The ongoing Julius Malema saga constitutes an interesting philosophical question: when can historically relevant modes of expression—such as, in this case, his singing of "awudubhulu ibhunu" or "shoot the boer", a black struggle song, at a university campus over a year ago—be prosecuted as 'hate speech'. There are many interesting angles with respect to the sorts of incidences, but I think there are two that are most important; first, is it still relevant after the conditions that created it have changed, and second, what is the motivation for the person in question singing it?
It is useful that Bono was just down a couple of months ago and had plenty to say about 'shoot the boer', likening it to rebels songs in Ireland about the Republican army.
"We sang this and it's fair to say it's folk music ... as this was the struggle of some people that sang it over some time. But would you want to sing that in a certain community? It's pretty dumb," Bono reportedly said.
This caused some major controversy:
[Afrikaans singer Steve] Hofmeyr, writing in Afrikaans on his official Facebook fan page yesterday, said he 'just chucked his two, R2500 U2 tickets into the Jukskei [River]'. "Bono is trying to lick the asses of the ANC by attempting to validate hate speech struggle songs by comparing them to Ireland's songs. The difference Bono? Your songs are in a safe context while ours are not. You live in peace in Dublin while our boere are exterminated like flies. The Irish songs are cold nostalgia - ours are warm blood," wrote Hofmeyr.
On the other hand,
Kallie Kriel, CEO of AfriForum, yesterday said the organisation "welcomed" Bono's comments. "It's actually a reflection of what we're saying. We don't want to wipe any struggle songs off the history books. [Bono] said there are rules as to when you can sing these songs, and Julius Malema does not abide by those rules," he said.
But Dirk Hermann, deputy director-general of trade union Solidarity, whose uncle was murdered in a farm murder last week, said he was "nauseated". He "dared" Bono to still call the song a folk song if his "uncle or brother or father was murdered in such a cruel manner on a farm".
So what is the final verdict? Well it isn't final, but my opinion would be to side with Sartre on this one:
"The only possible way out was to confront total negation with total negation, violence with equal violence; ... colonialists needed a sub-proletariat, but they had to live at the frontier of the impossibility of life because wages had to be as close as possible to zero. The violence of the rebel was the violence of the colonialist; there was never any other. The struggle between the oppressed and oppressors ultimately became the reciprocal interiorisation of a single oppression: the prime object of oppression, interiorising it and finding it to be the negative source of its unity, appalled the oppressor, who recognised, in violent rebellion, his own oppressive violence as a hostile force taking him in turn as its object. And against his own violence as Other, he created a counter-violence which was simply his own oppression become repressive, that is to say, reactualised and trying to transcend the violence of the Other, in other words his own violence in the Other."
--"Racism and Colonialism as Praxis and Process" in Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960)
In other words, the 'violence' that the Afrikaaners see in the singing of such songs is not just a veiled fear that these will initiate a certain call to arms. It is also a form of humiliation: a symbol of the counter-violence that had to be acceded to by the natives because they were pushed by violent means to ever-more marginalized status by colonialists. And it is the same dialectical violence: thrust and counter-thrust. What they have begun has come back to haunt them: the violence that they are experiencing is the same violence dished out through decades of repression. But is it right to 're-open old wounds'?
Well from my experience, these wounds are anything but old. Racism and discrimination still exist on a very large scale in South Africa; people have just learned to 'bottle it', i.e. it has become internalized. But the truth is that whatever is bottled often comes out in the heat of emotion, and the fall-out from apartheid is a topsy-turvy situation of thrust and counter-thrust: whites argue that blacks are taking advantage of their 'newfound equality', blacks claim that these objections by whites is a veiled attempt to perpetuate inequality, oppression, and racism (and the coloureds sit in the middle, lashing out at both sides and believing that since the situation was flipped on its head, they've gone from the middle of the old system to the middle of the new system, basically remaining completely ignored). The externalization of such racism in the singing of such songs has become a major taboo, because it is symbolic of the precarious socio-political position that the people of South Africa find themselves in. It is akin to a truce in which each side is still wearing the scars of history, and always have their arsenal of weapons at the ready in case 'someone' should break the ceasefire.
It is true that as a nation, South Africa needs to move on, but all African nations need to move on, and that is not really possible while they are still being oppressed in violent ways. Just because the violence is now economic rather than physical it makes no difference: "Repression is repression, no matter who does it [or, for that matter, how it's done], and it's got certain consequences, irrespective of the ethnic origins of those who are practicing undemocratic measures" (Ngugi wa Thiong'o). And what is violence? According to one definition on dictionary.com: "an unjust or unwarranted exertion of force or power, as against rights or laws: to take over a government by violence." When you change the type of power (economic instead of feudal), you equally change the definition of violence.
The bottom line is that things like the UN Charter of Rights and Freedoms basically make it illegal for the oppressed to meet violence with violence. As explained earlier (6th paragraph), the violence that the colonialists used before was feudal violence using superior weapons; if African natives wish to use feudal violence to counteract this problem, as they are now more able to do so (look at the weapons that the Libyan government has: the models may be outdated, but the weapons themselves are still modern enough), the rules have already been changed and feudal violence is no longer allowed. Instead, economic violence through superior capital is being used to undermine nations by establishing monopolies and oligopolies, assimilating or driving small-market competitors, etc. out of business, until the point where these corporate consortiums can charge whatever they want.
If people don't believe me, they can look at an article written about the economic downfall of the Goulart government that I came across:
"Although the Brazilian industrial and commercial entrepreneurs publically announced several times that they were prepared to assist the government as much as they could to control inflation, they actually used the power they had to speculate and to rise disproportionally the prices of their goods, passing along the stabilization costs to the customers. In a meeting promoted by the Association of Commerce of Sao Paulo at the end of 1962, for instance, this issue of speculating as well as transmitting and even anticipating increasing output costs to prices was raised by a member of the Association, who wanted to denounce to the press those firms that did not respect the agreement made with the government. Nevertheless, one of the most important and affluent commerce leaders in Sao Paulo, Nivaldo Ulhoa Cintra, who was also attending the meeting, opposed drastically to that proposal. Nivaldo pointed out that the Association of Commerce could not release a public statement recognizing that its members were increasing disproportionally the prices of their goods, contributing to the mounting inflation. This would be an issue, according to him, which should be discussed within the “walls of the Association”, but not out of them.
--Felipe Pereira Loureiro "Economic Policy and Social Actors: The governments of Janio Quadros and Joao Goulart in Brazil (1961-64)."
That may have been decades ago, but we can see that this sort of thing goes on by looking within South Africa itself at the recent bread-fixing scandal:
"The commission's investigation established that between 1995 and 2006, Premier Foods, Tiger Brands, Pioneer Foods and Foodcorp were involved in price fixing and market allocation. The commission found that they held telephonic discussions and meetings where they directly fixed the selling price of bread; directly fixed the dates when such agreed price increases would be effective [drastically raised in tandem during the holiday season]; and divided markets by allocating territories where each firm would be the only one operating a bakery in a particular territory and supply all distributors in the allocated area."
And what does all this have to do with Reggae? Well a couple of days ago I watched Marre's 'Roots, Rock, Reggae' documentary: "An extraordinary year for Reggae music, captured live in this award-winning film. Roots Rock Reggae was the first in-depth documentary about Reggae music in Jamaica and looks at the social and political importance of this 'cry of the people'." When does a 'cry of the people' become outdated? I would argue that it becomes so when the suffering that has necessitated this cry becomes outdated.
Does this mean that I support Malema's position? No. Because the suffering that has necessitated this cry HAS become outdated. "You are rich because you are white and you are white because you are rich," as Fanon wrote in The Wretched of the Earth, is no longer a valid claim. Although it is true that the roots of economic power still lie with the whites, this is the 'old money' and there is becoming more and more 'new money' that is showing up in the form of rich blacks, and that group includes you, Mr. Malema (note how he predictably turns it into a race issue: "The problem with you is that when an African child is emerging and becoming successful, that is when you have a problem"). Hypocrites, one might call them, 'walking left and talking right' as it were, though this was predicted by Fanon in the chapter "Pitfalls of National Consciousness": "The ministers, the members of the cabinet, the ambassadors and local commissioners are chosen from the same ethnological group as the leader, sometimes directly from his own family. Such regimes of the family sort seem to go back to the old laws of inbreeding, and not anger but shame is felt when we are faced with such stupidity, such an imposture, such intellectual and spiritual poverty. These heads of the government are the true traitors in Africa, for they sell their country to the most terrifying of its enemies: stupidity." So there is now no longer a major racial component because there is no longer an equivalence between race and economic class. If they changed it to 'Shoot the Rich (Especially Hypocritical) Assholes', then I would applaud.
But then Malema would have a real dilemma on his hands...
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