Roots Republic

Legless language
By: Ross Farley

It is helpful that a country like South Africa, with its ongoing history of sensitive race relations and maturing politics, has such a colourful and accessible national lexicon. Great local words like “Mampara” or “snot-klap” are often used by people across the racial divide in a tenderly mocking yet harmless context. Such words or expressions are one of the simple yet over-looked links of people throughout the country. It is therefore searingly distressing that a selection of South Africa’s youth leaders began to adopt language in 2008 that, apart from being divisive, was unnecessarily combative. Through that language, they exhibited at best an ignorance and at worst a disdain for some of Africa’s harshest historical lessons.

The festivities began in June 2008, when ANC Youth League leader Julias Malema addressed a gathering of ANC youth league supporters in Bloemfontein. His statement “We are prepared to die for Zuma. We are prepared to take up arms and kill for Zuma” certainly caught the country's attention. The media swarmed over Malema like jackals to a carcass demanding an explanation and retraction. Malema initially justified his comments by stating that "My statements that I will kill for Zuma were meant to demonstrate our love and passion for Zuma”. Jeez buddy … I would’ve thought some soft music, your slinkiest pyjamas and a bubble bath would have achieved the same result. Perhaps Malema realised that Zuma has four wives with a fifth in the pipeline and that a more radical strategy was needed to capture Zuma’s affections.

Following the incident, Malema was warned by the South African Human Rights Commission to withdraw the comments under threat of litigation. He didn’t retract the statements, but a compromise was reached when Malema agreed to not use the word “kill” in public again. Shortly thereafter, Malema displayed the political nous pervasive in our youth leadership by dusting off his old thesaurus - last seen standing in as a standard one soccer goal post - and firing back with the statement: “We are prepared to eliminate for Jacob Zuma”. Eish!

The latter half of 2008 saw Jason Mkhwane, an ANC Youth League leader in the Vaal Sedibeng region, announce to the Al Jazeera news network that “People like Terror Lekota and these people who want to destroy the history of the organization (ANC) these people behave like cockroaches and must be destroyed”. In seeking an explanation of the use of the word “destroy” the media were advised by the Vaal Sedibeng branch secretary Themba Ndaba that “We must kill them.”

On further explanation it became clear that neither Mkhwane nor Ndaba actually meant the literal killing of the opposition, but were in fact referring to an electoral “killing”. Mkhwane further explained himself by stating that English is not his first language and that he should be forgiven for his inexperienced use of it … Mkhwane holds a degree in logistics form the Vaal University of Technology. Unless said degree is comprised of the study of textbooks with popup pictures and nice colouring-in areas, Mkhwane's explanation is about as shallow and poorly considered as his initial comments. South Africans would be far more amenable to threats to destroy Australian cricket commentators or the VIP protection units who speed dangerously down our emergency lanes while transporting important personnel such as the MEC for shoelaces.

The majority of the population, regardless of literacy or news access, are incredibly aware of how words like “cockroach” were cultivated and exploited in 1994 by the Rwandan Hutu rebels in their slaughter of over 400 000 Tutsis. That not just a leader, but an African leader, can be so insensitive to the machinery of language, which lead to one of the continents most shameful and acutely disturbing scars is unforgivable. If these youth leader’s ideas and vocabularies are so impoverished that they have to resort to language with such a painful frame of reference, then they should not be given any leadership role. Instead, they should be forced to sit and digest the images of the Rwandan genocide over and over again.

What’s most distressing about the unnecessary language used by the ANC Youth League is exactly that it’s unnecessary; the ANC have a majority in Parliament. In addition, they have achieved increased voter support in every election since 1994. There is no war to be fought and no enemy to be vanquished. We are a stable and successful democracy that has based itself on tolerance and the acceptance of ideas, regardless of whether those ideas support or oppose ones own. The ANC have indicated to the public that the Youth League is an independent body whose policies and ideas are their own. Surely, the ANC, as the senior body, must stem the tide of this combative rhetoric. If they are struggling to find the right words to temper their youth league, perhaps they should ask Julias to lend them his thesaurus.