GARETH VAN ONSELEN: Julius Malema’s death cult

To one degree or another, any political party operates like a religious order. There is a holy text — its constitution and the ideology that underpins it; the party faithful, zealots and true believers alike; and, inevitably, the messiah, the chosen one who will lead the party to the promised land: national victory and power.

Along the way there are prophets and miracles and all the accompanying component parts of any religious belief, re-interpreted in political terms. In this way, each political party moves inexorably towards a terminus, just like those monotheistic religions of old — the end of days, and the world rebuilt anew.

Of course, in strictly religious terms, the end of days necessitates much death and horrible revenge before the realisation of any paradise is possible. Most political parties tend to try an avoid this in favour of some imagined utopia. Cults, however, put the apocalypse front and centre as not just inevitable but desirable. And death cults, in particular, would have it manifest sooner rather than later.

If the religious metaphor is generally helpful in understanding how political party behaviour works, the EEF is best understood as a death cult. It is not only pursuing the end of days but living through them, and the revolution, ever-present and all-determining, is the final judgment. Thus, death is intricately and irrevocably woven into the party’s ideological tapestry.

The Wikipedia entry for "doomsday cults", helpful in its simplicity, says of the psychology that underpins the phenomenon: "[A] study by Festinger, Riecken, and Schachter found that people turned to a cataclysmic world view after they had repeatedly failed to find meaning in mainstream movements." To this end, some cataclysmic event is adopted as the cornerstone belief, and all subsequent behaviour is informed by and flows from it.

The entry continues, "In his book Politeia: Visions of the Just Society, Eric Carlton … writes that the event is only seen as a ‘doomsday’ for the ‘wicked and unrepentant’, whereas members of the group itself often regard it as a ‘day of deliverance’, or a ‘renewal of the world’. He regards these groups as ‘the ultimate in exclusivity’, and while the future will be bleak for non-believers due to an unforeseen cataclysm, members of the group are promised existence in a new utopia."

South African millenarianism

With regards to the EFF, in particular, and South African society more generally, there are other influences at play. Millenarianism, the idea that some profound and all-encompassing change is imminent, one that will fundamentally alter the status quo, is omnipresent. Indeed, it is hardwired into the post-apartheid narrative. It underpins so much behaviour, from the rise in the number of wildly charismatic churches, to the ANC’s raison d’être itself — encapsulated by the idea of transformation. Our zeitgeist is, if anything, millenarian in nature. Change, absolute and total, is coming.

Accompanying and augmenting this is a pervasive fatalism and the notion that agency and freewill are both limited by the gods of fate and destiny. The suffering we endure is inevitable, like death itself. Perhaps because death is so ubiquitous and most people so long suffering, mortality has lost its edge. Regardless, it is fuelled by the impulse towards millenarian thought.

[The EFF] is leading the revolution, but the revolution looms large on the horizon. It is both cause and effect. In this way, it never fails, because it has never really happened yet

Into this environment, Julius Malema stepped. His offer is millenarian in its narrative and the EFF’s internal political culture, cultish in its fanaticism about its revolutionary credentials. This contradiction, between an imagined future and revolutionary present, plays itself out every day.

On one hand, the revolution is currently unfolding. As far back as December 2014, Malema would instruct his congregation, "Stop theorising, there must be a programme. The revolution is now. Theory without practice is useless."

On the other, the revolution is still to come. "Transform" or "wait for the revolution", Malema warned white-owned businesses in July last year. "You will lose everything‚ one day you will wake up in the morning and you have nothing beside of this reality."

The revolution lives on in the past, too. "We are going to a war comrades," Malema would say as leader of his first cult, the ANC Youth League, back in June 2011. "And you are not going to win it through rhetoric."

The revolution is yesterday, today and tomorrow. But the measure of it will always be tomorrow.

False prophecies

The EFF is always half-in and half-out of the revolution. Always it is pending. Always the party is in the thick of it. It is leading the revolution, but the revolution looms large on the horizon. It is both cause and effect. In this way, it never fails, because it has never really happened yet.

Wikipedia says that, "Social scientists have found that while some group members will leave after the date for a doomsday prediction by the leader has passed uneventfully, others actually feel their belief and commitment to the group strengthened. Often, when a group’s doomsday prophecies or predictions fail to come true, the group leader will simply set a new date for impending doom, or predict a different type of catastrophe on a different date."

Malema’s record is littered with false prophesy. In 2012, he said, "We are going to lead a mining revolution in this country. We are going to each mine. We will [make] these mines ungovernable until the boers come to the table." But the mines were never occupied.

Malema’s use of death and violence, always couched as some future threat and which he hangs over the head of SA like the Sword of Damocles, is infused into so much of his rhetoric

In 2014, the EFF threatened to make the whole of the Gauteng province ungovernable. "We will fight. We have the capability to mobilise our people and fight physically", said Malema. No one was mobilised, no one physically fought and the province, however dysfunctional, carries on.

In 2015, as part of a "national occupy land week" the EFF called on "all homeless people to identify open and unoccupied land wherever they choose and engage on the struggle to restore their land". Outside of a few minor isolated failures — most of which ended up in legal proceedings — the party’s call was not answered.

Later that same year, Malema would declare the party would occupy "each and every branch of Absa, until we are given a practical programme of action on how the bank is going to intervene to resolve the inequalities in society". No branch of Absa was occupied.

For the EFF, Doomsday is an ever-moving feast.

In trying to explain this, the book Experiments With People: Revelations from Social Psychology, by Abelson, Frey and Gregg, states, "Continuing to proselytise on behalf of a doomsday cult whose prophecies have been disconfirmed, although it makes little logical sense, makes plenty of psychological sense if people have already spent months proselytising on the cult’s behalf. Persevering allows them to avoid the embarrassment of how wrong they were in the first place."

By constantly playing off the revolution in the here and now, against the revolution to come, Malema avoids any realisation or introspection by the party faithful, that so many of his commands and predictions have come to nought. Always, there is the grand revolution, the ultimate changing of the guard. It is both imminent and current. And, intrinsic to it, is death.

A yearning for death

On Monday, in an interview with TRT World, Malema would repeat his ominous November 2016 sentiment, telling the interviewer, "I’m saying to you, we’ve not called for the killing of white people, at least for now. I can’t guarantee the future."

He warned that, "If things are going the way they are, there will be a revolution in this country. I can tell you now. There will be an unled revolution in this country, and an unled revolution is the highest form of anarchy."

Malema’s use of death and violence, always couched as some future threat and which he hangs over the head of SA like the Sword of Damocles, is infused into so much of his rhetoric. Most political parties — indeed, most religious movements — focus on everlasting life. Not the EFF. Death lies at the heart of its message, it is infatuated with it.

And as Doomsday moves, so does the nature of all that death to come. There was a time when Malema was "prepared to die for Zuma". Not just to die, but to "take up arms and kill for Zuma". That particular prophesy did not come to pass.

"We will run out of patience very soon and we will remove this government through the barrel of a gun," Malema said on international TV in April 2016, turning his sights on the very administration he had sworn to die for. "We are not scared of the army, we are not scared to fight. We will fight — yes, literally, we will fight." Now he would die and kill to destroy it.

‘We are the pure and chosen few’

Christopher Hitchens had the following to say about monotheistic and messianic religions: "With a large part of itself, it clearly wants us all to die. It wants this world to come to an end. You can tell the yearning for things to be over, whenever you read any of its real texts or listen to any of its real spokesperson."

"The eschatological element that is inseparable from Christianity [is that] if you don’t believe that there is to be an apocalypse, there is going to be an end, a separation of the sheep and the goats, a condemnation, a final one, then you are not really a believer. And the contempt for the things of this world shows through all of them.

"It is well put in an old rhyme from an English, exclusive brethren sect: ‘We are the pure and chosen few, and all the rest are damned; there is room enough in hell for you, we don’t want heaven crammed’."

The whites have stolen the land, dignity and wealth. They are the great unclean. And he, and his band of true believers, are here to cleanse; to ‘cut the throat of whiteness’

He concludes, "The painful business, of living as humans, and studying civilization, and trying to acquire learning and knowledge, and health and medicine and pushing back the frontiers, can all be scrapped. And the cult of death can take over."

The "wicked and unrepentant" are, for Malema, white South Africans. White South Africans, he would have it, are just "visitors", inherently illegitimate. Their surrogates, "unAfrican" Indians, and those black people — "house negroes" and "sell-outs" — who do not ascribe to the EFF’s dogma, are similarly enemies, to be vanquished. The whites have stolen the land, dignity and wealth. They are the great unclean. And he, and his band of true believers, are here to cleanse; to "cut the throat of whiteness".

When that great day arrives, SA will be rebuilt in the EFF’s image. A grand, agrarian economy. With the people on the land, each municipality a small, socialist dispensary of food and employment. The banks nationalised, and mines totally controlled by the state. In charge of it all, and everything else, will be the EFF. The chosen people, benevolent and wise. There will be justice and peace.

But first there must be a revolution. A great reckoning. It is here, and it is coming. And, unless the EFF is in charge of it, it will be anarchic. If it is resisted, there will be death. Both are constantly predicted by Malema. Neither seem ever to materialise. And yet its leader remains infallible. Always the bell is tolling. And so, the EFF death cult keeps believing, its sublimated desire for annihilation constantly kept in check by the promise of tomorrow and the sacrifice it demands.

• Van Onselen is the head of politics and governance at the South African institute of Race Relations.