SONGEZO ZIBI | Chanting struggle slogans doesn’t mean people are going to be killed

Last week, Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) leader Julius Malema testified before the Equality Court in yet another round of litigation against the “Kill the Boer” slogan, with AfriForum being the litigant. As always, Malema relished the opportunity to testify, and brought his A-game to the stand.

I have chanted the same before. In fact, in high school and university you were more likely to hear me chanting “One Settler, One Bullet” for I was affiliated with the Pan Africanist Student Organisation (Paso). I also know that had someone given me a firearm to shoot anyone, even if they were white, I would have done no such thing.

By the time the 1994 elections came, like many others around me, we just wanted peace because we had seen our parents cry too many times. Seeing your parent, your pillars of strength, wailing is earth-shattering when you are in your formative years. It delivers a combination of anger and helplessness especially if, as was the case when I saw my grandmother cry for the first time, the reason for the tears was another relative murdered by the apartheid security police.

I was 14 when I experienced my first tear-gassing incident. We had gone to a protest at the Mthatha High Court where a death penalty appeal for the now late Ndibulele Ndzamela and others was being heard. They were Umkhonto Wesizwe soldires.

It turned out that his nephew, Phakamisa, would later become my colleague and friend at Business Day. Phakamisa is now the author of an excellent book, Native Merchants. Please get it. His uncle avoided the hangman’s noose by the proverbial whisker and died a few years ago.

To this day, I can remember most struggle songs we used to sing in those days. Sometimes I sing them. They gave us something to hang on to, a visceral feeling that there was a bigger cause, and we were not alone. When democracy came, the connection to that history did not disappear.

For those of us who criticise the proclivities of the ANC and the way it has destroyed the country in recent years, we look back on that history and get angry. This is not because we did not want freedom, but that it has been squandered before so many of our compatriots have tasted the fruits thereof. It is a betrayal, and part of the memorial architecture involves reflecting on those difficult days when we chanted those slogans.

This may be a complex equation for some, but it makes sense to some of us. Although I no longer chant any of those slogans for a political purpose, I also don’t believe that people I hear chanting them are on their way to kill someone or will do so later because someone started the song. I am more likely to believe that people who say they want to get rid of immigrants will kill them. None of their chants involve killing, but we know too well that it has happened most gruesomely before.

The point being that those who want to murder do not need a chant specifically asking them to do it. They will do it. In any event, South African criminals are so violent they do not need political slogans to kill as wantonly as they do. This is whether they beat up a partner, murder them or rob a spaza shop or a farm.

We have a violent crime problem that all of us need to take ownership of and resolve. No one is picking on white farmers just because Julius said so. It is how I am reminded that we have much work to do, not that anyone should assault police officers, as my favourite struggle song says. Farmers and their workers get killed for the same reason the murder and robbery rates are so high in the townships. We are a violent society, one where males are particularly so.

That said, my connection to the days of struggle remains important. The struggle was to create a better country for all South Africans, not just some. We remain an unequal country in which black people are more likely to be poor and unemployed than white people, one in which white people have more economic opportunities. The reasons for this are numerous, including our history.

The responsible way is for all of us to own this problem and the solutions thereto. It helps no one for the advancement of black people to be a taboo subject for which we must use euphemisms. Colonialism and apartheid were both focused on dispossessing and disadvantaging generations of black people by turning them into a poor, property-less underclass. Saying so does not amount to hating white people or calling for them to be turned into an underclass. If anything, they should also say the same because it is a simple historical fact.

What matters is what we collectively choose to do. Transforming our society into an inclusive one should not be something that black people do to white people, but a common task that unites, rather than divides us. It should be our social contract so that in the future, black and white children can look back at that history and be proud of what subsequent generations did to forge a new country.

White South Africans belong here, and must confidently behave and speak like people who belong here. We have all been dealt a poor hand by history and are all victims of recent ANC corruption and misrule. We can choose to be united in our collective purpose to ensure that black people need no longer demand BEE measures, and that very few able-bodied people need state welfare because there is work for them to do. That requires hard work and pushing back against those who, in different ways, seek to keep us divided while destroying the very fabric of our society. In other words, it needs a different politics of purpose and unity that is premised on telling the truth about our past and present so we can have a shared future.

We will continue to have a black-white divide in South Africa so long as we allow that to be the defining pillar of what we do or do not do. The alternative is to pick a set of values that can anchor the society we want to build, and those are the social democratic values of freedom, equality, justice, and solidarity.

In future columns I will write about what they should mean for South Africa in the context of our past, present and the future we should build. None of us should rest until every South African has experienced them consistently, in different aspects of life. If we rest now, we will always have to worry about who’s chanting what slogan because we know that there are so many South Africans who remain excluded that they may really come and kill some of us.

That is no way to live.