extends this project as a platform for sovereign analysis, intellectual resistance and decolonial narrative power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If Hartle used the K-word, she has no place on the Bench. If the media can show Black judges during allegations, tribunals and impeachment battles, it can show the white judge accused of speaking the language of white domination in chambers. Anything less tells us that mainstream media still serves the old empire project while pretending to defend constitutionalism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10473,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"postBodyCss":"","postBodyMargin":[],"postBodyPadding":[],"postBodyBackground":{"backgroundType":"classic","gradient":""},"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,126],"tags":[488,489,375,490,491,492,493,494,495,496,497,498,450,499,500,167,501,502,503,504,505,506,80,507,508,509,510,511],"class_list":["post-10472","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-african-news","category-jurisprudence","tag-black-judges","tag-business-day","tag-decolonisation","tag-eastern-cape-judiciary","tag-editorial-choices","tag-groundup","tag-iol","tag-john-hlophe","tag-judge-belinda-hartle","tag-judicial-impeachment","tag-judicial-misconduct","tag-judicial-power","tag-judicial-service-commission","tag-judiciary","tag-k-word","tag-media-bias","tag-neo-neocolonisation","tag-news24","tag-nkola-motata","tag-racism","tag-ray-hartle","tag-sabc-news","tag-selby-mbenenge","tag-south-african-media","tag-thozamile-semekazi","tag-timeslive","tag-visual-politics","tag-white-privilege"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecounterhegemon.kre8tifley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10472","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecounterhegemon.kre8tifley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecounterhegemon.kre8tifley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecounterhegemon.kre8tifley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecounterhegemon.kre8tifley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10472"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thecounterhegemon.kre8tifley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10472\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecounterhegemon.kre8tifley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10473"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecounterhegemon.kre8tifley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10472"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecounterhegemon.kre8tifley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10472"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecounterhegemon.kre8tifley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10472"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}