September 14 2011 at 09:00am
By Mathatha Tsedu
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THE OTHER SIDE: A white demonstrator wears a poster depicting Julius Malema as racist delinquent.
Can somebody please give me Kallie Kriel’s number? I am feeling like singing Senzeni na and want to know if it pinches a raw nerve in his body politic like Dubul’ iBhunu did. If he says it does, then, despite my thirst for the song, I should just sulk unless I have enough cash and time for court appearances.
The judgment by Justice Colin Lamont is problematic and the ANC leadership that signed the Codesa agreement that gave us this system, as well as the Deputy Judge President of South Gauteng, Justice Phineas Mojapelo, must take the blame.
The ANC now wants to appeal the judgment that has effectively defined our Struggle heritage as hate speech. We are told by the learned judge that the song is a call to genocide against Afrikaners or maybe even white people in toto.
And so, the obnoxious boy of ANC politics, Julius Malema, the ANC, and seemingly all of us are now barred from remembering. What is the value of a song? What is its importance as a song? Why do people sing?
Songs create moods, they infuse energy, depending on what kind of energy you need. In church, people sing to create the ambiance to be able to imagine a better hereafter. It is a hereafter whose logic may be difficult sometimes, but once people gather in a church and start singing, they are transformed, and heaven becomes possible.
The Struggle songs gave a different energy. They allowed us to imagine a free existence in a free country. When I spent 300 days in solitary confinement back then, and days became weeks and weeks became months, lonely nights were assuaged by the singing of these songs.
And once I got going, alone, I would be transported outside that dingy cell, for that time I would be free, roaming with my comrades. Singing allowed me to imagine a free country and, for that, (to endure) the pain of detention and tortures of unbelievable brutality by the kith and kin of the rightwingers who now dictate what I may or may not sing, would be nothing.
Our entire Struggle has now been reduced to the lowest possible interpretation of our songs. As if the entire Struggle was based on a crusade for an orgy of mass white genocide. This is such nonsense. Where was this genocide implemented during the Struggle? And why would it only start now? Our Struggle was much much more sophisticated than that.
We understood that blackness was not just colour, it was a state of mind and a way of life that refused to accept a status of inferiority in our own land. Similarly with whiteness, it was a state of mind that saw blacks as lesser human beings, if at all, created by the good Lord for whites to exploit as they deemed fit.
This was what iBhunu meant and continues to mean. That state of mind needed to be exterminated. It was defending itself through an army of armed men in the police, SADF and commandos, and if you were serious about bringing it down, you had to match their firepower with equal or better firepower.
The ignition of an otherwise dormant and moribund resistance in 1976 through black consciousness that saw hundreds of youths going for military training had its genesis in that understanding. That was what Bantu Biko taught us all. That the judgment was handed down on the 34th anniversary of his death is a desecration of his memory and work, and proof that the more human face he sought to give to this country has not been found yet.
The ANC, in its haste to settle with FW De Klerk in 1993, ignored many salient points about redress and what this country must be. These are now coming back to haunt them and all of us. Every little name change that must happen to some town or street must pass AfriForum’s test first. Land reform is hamstrung by onerous conditions that are effectively unworkable.
And now this. What does this ruling mean? What are its implications for other songs, such as Senzeni na, which says in one line amabhunu a yi zinja? Is that banned too? Could Judge Lamont ever understand what this song and the lament it embodies says?
How was he chosen to sit on this case? Which brings me to Justice Mojapelo. In a High Court like Johannesburg, where you have judges such as Ratha Mokgoatleng, Seun Moshidi and many others who may even have sung the song and would know what it really meant, how is it that someone who may possibly have seen themselves as a target of the song get chosen to hear this case?
In that decision, were the wider political implications of the case taken into consideration to ensure that the best among the learned brothers and sisters was assigned to the matter? Or was it just by roll call? Whoever was free at a particular time?
Judge Mojapelo owes us an explanation. This is not an argument for pliant judges to be assigned to cases but for the best suited to understand issues. Surely there would be judges who have a keener understanding of finances and would be assigned to deal with intricate matters involving big money shenanigans.
I am arguing for the same here.
It is not about Julius, it is about a misrepresentation of what our Struggle was all about, it is about defending our heritage of a proud and principled as well as sophisticated Struggle for freedom. It is about denying the rabid right-wingers to be the deciders of what part of our history is palatable.
l Mathatha Tsedu is a former City Press editor and the project director of the Press Freedom Commission.
The Star
Comments by Sonny
Our history must never be distorted by a blind majority!
Communist rhetoric is dead and buried!
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