Even if Malema goes, freedom fantasy will play on

25 September 2011 - 05:13 By Jonny Steinberg
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Image: Sunday Times

Julius Malema is finally being buried. That is the word doing the rounds. His political grave may be taking a while to dig, we are told, but it is almost six feet deep now.

Commentators are already minimising what he has meant to us; some speak of him as a bad dream from which we are waking.

But Malema is not a dream. Even if it is true that his public life is coming to an end - and it is far too soon to say that - the real question is why he has been able to cause so much trouble. Why has the task of containing him been so hard and wrenching?

One reason is this: when Malema speaks about the history of the ANC, he scratches open bone-deep wounds. And they are unlikely to heal soon, even after his political demise.

The ANC led a struggle for what it called "national liberation". It is important to take the meaning of words seriously. Behind "national" is the seemingly simple, but very important, assumption that South Africa's fate will be determined by South Africans.

"The people shall govern," the Freedom Charter declares. This takes as a given that South Africa is a sovereign entity.

There is an obvious sense in which this isn't quite true. We are an agglomeration of land, minerals, technologies and labour that are traded on global markets, and we are only partially in control of the terms on which we enter this trade. We are thus in charge of our own destiny only in a heavily qualified sense.

When English drinkers decide that South African wines are no longer "cheap at the price", for instance, we must either exploit our grape-pickers even more or retrench a whole lot of them. When China starts producing T-shirts at half the cost we do, we must either treat clothes workers the way the apartheid government did, or put up heavy tariffs, or watch an industry shrivel and die.

The task of a democratic government is not to shape a country's destiny. It is to position its people and its assets as best it can in an unpredictable world. The poor pay a price when their government gets things wrong. One such price is a 25% unemployment rate.

It is hard to exaggerate the dissonance between this real world and the world invoked by the idea of "national liberation". Ever since the ANC came to office, it has chafed against the fact that it is not the prime mover of South Africa's fate.

This chafing is ubiquitous. It shaped Thabo Mbeki's presidency; he became obsessed with the idea that foreigners were deciding what was making South Africans ill and what would make them better. It shaped the opposition to Mbeki's presidency; Cosatu's and the SACP's talk of the Class of '96 was a dispute about who would win and lose in South Africa's engagement with the global economy.

Behind all of this chafing was the muted idea that South Africa's hard-fought freedom was a ruse, for the very idea of liberation assumes that a country's destiny is shaped within its own borders.

Here is where Malema comes in. He dips into the ANC's history and takes from it old and familiar ideas: the nationalisation of mines, the expropriation of land. With these, he reminds us of the deepest meaning of "national liberation": the idea that a people is in charge of its fate. He tells the ANC that it is betraying its own history, that it has not delivered to South Africans what it has always promised.

Malema gained traction in part because his fantasy of national liberation resonates. And it resonates because it is what the freedom struggle was about. It is hard to explain to a newly liberated people that the movement they voted into power is only a bit player in a harsh and tumultuous world.

It is easier to tell them that they have been robbed of their patrimony.

Malema has found the key to a new door, one that opens onto the ANC's past. He has shown that reminding the ANC of what it once meant by national liberation is powerful. This is why the likes of Mathews Phosa and Tokyo Sexwale backed him. While it is possible that Malema himself will soon disappear, the door he has opened will not close. The global economy is in grim health. It will continue to bruise us for a while to come. Reminding the ANC of what it once meant by freedom remains a strong suit for the ambitious and the opportunistic.

  • Steinberg is with Huma at the University of Cape Town
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