My encounter with Julius Malema

Posted by Madibeng Kgwete: 20 April 2011

Depending on which side of South Africa’s colourful history you most associate with and what your views are on contemporary socio-economic realities, Julius Malema, president of the ANC Youth League, could be described in completely opposing terms at the same time: a populist demagogue, a racist, a charismatic leader, a fearless truth-teller.

As it is now alleged in the hate speech trial brought against him by Afri Forum and the Transvaal Agricultural Union (TAU) for his singing of the anti-apartheid struggle song dubul’ ibhunu (or shoot the Boer), Malema can sometimes also be a menace to some. He also allegedly incites his supporters to carry out racial attacks.

Counsel for AfriForum and TAU have argued in court that their clients are worried about Malema’s singing of the song in post-apartheid South Africa because the song (or chant as it's been called by a "music expert") incites violence against a particular grouping of the white population, the Boer.

Testifying in the case, AfriForum’s deputy CEO, Ernst Roets, said Malema uses violent language and threatening gestures and has even threatened a delegation of Afrikaners at a meeting that if they marched to the ANC’s headquarters in Johannesburg, “what happened to IFP members outside Shell House in 1994” would happen to them.

“I’m not a struggle expert,” said Roets, “so I asked what he meant.” At this point leaning forward in his chair, Malema allegedly told the Afrikaner delegation: “Come protest and you will see.”

Quite why many people fear Malema is a matter that goes far beyond the young man himself. The Malema I have known from a young age (and whom I had a chat with following a meeting in 2010) is anything but threatening.

In real life, he is not even what he appears to be on television, radio or newspapers – both in terms of physical stature and in tone. In real life, Malema is shorter than what he appears like on TV. Also, he is more youthful in appearance.

When I met him at a gathering where he addressed a group of foreign journalists in Johannesburg one evening in 2010, Malema never seemed to value his own presence. He listens very attentively to every word spoken to him (even greetings).

It may very well be a psychological issue: that Malema has been told many times that he’s a half-literate idiot who barely passed matric. When you speak to him, he listens as if saying: “I don’t know anything. Please educate me.”

At the gathering with international journalists, the room was packed with between 80 and 100 people, but there were only about six or seven black people amongst them – Malema and his spokespesperson Floyd Shivambu included.

When I went to speak to him after his address (during which he likened his frequent controversial outbursts to those of young Nelson Mandela), he asked me as one of the few black people in the audience: “Do you work with these people?”

“No,” I responded. “I work for the GCIS”. I didn’t think he’d care to ask any further question – or even to know what the GCIS stands for. And he responded: “Oh, Government Communications! I see.”

And he wasn’t finished asking me questions: “So where do you come from?” When I told him I’m from the Sekhukhune area in Limpopo, he smiled and said: “You see, when I speak about mines, I think you’ll relate with the situation I am talking about.”

Then he said in Sepedi: “These people (referring to white mine bosses) are eating our resources. The whole Sekhukhune is poor. There is dust all over, and they are busy grabbing away from us in broad daylight.”

The menacing Malema that is being referred to in many public platforms – and now in the on-going hate speech trial – seems, to a black person, like an invention. But to whites, the fear that they get when they listen to Malema is in fact fear of the kind of radical change that they believe they had put behind their backs through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).

The TRC served its purpose in as far as bringing erstwhile political adversaries closer is concerned, but it also served another purpose: to assure the white man that the possessions he acquired, either legally or illegally, during apartheid were protected from any form of violent dispossession in a post-apartheid dispensation.

A common theme amongst many conservative South Africans is that their country is on the way of becoming another Zimbabwe, and this point was also made in the hate speech case. Reference was made to the fear amongst Afrikaners of South Africa veering towards “a failed state.”

Many white South Africans are still afraid of blacks in general; and Malema, as the self-styled leader of angry, jobless and poor black youth, must not be allowed to provoke this potentially dangerous group of people who would have little to lose even if the country plunges into another Zimbabwe.