By Nyaboga Kiage,
On social media, Tracy Zille has been fronting himself as a White woman behind the highly offensive, racist and belittling posts targeting African countries and their people.
Commanding a huge following of over 80,000 on Twitter and 100,000 on Facebook, Tracy Zille drew African wide condemnation following a series of vitriolic attacks on African people and their leaders.
The social media accounts' most recent activity drew ire over its denunciation of Africans' safety concerns about Covid-19 vaccines ahead of mass vaccinations beginning this month.
The tweets focus mainly on disparaging the efforts African countries have made to achieve political, economic and social independence following at least 75 years of colonial rule by Britain, France, Belgium, Spain, Portugal and Germany.
It has since been established that the person behind the account is a man who was unmasked last year by South African authorities and charged with hate speech.
According to South Africa's Eyewitness News, South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) traced the individual responsible for the controversial account.
When they unmasked the account owner, SAHRC commissioner Chris Nissen said they had sufficient evidence of hate speech and that the matter would be referred to the Equality Court.
"What happened was that we received a complaint, investigated the complaint, used a tracing agency to try and find out who is the owner of the Twitter posts and eventually, through our agency, we managed to get the name of the person and sufficient evidence of what can constitute hate speech and racism. There are a number of other things in it, but we prefer to keep it to the hate speech.
"The evidence that we have got, we have prepared the papers and will now go to the Equality Court which we will then ask the court to prepare a date and a time for it," Nissen said.
But following an investigation by Jean Le Roux, a research associate with the Digital Research Lab, claimed that the person behind the highly offensive content was a black South African who was allegedly a member of the Economic Freedom Fighters Party.
The South African Times said that the Jean Le Roux investigation found that the Twitter account was being used to steer traffic to three websites registered by the EFF party member, sites that were linked to Google's Ad Sense.
However, it appears that the SAHRC threat of prosecution has not deterred the person as the account has been upping the ante since December, targeting not only Africans in South Africa but the rest of the continent, including Nigeria and Kenya.
In one of the recent tweets, the account attacked African women, saying they bleach their skin to look like White women.
It is still not clear why Twitter has not taken the account down given that it prohibits attacks based on the basis of race and ethnicity.
"You may not promote violence against or directly attack or threaten other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, caste, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease. We also do not allow accounts whose primary purpose is inciting harm towards others on the basis of these categories," the Twitter policy reads in part.
Additional Reporting by Joel Muinde.
