The woman who now commands megaphones and marshals thousands in the name of economic nationalism once sat hunched over a smartphone screen, firing off 140-character missiles from a younger, angrier, and far more reckless self.
On a drizzly Thursday morning, Jacinta Ngobese—now 39, the steely founder of the March and March movement and a polarizing voice on talk radio—did something she had avoided for over a decade. She apologized. Not for the anti-immigrant protests that have made her a household name, nor for the fiery rhetoric that fills stadiums in Tshwane. She apologized for old tweets. Specifically, a pair of digital fossils from 2011 and 2013 that had resurfaced, threatening to unravel the careful, hardened persona she has built.
The tweets were juvenile, cruel in the casual way of early internet culture. One, from 2011, joked that girls from Limpopo entering Johannesburg needed to carry their rural identity documents, implying they were so unsophisticated as to be foreigners in their own province. Another, from 2013, dismissed the melodic, click-consonant-rich languages of Venda and Tsonga as “punishment languages”—a slur that linguists and cultural activists say reduces rich heritages to punchlines.
“I was a different person,” Ngobese said, standing behind a podium in a charcoal blazer, her voice stripped of its usual rally-cry rasp. “That was a child speaking. A stupid, uninformed child. I take full responsibility for those words.”
She then did something her detractors did not expect: she pulled out a tablet and scrolled through her recent post history, highlighting tweets from the past two years praising Tsonga-language commentators and Venda business leaders. “Look at the arc,” she insisted. “That is not who I am today.”
But in the age of rage-bait politics, an apology is rarely a clean slate. It is a mirror, and the reflection depends entirely on who is looking.
The Unforgiving Scroll
The tweets did not surface by accident. They were dredged up by a rival activist collective, The Ubuntu Underground, which has long accused Ngobese of performative outrage. Their timing was surgical: just days before her March and March coalition was set to submit a memorandum to the Gauteng Premier’s office demanding the closure of undocumented spaza shops.
For the critics, the old tweets were not isolated artifacts of a misspent youth. They were a pattern. A prophecy.
“She mocks Tsonga people online a decade ago, and last month she was leading a chant at a roadblock in Diepsloot that specifically targeted Shangaan hawkers,” said Thandi Mokoena, a media lecturer and columnist. “She sang, ‘Shangaan, mkhwetha, hambani naye’ —‘Shangaan, foreigner, leave with him.’ That’s not a slip of the tongue. That’s a worldview.”
The chants, captured on cellphone video and shared widely on WhatsApp groups, have become a rallying cry for some and a smoking gun for others. Mokoena argues that Ngobese’s anti-immigrant platform has always carried an internal xenophobia—a sorting of “acceptable” Black South Africans from “undesirable” ones, with Tsonga and Venda speakers often caught in the crossfire due to their perceived cultural or linguistic proximity to Mozambican and Zimbabwean migrants.
“You can’t spend years conflating foreign nationals with specific ethnic groups, then act surprised when people point out your old jokes,” Mokoena added.
The Supporter’s Plea
But in the packed community hall of Ivory Park, where Ngobese’s voice echoes off corrugated roofs, the apology was met not with scorn but with weary forgiveness. To them, the tweets are a distraction—a luxury of keyboard warriors who have never had to queue for water or watch a job go to an undocumented hire.
“She was twenty-six when she wrote that nonsense,” said Bheki Zondo, a 45-year-old security guard who has joined three March and March protests. “I’ve said worse things about my own mother-in-law. The question is: what is she doing now? She is fighting for our children to have work. The Tsonga people in my street are marching with her. That’s the real apology.”
Indeed, Ngobese’s strategy has been to outrun her past with sheer present-moment volume. Since turning 35, she has rebranded from a niche radio personality into a grassroots organiser with a talent for turning economic anxiety into action. Her March and March movement has successfully pressured several municipalities to conduct business license audits, and her daily radio segment, The Wake-Up Whistle, is required listening in taxi ranks from Polokwane to Port Elizabeth.
“She’s not a saint,” Zondo admitted. “But saints don’t win fights. Pit bulls do.”
The Uncomfortable Silence
What made the press conference truly uncomfortable, however, was what Ngobese did not apologize for. When a journalist from Limpopo Mirror asked whether she would extend her regret to the recent chant about Shangaan people, Ngobese’s jaw tightened. She leaned into the microphone.
“That chant was about undocumented foreigners who happen to be Shangaan-speaking,” she said carefully. “We have Shangaan South Africans in our leadership. We have Venda captains. The difference is papers, not tribes. I have already answered for my old tweets.”
She did not say sorry for the chant. She did not disavow it.
And in that pause, the fracture in her apology became visible. She could mourn the thoughtless teenager of 2011, but she could not—would not—question the hardened nationalist of 2026. The old tweets were a sin of youth. The new rhetoric is a strategy of adulthood.
The Verdict
As she left the podium, a small group of Tsonga women stood silently at the back of the hall, holding a handwritten sign: “Punishment is forgetting. We remember.” They did not shout. They did not disrupt. They simply bore witness.
Later, driving away in a convoy of double-cab bakkies, Ngobese’s social media manager posted a single sentence on her X (formerly Twitter) account: “Growth is ugly before it’s beautiful. Keep moving.”
The replies, as of press time, were a war zone. Some posted crying-laughing emojis next to screenshots of the 2013 tweet. Others posted the South African flag and the hashtag #ForgiveJacinta. And a handful—mostly young, mostly Tsonga—simply wrote: “Which part of ‘punishment’ was the joke, ma’am? We are still waiting.”
In the end, the story of Jacinta Ngobese’s apology is not about whether she meant it. It is about a nation that has learned to forgive its public figures for almost anything—except the suspicion that they have not really changed at all. And as the march on the premier’s office goes ahead next week, the ghosts of 2011 will walk alongside the banners of 2026, asking a question no apology can fully answer: Who, exactly, are we leaving behind?
About The Author
