Cape Town Lawyer Gary Trappler convicted for slashing tyres in alleged racially motivated attack on neighbour
Image: File
A Cape Town lawyer has been found guilty of malicious damage to his neighbour's property.
Prominent attorney Gary Trappler was convicted this week in the Cape Town Magistrate's Court.
Trapper was found guilty of slashing the tyres of his former neighbour Thandi Mgwaba.
The incident took place in Sydney Road, Toronga Mansions in Green Point in 2020.
Mgwaba said at the time that Trappler's actions were racially motivated because she was a black woman, and Trappler told her children that he did not want black people living there.
Leader of the ANC in the Western Cape and Parliamentary constituency head for Cape Central and the Atlantic Seaboard, Khalid Sayed, welcomed the conviction.
'Ms Mgwaba, a Black woman and grandmother, was subjected to a deeply traumatic and targeted act of aggression in 2020 when Trappler slashed her car tyres, made threatening remarks, and asserted that Black people did not belong in the neighbourhood,' he said.
'Initially, the case was dismissed despite the existence of CCTV footage showing Trappler approaching the car multiple times and crouching by the tyres before they visibly deflated. Public outcry resulted in the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) reviewing the case and making a decision, based on the CCTV evidence, to reinstate the charges,' Sayed said.
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He further called for action to be taken against the SAPS and NPA for refusing and denying Mgwaba justice.
The ANC has further called for a blacklisting of Trappler in the legal fraternity.
Sayed said the party commended Magistrate Stephen Bengequla for his clear and principled ruling, and noted his decision to refer the matter to the Equality Court to determine whether the crime was racially motivated. He said they believe this is a necessary and just step.
'This case highlights not only the persistence of racism in our communities, but also the need for vigilance in how our justice system responds to such incidents. Ms Mgwaba's courage in speaking out and the community's insistence that the case be taken seriously must be acknowledged. The ANC remains committed to fighting racism in all its forms and to ensuring that victims of racially motivated acts receive the justice they deserve,' Sayed said.
The Western Cape spokesperson for the NPA, Eric Ntabazalila, confirmed the conviction.
He told IOL the matter against Trappler has been postponed until August 8, 2025, for sentencing.
robin.francke@iol.co.za
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IOL News
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Gillian Schutte is a film-maker, and a well-known social justice and race-justice activist and public intellectual. Image: IOL West Indian psychiatrist and decolonial philosopher, Frantz Fanon, wrote that 'the Black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man.' He named a violence deeper than physical domination: the psychic capture of the Black subject inside the white imaginary. In the colonial order, the Black man is not seen as a man; he is seen as a body, a phallus, a threat, an object of anxiety. The Black woman is not seen as a woman; she is seen as an overdetermined symbol, hypersexualised, violable, yet erased as a full erotic and political subject. Post-apartheid South Africa continues to move within these patterns. Two judicial sagas, ten years apart – the 2016 exposure of Judge Mabel Jansen and the current tribunal against Eastern Cape Judge President Selby Mbenenge – reveal how deeply colonial logic still shapes our public life, our media, and our institutions. In 2015, during a public debate on my Facebook page, Judge Mabel Jansen entered of her own will. She had been following my social justice feminist work for months, even inboxing me with praise. The debate she chose to join centred on a petition circulating about poor white Afrikaners begging the EU to 'repatriate' them – a discussion already thick with tensions about race, poverty, colonial grievance, and belonging. Into this space, Jansen dropped comments that landed like malfeasance. Here are her exact public statements: '99% of criminal cases I hear are of Black fathers/uncles/brothers raping children as young as five years old. Is this part of your culture? Because then you do not know the truth. And they do it to their children, sisters, nieces, and so on. Is this also attributable to white people somehow, because we take the blame for everything?' 'Fact: Black children and women are raped and abused, and beaten by Black men to an extent that is so sickening that one cannot even cope with it. And that is a fact.' 'Want to read my files: rape, rape, rape, rape of minors by Black families. It is never-ending.' 'Show me one Black woman who has not been molested herself … but culturally that is the viewpoint.' 'Apparently sex is simply to be had when required. And five years old, by the way, is old … apparently it is not regarded as rape, but the exertion of a male's right. And women allow the father to be the first.'When I answered that the majority of Black uncles, fathers, and brothers do most certainly not rape 5-year-olds, she replied, 'Oh yes, they do. 'She also inboxed me privately: 'In their culture, a woman is there to pleasure them. Period. 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Text Color White Black Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Transparent Window Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Transparent Semi-Transparent Opaque Font Size 50% 75% 100% 125% 150% 175% 200% 300% 400% Text Edge Style None Raised Depressed Uniform Dropshadow Font Family Proportional Sans-Serif Monospace Sans-Serif Proportional Serif Monospace Serif Casual Script Small Caps Reset restore all settings to the default values Done Close Modal Dialog End of dialog window. Next Stay Close ✕ They tried valiantly to turn the focus of the protests onto my amorality in order to divert the Black organising against Jansen to me. It failed. In the JSC hearing, Jansen's defence lawyers, using this same trope in their defence, sought to discredit me, portraying me as ideologically radical, emotionally unstable, and mentally unbalanced. 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This political history forms the backdrop to the Mbenenge case. In the current tribunal, private WhatsApp exchanges between Judge President Selby Mbenenge and court secretary Andiswa Mengo – filled with flirtation, erotic humour, playful negotiation, and mutual pleasure – have been hauled into public spectacle as evidence of sexual misconduct. The 'privacy argument' raised to shield Jansen has been discarded without hesitation. Fanon is again essential. In the colonial imaginary, Black male sexuality is imagined as excess, danger, and violence; Black women are imagined as bodies without agency. There is no script to hold African men negotiating desire, speaking of cunnilingus, imagining female pleasure, or showing concern for mutual satisfaction. There is no space to imagine African women as agents of their own pleasure, as partners in joy, as subjects of flirtation and orgasm. This is what Fanon called the white neurosis – a psychic malaise that turns Blackness into a site of phobic fantasy. It is why, in this case, liberal white feminist discourse reproduces the same reductive gaze as Jansen's open white supremacy. Both erase the fullness of Black erotic life. Both install the same whiteness default: the monstrous Black man, the violated Black woman. Yet the messages between Mbenenge and Mengo belong to ukudlalisa ngamazwi – an idiom of wordplay, teasing, humour, and mutual consent, deeply woven into isiXhosa culture. Mengo jokes, withholds, offers, and winks. She participates. She chooses. She suggests. She enjoys. 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When Ramaphosa finally faced the nation, the address was characteristically and predictably underwhelming. All opposition parties took potshots at Ramaphosa. Those who were disappointed in Ramaphosa's utterances have themselves to blame. First, Ramaphosa is not a man of courage. He has no backbone. Placed in a prickly situation, his instinct is to choose ANC's interests over those of the country. Second, Ramaphosa and the ANC have demonstrated that an oath to uphold and protect the constitution is politically meaningless. Third, Ramaphosa does not come with clean hands. The Phala Phala farmgate scandal must have weighed heavily on his mind. The independent parliamentary panel, comprising luminaries in law, found Ramaphosa to be possibly guilty of serious misconduct of violating section 96(2)(b) by acting in a way that is inconsistent with his office. 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'Are we [the ANC] saying that we suspect or know that he (Ramaphosa) has done something impeachable and therefore decided that we must protect our president at all costs by ensuring that no Multi-Party Committee is formed?...... We acted as we did [as if] there was something to hide'. There is no way that Ramaphosa was going to throw Mchunu, one of his supporters, under the bus without facing serious political repercussions. The establishment of a judicial commission of inquiry was the only safe route open to Ramaphosa. It enables Ramaphosa to postpone addressing a tricky political question of dispensing with Mchunu's services. Be that as it may, the inquiry should not prevent the police from conducting criminal investigations against those implicated in the alleged commission of crimes. Neither does the commission absolve parliament of its oversight responsibility. Video Player is loading. 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Advertisement Next Stay Close ✕ With a president burdened by allegations of possible criminality, it would be foolhardy to expect that the recommendations of the Madlanga Judicial Commission of Inquiry will be taken seriously. That the country can be held in suspense by a President who has proved to be a constitutional delinquent reflects the pervasive sense of lack of accountability, paralysis, and resignation that grips the nation. South Africans deserve Ramaphosa. No self-respecting country would allow this. South Africans have expressed a sense of inquiry-fatigue. They have witnessed far too many commissions without any of them leading to discernible positive effects. Some commissions were demonstrably weaponised to target certain individuals disliked by the establishment. Ordinarily, had it not been for the fact that Mkhwanazi implicated judges in the commission of corrupt activities, the establishment of a judicial commission would be unquestionable. Matters become complex if one considers the fact that the very judiciary had decided that South Africans cannot be entrusted with information relating to who funded President Ramaphosa's 2017 ANC presidential candidacy. Mkhwanazi's allegations lend credence to the speculations that the reason the CR17 files are sealed is that they may implicate some members of the judiciary or their family members. Ramaphosa is lucky. Each time he asks the courts to seal matters that relate to him, the courts oblige. This raises several questions. What happened to transparency being the lifeblood of democracy? If Ramaphosa is innocent as he pretends, why rush to the courts for cover? Who are the funders and beneficiaries of the CR17 funds? The tendency to obfuscate issues whenever Ramaphosa is involved played itself out at the Constitutional Court. 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We ought to know that partly, we account to the public through our judgments. Now, if you write in such a way that the public can't even understand what you are doing, what kind of accountability is that? We don't write for lawyers. We don't account to lawyers only; we account to every South African citizen.' The question becomes pertinent given society's growing mistrust of the judiciary. According to the 2018 Afrobarometer survey, 32% of South Africans suspect that judges are involved in corruption. In 2002, the level of mistrust was 15%. Responding to the 2021 Afrobarometer report on the society's loss of confidence in the judiciary, Chief Justice Mandisa Maya argued that 'the judiciary itself needs to do an introspection and check if we are to blame for this change of attitude towards the institution.' The chair of a commission of inquiry must be beyond reproach for the commission to enjoy legitimacy and credibility. For now, we can only speculate. And the picture is not rosy. * Professor Sipho P. Seepe is an Higher Education & Strategy Consultant. ** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL, Independent Media or The African.
