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Malema tops the race-popsSixteen years of supposedly non-racial democracy has failed to eliminate racial politics in South Africa – a fact highlighted starkly in the current political campaigning for next week’s municipal elections. And so bad has the racial politicking become that this may well become a major legacy of these elections, the consequences of which are likely to reverberate for a long time to come, writes Stef Terblanche.
For a country such as South Africa with its racially divided past to follow this route instead of the reconciliatory and nation-building doctrine advocated by Nelson Mandela and others like Archbishop Desmond Tutu, is to court extreme danger and a Zimbabwe-type future. With racism and the almost irreparable divisions and polarisation it causes comes the politics of entitlement…the one fuelling the other.
While the element of race has never quite left the political discourse in post-apartheid South Africa, it has become something of a battle cry for certain politicians campaigning in the build-up to next week’s municipal elections.
Two of the major culprits have been ANC Youth League (ANCYL) president Julius Malema and SA Communist Party (SACP) general secretary and minister in the ANC government, Blade Nzimande.
This past weekend Malema took his by now almost customary anti-white vitriol to the next level while speaking at an ANC election rally in Galeshewe Stadium in Kimberley, with President Jacob Zuma sitting on the same stage without intervening or correcting him.
Whipping up a crowd of some 3,000 people, Malema called on ANC supporters to treat all whites as criminals for “stealing” land from black people and said their land must now be taken without compensation.
With Zuma failing to rein in Malema, it was left to ANC deputy president Kgalema Motlanthe to put out the racial fires on Sunday by saying Malema’s statement was based on “wrong logic” and that one could not generalise and call all whites criminals…a soft correction of a barbaric statement. The ANC further tried to dilute Malema’s statement by saying he may have been referring to the Natives’ Land Act of 1913. But the damage had been done.
For Malema’s remarks amount to a highly inflammatory racial insult aimed at all white South Africans – including those who are loyal members of the ANC, no matter how much the likes of Derek Hanekom and other senior white ANC members may try to “contextualise” Malema’s words in seeking to justify them, as they did during Malema’s current hate-speech trial around the singing of the so-called liberation struggle song “shoot the farmer, kill the Boer.”
Hate-speech trail
It is within the context of Malema’s hate-speech trial that his latest remarks should be seen. Malema’s and the ANC’s defence has been that the dreaded song, or chant – which many view as a call to kill farmers in particular and whites in general – originated as a so-called “struggle song” during the struggle against apartheid. It was aimed at the system of racial domination and oppression rather than against whites, they argue.
Critics of Malema’s use of the song quite rightly ask what the purpose may be of singing this song with its explicit reference to killing members of a specific racial community twenty years after the liberation struggle ended and sixteen years after the ANC came to power – that while reconciliation is supposed to be the cement that holds South Africa together.
The hate-speech complaint was also brought against Malema within the context of over 3,000 white farmers allegedly having been murdered in South Africa since 1994.
Malema’s trial, and the ANC’s defence of the signing of such an inflammatory song, has already led to some disturbing responses.
In response to Malema’s trial, Solly Phetoe, provincial secretary of the Congress of SA Trade Unions (COSATU) in North West Province, issued a somewhat twisted statement in April saying the song “kill the farmer, kill the Boer” had nothing to do “with killing of white racist farmers who have been killing their own farm workers”.
Phetoe spewed forth: “The former AWB (sic), before he was killed, called our government a baboon government. Some few white racists in Sun City had a CD song calling our icon Madiba Mandela a ‘kaffir'. Our poor workers at Sun City continue to be called baboons and kaffirs. During the funeral of the late ET the same white people were waving the old SA flag and sang Die Stem and other racist songs.” (Die Stem is part of the official national anthem, adopted after the ANC came to power in 1994.)
Phetoe goes on to position a monumental lie as fact to apparently justify his own racial prejudice by adding that the number of attacks on white farmers must be compared with “the farm workers attacked and killed by white racist farmers since 1994” as it was “more than six times” the number of white farmers killed – in other words, more than 18,000 farm workers killed!
That there have been incidents of farmers treating their black workers badly, or even murdering some workers, is not disputed. But the numbers are by far nowhere near what this trade unionist claims. Nor does it begin to approach the number of white farmers killed. Nonetheless, in some parts of the country white racism towards blacks remains a serious problem, adding to the intensification of racial tensions.
Thus, Malema’s latest outburst against whites – calling for them to be treated like criminals and their land to be seized without compensation – resonates uncomfortably with the call to kill farmers or Boers and the actual murder of thousands of farmers.
The ANC’s much muted response to it is cynically arrogant and highly irresponsible. It is no wonder the incident has already led to a flood of complaints to the Human Rights Commission (HRC), rights organisations like AfriForum, in newspaper columns and to political parties.
Opposition parties slammed President Zuma for not rebuking Malema while sitting silently on the same platform. Both the Freedom Front Plus (FF+) and AfriForum are studying Malema’s statement with a view to possible legal action. Pieter Groenewald of the FF+ said Malema acted “like a criminal, being racist” and said he “obviously hates white people”. Philip Dexter of the Congress of the People (COPE) reportedly called Malema’s statement “outrageous” saying it would be “very difficult to undo the damage.”
Also in more subtle ways
Going back to government spokesman Jimmy Manyi’s infamous remarks about Western Cape coloureds hitting the headlines several weeks ago, the race-card has also in recent times increasingly found it way into the political discourse in some somewhat more subtle ways.
While it was left to the mainly white labour union Solidarity to expose Manyi, the race card has played a bizarre part in this municipal election.
Manyi’s statement, followed by a dim-witted ridiculing of coloureds by a minor newspaper columnist, led to an unprecedented public rebuke by National Planning Minister Trevor Manuel, backed by others like COSATU’s Tony Ehrenreich, former Speaker Frene Ginwala, cleric Allan Boesak and others.
Manyi in turn received backing from businessman Paul Ngobeni, also an adviser to Defence Minister Lindiwe Sisulu, who attacked Manuel in an open letter and was later suspended from his position as advisor.
However, minister Manuel’s plea that the elections should not be about race seems to have fallen on mostly deaf ears in his own “non-racial” party.
Malema on Saturday also again referred to opposition leader Helen Zille as a “dancing monkey” from “monkey town,” the kind of language that has in the recent past landed more than one white person in trouble when used in reference to black people.
ANC politicians have also consistently given a racial connotation to service delivery issues in DA-governed Cape Town while its own failings have seen violent protests taking place across the country.
In other incidents relating to race, Higher Education Minister Nzimande perhaps set the tone for the current debates when he used highly unparliamentary language to apparently mimic white criticism of government by claiming it refers to government as incompetent darkies.
This past week DA spokeswoman Lindiwe Mazibuko labeled the ANC a "party of racial nationalism" that sought to divide South Africa on racial lines to "shore up its rapidly eroding support base." It was in reference to Nzimande labeling the DA’s leadership as "two stooges and a madam" in describing party leader Helen Zille (white), DA mayoral candidate for Cape Town, Patricia de Lille (coloured) and Mazibuko (black).
Malema and others have also been calling for the nationalisation of mines based on similar race-inflicted arguments, openly demanding a Zimbabwe-style approach. Just this past weekend Malema, in the impoverished Northern Cape township of Galeshewe, blamed “the Oppenheimers” for amassing wealth from mining, thus leaving no money for the government to create jobs and build a university in the Northern Cape … the racial undertones being quite clear. Both issues, however, refer to unfulfilled election campaign promises made by Zuma in 2009.
Perhaps it was this notion of entitlement that moved COSATU general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi to complain over the weekend that wealth and economic power in South Africa “are still concentrated in the hands of small, white, male elite, which has been joined by a handful of black millionaires”.
These are indeed dangerous times, and unless a firm stop is put to this madness, the “South African miracle” may yet explode its own myth.
(Stef Terblanche is an independent political commentator and freelance journalist)
