It is depressing, but perhaps unsurprising, that this is the place we have circled back to: a standoff between those who, like Julius Malema, think that chanting “Kill the Boer” mobilises a proud history in support of a current, legitimate political project, and those — particularly Afrikaners — who feel it violates their human rights.
The South Gauteng High Court two weeks ago ruled the song unconstitutional, a judgment that the ANC plans to appeal.
It is union federation Cosatu that puts the position against the judgment most clearly:
“The words, if interpreted literally, could be seen as promoting racial hatred and inciting violence, but such songs evolved in the context of a society where the black majority were disenfranchised at the barrel of a gun by a small white minority and their illegitimate government.
“Even then, the songs were not aimed at individual white people, although some of them did get caught in the crossfire. The reference to ‘boers’ was directed at apartheid as a system and the white farmers as a class, who brutally exploited black workers and were identified as defenders of apartheid.”
On this account Malema, even if he is intentionally provocative, is not literally calling for the murder of whites.
That will be cold comfort to farmers, however, and indeed to anyone who imagines they might be covered under the broad rubric of “boers”. More than 3 000 white farmers have been murdered since 1994 and despite the government’s claims to the contrary, there is a real apprehension in that community that they are being deliberately targeted for political revenge.
They will not be comforted by the rapturous welcome planned for Malema in Zimbabwe, where farmers have been dispossessed and driven into exile.
The court judgment represents one kind of response: it is an effort, albeit perhaps a misguided one, to recognise that it is only when all our rights are protected that they have any meaning. Steve Hofmeyr’s racist rant back at Malema represents another and, tragically, it is likely to resonate more. Neither is adequate, nor is Cosatu’s historical justification.
We believe that singing “Kill the Boer” should be legal, but that anyone who does so sacrifices any claim to credibility.
The song may echo down the years, but we now have a rights-based Constitution and a complex, challenging project of figuring out how to live together in the company of our appalling history.
That history should not be airbrushed, but nor should its monsters be put to work in the service of a demagogic politics that serves the crudest of individual interests.
We shouldn’t need a judge to stop that happening — on the contrary, we should be very wary indeed of abdicating our duty of care entirely to the courts. Instead, all of us — in civil society, in political parties, in the media, in our private lives — must act in concert to isolate the extremists, whether right or left, so that they give up their lonely cause of hate.
We’ve got a new song, and Julius Malema doesn’t know the tune.
Gauteng’s spring-cleaning spree
There is a good deal of talk from President Jacob Zuma’s administration about stopping waste and corruption, but not much action.
In the Gauteng provincial government, however, economic development provincial minister Firoz Cachalia, with the backing of Premier Nomvula Mokonyane, is cleaning up the toxic legacy of his predecessor, Paul Mashatile.
Mashatile used the state agencies set up to boost economic growth in South Africa’s richest province to indulge in a range of questionable spending decisions that either benefited his friends and allies in a tight-knit group of politician-business people known as the Alex mafia, or were simply so nonsensical as to raise suspicions of impropriety.
Prominent in the latter category were the Gauteng Motorsport contracts that were to have funnelled nearly a billion rand into Formula One, the A1 Grand Prix and superbike racing.
Cachalia has cancelled those deals and he has driven investigations into numerous other dubious tenders where laws appear to have been broken.
Last week we learned that he had moved to end another outrageous spending programme — the previously secret $3-million (R22-million) annual subsidy to business news channel CNBC Africa.
That the arrangement was kept secret tells you all you need to know about its propriety, both journalistically and politically.
The channel was effectively dependent on the provincial government for its survival and it is hard to imagine how it ensured editorial independence under those circumstances. As for its benefits to the province, no one involved has explained them convincingly and well-informed gossip focuses on the enthusiasm with which then-president Thabo Mbeki embraced the project in the run-up to his Polokwane defeat.
It’s a huge embarrassment, or ought to be, for parent company NBC and its trusted news brand.
There are those who will say Cachalia’s actions are simply designed to bolster the premier in her battle with Mashatile for Gauteng provincial chair of the ANC. That shouldn’t distract him from pressing ahead. We urgently need examples of this kind that show it is possible to turn the tide on maladministration and build government structures that are focused on delivery to the people, instead of to the crony elite.