The Huffington Post South Africa has outed the author of the hoax “Shelley Garland” blog post – calling for the disenfranchisement and dispossession of white men across the world - as Marius Roodt, a researcher with the Centre for Development and Enterprise (CDE). On Wednesday afternoon a group made up of Pieter du Toit, Deputy Editor, Ferial Haffajee, Editor-at-large, and Pontsho Mabena, Video Editor, confronted Roodt at the CDE’s offices in Johannesburg after they had “digitally traced” the email address he had used to contact their publication back to him, and confirmed his identity with “facial recognition technology.”
A video of Haffajee and Du Toit’s interrogation of an apologetic Roodt, in a CDE meeting room, was posted on the HuffPost SA website. In it Roodt denied that he had intended to target editor Verashni Pillay specifically in any way. Du Toit put it to Roodt that HuffPostSA’s unwitting publication of Roodt’s satire had “led to a white twitter outcry” and “some terrible things being said about South Africans across the board and terrible things being said personally about our colleagues and the title we work for and the company we work for.” Du Toit added that although this did not exonerate HuffPost SA it had “led to a lot of damage and a lot of hurt”. A visibly angry Ferial Haffajee put it to Roodt that he had been a “’bit of a doos’”.
Roodt consequently tendered his resignation to the CDE on Wednesday, and it was accepted with immediate effect by CEO Ann Bernstein.
On the 29th March Roodt had, after failing to interest the Daily Maverick in his proposal, written to the Huffington Post South Africa under the Garland pseudonym, asking if they would be interested in an article exploring the suggestion that white men should “be stripped of the franchise” given that the white male vote had given the world Trump, Brexit and a number of DA-controlled metros. In this email, written using a Yahoo.co.za email address, “Garland” described herself as a UCT student completing an MA in philosophy with an emphasis on feminist thought.
The following day the HuffPost SA wrote back to thank Garland for her pitch stating “we would love to run a piece like that.” Roodt then sent through an article on the topic under the Garland pseudonym as well as a picture of himself dressed in drag, and a brief bio stating that when Garland is “not gagging at South Africa’s unique brand of rainbow politics, she’s working on ways to smash the patriarchy.”
The article itself appeared on the HuffPost SA website on Thursday the 13th of April. The piece tacked together common racial tropes habitually directed against the white minority in South Africa by racially-minded journalists, editors, opinion-formers and politicians, and referenced the inaccurate statistics often employed by such people. The article then took their stance to its logical, but absurd and comic extreme by calling for all white men on the planet to be stripped of the vote for a generation, so that their “oppressive power” could be broken, and the wealth they had acquired through theft and violence, could be returned to the “rightful” owners.