ethnic clashes in South Africa in the early 90s in which minorities faced the brunt of it all, the case of Gukurahundi genocide in Zimbabwe, targeted at the Ndebele people (1982 – 88), the case of Frelimo vs Renamo in Mozambique, the problems of Angola, the case of Zambia’s Barotseland, the case of Malawi’s Ngoni people, right across the continent to the case of Biafra in 1967, in which millions of Igbo people were brutally massacred. In view of all these, one is forced to invoke Ali Mazrui’s views in which he asks; ‘… Is the colonial order being washed away with buckets of blood? Or are we witnessing the agonizing birth pangs of a genuinely postcolonial order? Is the blood, in fact, spilling in the maternity ward of history as a new Africa is trying to breathe? Until we know whether this is the birth of a truly decolonised Africa, we can not celebrate. In any case who can celebrate in the midst of all this blood and carnage’ (Mazrui 1995: 28). Of hate speech and violence The 21st Century is now typified by an extreme form of social violence whose scars are inflicted on the soul of the minority folk – HATE SPEECH/LANGUAGE! And so, we are reminded through the wisdom of our elders that, ‘…when a leopard wants to feed on its young ones, it first accuses them of smelling like goats.’ Hate speech and hate crime in Southern Africa straddle along identification processes of boundary making and is often fraught with unmarked social forms of violence. We can perceive it as a form of stereotypical representation of a particular group of people as the ‘other’ ethnie, which as a form of violence