Gonubie businessman Garry Rieger must pay R60 000 in damages plus legal costs for pepper-spraying fellow motorist Clint van der Westhuizen, calling him the p-word and telling him to ‘go back to Duncan Village and drive there, you poes’.

According to a Daily Dispatch report, Van der Westhuizen said that, as ‘a coloured man’, the racist overtones of the degrading and insulting comments by Rieger, a white man, troubled him most, reminding him of his first experience of apartheid as a young child.

The heat of a 2016 road rage incident in Gonubie continued through a lengthy court process, with adverse findings against both men, but a full Bench of the Eastern Cape High Court (Makhanda) has now dismissed Rieger’s appeal against the initial damages awarded by the High Court.

Judge Murray Lowe, with Judge Gerald Bloem and Judge Sunil Rugunanan concurring, held that Rieger’s racist words had no place in SA.

They confirmed Rieger’s words to Van der Westhuizen represented an insult, constituting an infringement of his dignity and self-respect. The appeal court confirmed the previous damages judgment against Rieger, of R50 000 for injuria and R10 000 for assault, plus costs.

The judges on appeal found that R50 000 in damages was not an unreasonable amount of money for Rieger to pay for ‘a highly objectionable racial connotation, demeaning and hurtful’ utterance.

Full Daily Dispatch report (subscription needed)