From behind the podium at a series of EFF rallies in KwaZulu-Natal this past weekend, EFF leader Julius Malema reproduced a range of now familiar and bigoted slurs about Indian South Africans.
They included the suggestion that “the Indian community must rework their mentality that they are closer to whiteness” and that they pay “our people” a pittance, typically in form of food and old clothes, instead of money.
Malema has been pushing this line hard for a couple of years now, always in KwaZulu-Natal.
In 2017 he suggested that, “Here in KwaZulu-Natal, everything strategic is given to Indian families” and called on Indians to “respect Africans”, because they were “ill-treating them”.
In fact, he claimed, “they are treating them worse than [the] Afrikaners”.
“They don’t pay our people,” he said, “they pay them with food parcels, it must come to an end.”
And so on and so forth, all of this being just a part of a long list of anti-Indian sentiments that fluctuate between racial scaremongering and raw hate, dating far further back than 2017.
The thing is, all the available evidence suggests it is working. Support for the EFF in KwaZulu-Natal is growing. And not on the margins either. Together with Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal is set to form the backbone of EFF support on 2019. And it will be built largely on a slew of racial scapegoating.
In 2014, on the provincial ballot in KwaZulu-Natal, the EFF hardly featured at all: 1.85% or 70,823 votes. There is not that much data on its current standing but in December, an IRR poll put the EFF on 10% in the province (the IFP on 13%, DA on 16% and the ANC on 53%). If that pattern holds, the EFF will grow exponentially and, as in Gauteng, it will be directly at the expense of the ANC (who managed 64.52% in 2014).
More to the point, it would have come on the back of a relentless drive on the EFF’s part to racially denigrate Indian South Africans, and to scapegoat the many and various problems facing the province, all of which can be directly attributed to the ANC’s governance, not Indians.
What does one make of that? As ever, Malema, a racist demagogue who relies on the kind of grand sweeping slurs he makes about minorities (whites and Indians in particular) to mobilise support, obviously deserves the necessary condemnation.
That is easier said than done. The media seems to finally be coming round to that conclusion, but it did take a series of highly personal and vicious racial assaults on various journalists for the penny to drop. Nevertheless, better late than never.
In 2017, TimesLive gave Malema’s Indian hate-fest the headline: “Juju at his fiery finest at EFF birthday bash”. What a jolly occasion it was. This time, it went with the headline, “Indians need to ‘rework their mentality’ about African people, Malema says at KZN rally.” A bit more to the point. So, that is encouraging.
Regardless, Malema seems largely immune to the opinions of the fourth estate. Sure, he rants and raves about them, along with his small coterie of pseudo-generals, but really you can say what you want. He doesn’t care. He remains absolutely focused on the electorate and talks directly to them better than anyone else in South African politics. He sells them hate, and they buy it. In KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng, it’s the equivalent of a mad Black Friday rush (no pun intended) to get to the front of the store.
As ever in SA, you feel those 10% of voters who are being won over to this deeply dangerous brand of racial populism have a case to answer for. As ever in SA, no such case will ever be put to them. Voters are never wrong in SA, only politicians.
What the EFF is systematically doing across the country, most successfully in Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal, is filtering out of the ANC the most racist, radical and angry members of the alienated morass that is the ANC support base, and consolidating them under banner which makes the implicit explicit.
The ANC has always held a certain contempt for minorities. Occasionally it manifests in the kind of cold, unambiguous language the EFF employs. You might remember, in 2000, S’bu Ndebele’s statement: “To all Africans, Coloureds and Indians who voted for the DA, be warned that there are going to be consequences for not voting for the ANC. When it comes to service delivery, we will start with the people who voted for us and you will be last.”
Interestingly, that statement was also made in KwaZulu-Natal. But, for the most part, the ANC keeps that sort of visceral contempt just below the surface — it intimates at it all the time, but that is as far as it is willing to go. Divisive euphemisms such as “our people”, do the work for it.
Malema has taken all that to another level. He doesn’t play word games. He wears his hate on his sleeve. He has no interest in feigning nonracialism. Quite the opposite: race is his calling card, and racism the hand he plays week in and week out.
White South Africans are the primary target. Malema seems to be waiting for the right opportunity to cut their throats. Indians are worse than Afrikaners. God knows what Malema wants to do to them. But don’t think that Coloured South Africans are exempt. Coloureds, like Indians, are no less privileged and contemptuous — or racist. It is, for Malema, Black South Africans versus the rest.
And it shows in the EFF support: 98% of EFF voters are black. That is as close to a racially homogeneous group as you get. It is self-selecting too: people who respond to racial stereotyping and denigration, who see themselves as the ultimate victim, not of the ANC’s ruinous policies, but minorities — the ultimate vestige of political, economic and social power. The ANC’s only real failure has been that the party is too soft on them.
When analysing the EFF, it is tempting simply to lay blame solely at Malema’s feet. Make no mistake, he is unquestionably primarily responsible for the monster he is generating. But there are millions of people out there who are taking to heart everything he says — among it all, a profound, relentless message of hate directed at minorities.
That is where the EFF’s real power lies. Malema might think he is in control. He is not. If a group like that, racially homogeneous and organised around hate, gets big enough, it takes on a life of its own. It is no coincidence that when SA faces outbreaks of xenophobic violence, Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal are epicentres for it. These are fertile grounds for racial mobilisation. And Malema knows exactly how to tap straight into the heart of it
Black First Land First (BLF) is an interesting organisation. If the EFF is the ANC’s revolutionary conscience, BLF is the EFF’s id. That is saying something. It takes every EFF position to its insane conclusion. But, just as the EFF was born of the ANC, BLF was born of the EFF and in it, you can see the EFF unchained, where even the pretence of democratic or constitutional respect is stripped away.
BLF says it will not accept white members. Malema is cleverer than that. But that is what he is really communicating. No Indians or Coloureds either. “Read between the lines,” he says, “you are the enemy.” All that hate is all held together by the idea of “whiteness” and one’s proximity to it.
Your choices are to relinquish power and repent, or get your throats slit. And that message is burning bright in places such as Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal. If Malema keeps fanning those flames, soon enough no firebreak will hold it. Perhaps that is what Malema wants.
• Van Onselen is the head of politics and governance at the South African Institute of Race Relations.
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