WORLDVIEW: The radical leader of the ANC's Youth League has been hauled up over singing a liberation song
Up with halbert out with sword. . .
From Tassagart to Clonmore,
There flows a stream of Saxon gore
Oh, great is Rory Oge O’More,
At sending loons to Hades.
White is sick and Lane is fled,
Now for black FitzWilliam’s head
We’ll send it over, dripping red
To Liza and her ladies.
AMONG THE finer but more bloodcurdling of our nationalist ballads, Follow Me Up to Carlow'scelebration of battle in 1580 has with time perhaps lost its inflammatory power. But not so some of the more recent representatives of the genre, the mawkish pub glorifications of IRA "heroes" and of the armed struggle. And while for most of us such hymns to violence are just distasteful reminders of the past, to many in the North's majority – and they have their own versions too – they still inspire genuine fear.
Bad taste is one thing, but should such songs be banned under incitement to hatred law? And does the performer – whether Planxty or the Wolfe Tones – or indeed the context, change the nature of the performance?
Seventeen years since apartheid was overthrown a Johnannesburg court is currently engaged in weighing precisely such questions.
Thirty-year-old Julius Malema is a controversial, radical leader of the ANC’s Youth League, a demagogue who is sometimes spoken of as a future candidate for the presidency. He is being sued in South Africa’s Equality Court in Johannesburg for “hate speech” by Afrikaner non-governmental organisations Afriforum and the Transvaal Agricultural Union (TAU), backed financially by some 45,000 supporters.
His offence, to sing publicly a liberation ballad consisting largely of the repetition of the lines
Aw dubulibhunu
dubula dubula
(“Shoot the Boer, shoot shoot”)
and an appeal to mothers to let their sons leave home for military training to take on the Boer.
The confrontation is taking place in a colonial-era courthouse between Malema and Roelof du Plessis SC, a white Afrikaner with a heavy Afrikaans accent, a line in red-baiting questioning, and a summoning up of fears of black on white genocide and farmers driven off their land. The trial, its rhetoric and bitterness, could be a replay of one in the bad old days of white rule. “Old scars picked bare”, is how one journalist put it.
“It’s a clash of atavisms,” Nic Dawes, editor of the Mail Guardian told the New York Times. “It’s like those days when you tune into talk radio and you hear a version of the national conversation dominated by the most unpleasant aspects of white anxiety and the angriest black reactions.”
Malema’s defence is that the words do not bear the meaning imputed to them – “shoot the Boer” is not about encouraging people to shoot whites, but a metaphor for fighting and overthrowing apartheid. But, truth is, even some of his supporters find his argument a tad disingenuous – last year the party found its young firebrand so dangerously over-the-top it sent him to anger management.
ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe has nevertheless appeared for him, telling the court it was a song from the struggle, now sung in the ongoing battle against economic oppression.
It reflects the historical experience of blacks, is now part of their culture, and is deserving of protection, Wally Mongane Serote, poet, author and former ANC fighter, testified. The songs were “as important as the Voortrekker monument”, the Afrikaner shrine to the Great Trek, kept on rightly “as a memory even after apartheid”.
Or what we might here call “parity of esteem”. All rather familiar.
He called for tolerance of the past, “including versions of the past that make us feel uncomfortable”. “No harm” was intended. “I entered the ANC as a very angry person, absolutely determined to kill white people, but I learnt about non-racialism and about a restricted armed struggle from the ANC,” Serote told the court. He recalled “Jazz Mondays” in the ANC’s camps in Angola, its volunteers sitting together, composing together, singing the songs of the struggle together.
It had always been understood, he said, that “Boer” referred to the institutions of apartheid.
In a similar vein, the country’s president Jacob Zuma warned journalists of the danger of “erasing facts” from history. “Could you interpret your history by hiding certain facts?”
Malema spoke of his early induction into politics and the ANC’s non-racialism, drummed into them from the start. Of marching armed at the age of 11 to protest the murder of its leader Chris Hani. “We came across white people,” he said. “We never shot any one of them. We had all the reasons.”
All very well, du Plessis argued, but Malema’s championing of expropriation of white farmers, nationalisation of the mines, and of Robert Mugabe no less – “It’s a democratic country . . . They have been holding elections every five years” – hardly suggested a live-and-let-live attitude.
“I belong to a radical and militant youth organisation, and if you’re not militant in the Youth League, you run the risk of being irrelevant,” Malema insisted unapologetically.
“What we are talking about,” du Plessis retorted, “is the perception that people have outside this courtroom of you, of what you say and how that should be interpreted, not how you say it must be interpreted and what you mean.”
The gulf remains huge, the mistrust deep. Whether banning a song will make any difference is another matter.
Closing arguments in the trial begin on May 19th.