Julius Malema’s relationship with “white people” fits comfortably into that binary mechanism we love to understand so much by. He hates them. Case closed.
Truth is, it is a little more complex than that, as is Malema himself, as people tend to be. Hate might still be the conclusion you arrive at after some consideration but even hate alone is a complicated beast.
For example, Malema has said of his bête noire, “I would die in defence of the white minority — they must enjoy the same rights as Africans.” And, “You must never buy the story that we are anti-white and we want whites to be driven to the sea. This is your home, your country and it belongs to all of us.”
But then the story does not end there.
Malema has also said, “No white person is a rightful owner of the land here in SA and in the whole of the African continent” and, “You are a visitor. Visitors must behave.”
He does this all the time, to the point where hypocrisy has now become a fundamental part of his personal brand. He lives in a world of absolutes, not just of totalising racial archetypes but of values and principles that are constantly remoulded to suit whatever his contemporary agenda is.
To his credit, he has never gone so far as to say that he loves white people. That would seem to be a bridge too far, even for the country’s premium populist. The closest he has come is the contention that, “We don’t hate white people, we just love black people.”
So, his is a kind of non-hate.
The nature of non-hate
His starting point for this non-hate is the following: “Once we agree they stole our land, we can agree they are criminals and must be treated as such.”
From that, all else flows. White people, Malema says, “committed a black genocide”, “took land”, “raped our mothers” and are responsible for the fact that “black people” are “poor”, “don’t have jobs”, “are dying of sicknesses”, are “illiterate” and have “surrendered to drugs”.
Recently, he added that, white people also, “killed our child in Coligny for picking up a sunflower” and, generally, “kill our people saying they have mistaken them for baboons”.
Even xenophobia, Malema says, white people are responsible for: “we are dealing with a mess created by them”. A ubiquitous “white arrogance”, which is irrevocably hardwired into “white” DNA, underpins this. “Even if they are hobos,” Malema says, “they never forget they are white.”
For all this and more, Malema says, “You owe us a lot.”
Contemporary white power
Supplementing all this is white power. There is the economy — “the owners of our wealth is white monopoly capital”; the law — “the judiciary is controlled by these white minorities”; and political power, influence which extends far beyond our domestic borders: “This country is controlled from London.”
There is much else besides. Essentially, there is no aspect of the country these criminals do not control or define. Thus, “black people” are “servants of white people”, and “they must pay for making us slaves. We must punish them. And now they must pay”.
But, Malema insists, “I’ve got no hatred for white people”.
What is to be done?
White people can stay, if they subscribe to Malema’s world view. If they don’t, they should leave. He would, however, prefer they stay — “We don’t want them to go anywhere. They must be here. We must work together, because if they leave, they will poison the land.”
But, if they do stay, they should endure. And the first thing they should indulge is Malema’s attitude towards them. Not just that the land is generally up for grabs, literally (“When we leave here, you will see any beautiful piece of land, you like it, occupy it, it belongs to you”) but their lives, too, would seem to hang in the balance.
Death features prominently in Malema’s rhetoric. It is an interesting question as to why. On one level, Malema likely feels guilty that he missed the real revolution. Many of his heroes died for the cause. So martyrdom is a common theme. There is a lot Malema has said he will die for. But he has also said he will do a fair deal of killing along the way. And few things induce violent and threatening behaviour in him more than white people.
Implicit in all of this is, of course, a profoundly insulting and equally fundamental stereotype of black people, a subject perhaps for another day. Victims all of them, without agency
There is much evidence for this, most of which is now infamous. But it is perhaps best summarised by his endorsement of Robert Mugabe’s position that, “The only white man you can trust is a dead white man” — as pure a form of non-hate as you could wish for.
In accompaniment, he has said his party will “cut the throat” of whiteness and called on his supporters to “confront” and “defeat white people”. How one does that depends. As of today, Malema says, “We are not calling for the slaughtering of white people, at least for now.” Presumably that time will come.
For the moment, Malema says, “when we say we must share, it doesn't mean we are fighting — we are actually protecting you.”
Love as hate
Socrates said, “From the deepest desires often come the deadliest hate.” In this sense, love and hate both flow from the same tap for Malema.
He might have only non-hate for white people but he has a detailed understanding of what love involves when it comes to black people. He is not satisfied with mere self-esteem. True love involves embracing the war. True love is to be a “solider”, like himself. To take the war to the enemy, and give them a taste of real non-hate.
Here is a section from Malema’s recent remarks in Schweizer Reneke, where he elaborates on the problem: “You [‘black people’] are unable to break their statues. You are afraid of white people so much that you are even afraid of their statues when you see them, you cannot even collapse the statues of white people. That is how much you are scared of them.”
“Why? You hate yourself. You don’t love yourself. You must start loving yourself. It starts on the 15th [of January].”
“Black man when you leave this place, look yourself in the mirror, ‘today I am going to start loving this guy. There is nothing that is going to happen which is of less quality to this guy, this guy deserves much better, everything quality, everything long lasting must be given to this guy’.” When you are done on the mirror because you cannot see yourself, there is no longer a mirror, you are going to see the next black person. When you look at that next black person, you see yourself, and say ‘this is me, the pain of this person is my pain, the suffering of this person is my suffering. We shall fight this fight together until we emerge victorious’.”
James Baldwin wrote, “I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”
But Malema has a solution for that. Pain needn’t fuel hate. It can engender love. The love of hatred. The bedrock of self-esteem for black people is the realisation that they are “slaves”, and emancipation lies in recognising and standing up to the enemy. To maintain the narrative, and the hate, white people can only ever exist as a homogeneous racial archetype. Look beyond that, and hatred collapses.
Implicit in all of this is, of course, a profoundly insulting and equally fundamental stereotype of black people, a subject perhaps for another day. Victims all of them, without agency, wholly dependent on a benevolent state and born without responsibility or complexity, each “black person” a character with the pre-determined disposition as defined by Malema.
It is interesting that so few people take umbrage at his condescension on this front, for it is all merely the other side of the coin.
The power of the totalising archetype
There is a vast sea of vitriol out there from Malema, on white people and black people, who they are and what defines them. What strikes you, when reading it all, is how uncompromising he is. Not just in terms of the positions he takes, which are always absolute, but in terms of the archetypes he deploys in doing so. He never says, “some white people”, or “most black people”.
Each person is for Malema not just the total sum of the racial stereotypes he attaches to them, but the contemporary embodiment of the history of their race, as he proscribes it. It is all brought to bear. Each individual no more than a metaphor. You can see why George Orwell said, “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”
The purpose is all important: he wishes to control history, not to right wrongs but to define the enemy in total and (non)hateful terms.
That, more than anything, should be disturbing. When people stop being people, when they are reduced to murderous symbols and callous metonyms, the real world gives way to a fantastical nightmare. History shows that the moment you destroy the idea of the individual, you destroy the foundation on which humanity rests.
Should the racial war and violence Malema constantly alludes to ever come to pass, you wonder what Malema will do on that day. Will he be on the front line, plunging his bayonet of non-hate into his enemy’s heart? Or will he be in the background, with a megaphone, reminding everyone this is all an exercise in self-love?
If he does ever find himself on the front line, what will he see in his enemy’s eyes, as the life drains from them? History? A drug dealer? A member of the white Illuminati in London? Probably all that and more. But he won’t see a person; Malema doesn’t do people.
Love and hate, just like “black people” and “white people” are abstractions for Malema. They are no more grounded in the real world than nationalisation or Mao Zedong.
Some people might say that is sociopathic. But those people don’t know what non-hate is.
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