No DA response to Malema’s Indian rant

In an amoral description of the EFF’s four-year anniversary celebrations, typical of a widespread and relativistic infatuation with the party, Richard Poplak gave Julius Malema’s various comments about Indian South Africans no more than one line in passing, before moving on.

He wrote for the Daily Maverick, “He endorsed the evergreen slogan ‘white monopoly capital’; he decried its appropriation by Bell Pottinger and their idiot mimics; he insisted that ‘Indian monopoly capital’ in KZN had to fall. And so it went.”

This is how much of the press reports on Malema.

“Juju at his fiery finest at EFF birthday bash,” read the relevant TimesLIVE headline on the occasion. Note the familiar nickname, as if Malema is a personal friend of the paper, and how his racist, inflammatory rhetoric is reduced to a kind of entertainment, and good fun at that. The man is a charmer, and even his hate is endearing.

Here is a fuller explosion of what Malema had to say about Indians, during his speech: “Here, in Durban, here in KwaZulu-Natal, everything strategic is given to Indian families. Everything, big tender, is given to Indian families. They are the ones who are owning strategic things here, in KwaZulu-Natal. We don’t have a problem, we are saying to them, ‘share, with our people’. We also want to call upon our fellow Indians, here in Natal, to respect Africans. They are ill-treating them. They are treating them worse than Afrikaners . We don’t want that to continue, here in Natal. This is not anti-Indian statement. It’s the truth.

“If we tell whites the truth, if we tell blacks the truth, we can as well tell Indians the truth. They must treat our people properly, here in KwaZulu-Natal”.

To end off, Malema added a fleeting disclaimer, something along the lines of, if the shoe fits, beware. Only to be followed by the inevitable EFF-style contradiction that “we must fight racism”.

Now, this is racial fear-mongering of the first order. One would describe it as xenophobic if it didn’t apply to South African citizens. But then that is the point when it comes to Malema, only black South Africans are legitimate citizens. Minorities are visitors here and “visitors must behave”, as Malema has said before. If the EFF does ever control a government, it won’t be a South African government. It will be a racial cabal. He does not see people as individuals but some generic replica of a racial archetype that exists in his head.

If Mmusi Maimane said any of this it would be the end of his career. The media would turn on him like pack hounds. But, hey, it’s Malema. What a feisty fellow he is.

One is loathe to evoke Germany, but the world has seen these arguments before. “The rich Jews, stealing German jobs, mistreating the German people, operating a hidden network of influence to their own benefit, overly protected and pampered by the powers that be. Visitors, who had been indulged too long.”

But Malema can get away with this sort of demonising because he uses race as a proxy, and in SA nothing shields bigotry from public condemnation more effectively than race. We cannot see beyond it.

The Gupta family’s influence on President Jacob Zuma has seen a rise in anti-Indian sentiment. It is perhaps on the margins, but it is there. And Malema – who is finely tuned to any and all racial demagoguery – has quickly understood there is a rich vein of stereotyping on which to capitalise as he seeks to augment his particular brand of racial essentialism. It is, for him, the perfect weapon, especially in KwaZulu-Natal where the EFF is desperate to gain a meaningful foothold. Every racial nationalist needs an enemy, nationally the EFF has white South Africans, in KwaZulu-Natal it now has Indians.

The truth is for a person ostensibly so concerned with Marxism and the values of class analysis, Malema does not subscribe to it at all. The Indian industrialist, the housewife, the entrepreneur, the factory and blue-collar workers, the unemployed students – a whole race reduced to shopowners. And what of the virtues often applicable to the Indian community as a generally tightly knit, socially cohesive, productive group? Do they have none? Certainly none Malema is willing to identify.

He is perfectly happy to play the Indian stereotype card at a national level. At the Judicial Service Commission, while interviewing for vacancies on the bench in 2015, Malema would raise “The Indian Question”.

Malema says he is a truth teller. But here is what he reportedly said about Indians in 2011: “Bana ba lena ba tshwanetše ba dumelelwe gore ba tsene sekolo le bana ba makula mona ” No doubt you can quibble over the exact translation of “makula”. Whatever your final interpretation, it is a racial slur. That’s his real truth.

And don’t think Malema is vaguely consistent on the subject either. Today he defends Pravin Gordhan because it suits his anti-Zuma agenda. Before, when he was being pursued by the South African Revenue Service (SARS), he said, “I’m subjected to political persecution by political leadership led by Pravin , with his group of Indians.”

It is a particularly cowardly assault because, despite Malema’s insistence otherwise, Indian South Africans, even less so than coloured South Africans, have no real political home.

A tiny minority, Indian South Africans are traditionally split between the DA and the ANC, and are routinely excised from the national debate almost entirely.

We speak for the most part of “black” and “white”. That is the essentialist, binary grand South African debate. It is as if they don’t exist at all and any issues particular to the Indian community are inevitably subsumed by far more powerful racial narratives. That is, unless you need an enemy. Recently, the DA has proven to be a more favourable home than the ANC, and it is fair to say the majority of Indians now support the party. They must wonder why. The DA has been completely and utterly silent on Malema’s assault. Even in KwaZulu-Natal, its provincial leadership had nothing to say. The DA KwaZulu-Natal’s homepage contains no response. It is an indictment of the DA from one end to another.

If this is the price the DA is willing to pay for co-operation with the EFF, it is a deeply disturbing one. Morals aside, it is just bad politics. Indian voters are a core part of the DA’s constituency in KwaZulu-Natal, so if the DA doesn’t have their back, then who does? And besides, does the DA not realise Malema was accusing the party of being captured by Indian self-interest, that it was “in the pocket” of Indian families? Basically, like the rest of SA, the DA assumes Indian South Africans are not a legitimate part of our society and their concerns, not as serious as those of other minorities.

This is a party that goes into apoplectic spasms about racism inside the DA, imagined and otherwise. But nothing with regard to its own constituents. Co-operation seems to have bought the EFF bullying rights, and it can now abuse and taunt the DA’s constituency without repercussions. Racism and prejudice should be condemned and dealt with wherever it occurs. But when you set race groups up against each other, like Malema so effortlessly does, you create conflict far quicker than you arrest it.

The EFF is a destructive force on this front. It works by stoking fear and driving division. It has no interest in reconciliation. It does not see SA as a country, but as a civil war. And peace is not on its agenda.

It is no doubt captivating to watch Malema at his “fiery finest”, but if that is how you go about describing this sort of divisiveness as nothing more than entertainment, then you open the door to forces you will soon be unable to control.

Julius Malema has a particular problem with Indian South Africans. At its worst, it is expressed as outright bigotry; at its best, rampant stereotyping. But always it is designed to denigrate and malign. And always, it is to help define the imaginary enemy he and his party need to survive.

Malema has much of SA eating out his hands – his rhetoric has been reduced to gamesmanship, never taken at face value, and talked up as the charismatic charm of a miscreant. It’s all fun and games, until he wins power. Should that happen, you can be sure headlines like those delivered by TimesLIVE will be far less frequent. Then the game will have reached its endpoint. For those interested in the values of non-racialism, that is not a world you want to occupy.