But a year to the day after I had sat with him in that hotel foyer in Caracas, Malema was revelling in his new-found status. He had become a political hero as the villain in a hate speech trial that was initiated by AfriForum over his singing of the Struggle song Dubula iBhunu(Shoot the Boer).
And it was a court case that played right into his lap.
Like his political forebears, Malema finally had his day in court. It was an important moment for him and one that would give him the political legitimacy he lacked because the court plays a pivotal role in ANC Struggle and contemporary history. Until then he had no Struggle credentials, trading instead on the fact that his mother was a domestic worker. And now he was about to earn them, within the confines of a Johannesburg courtroom.
Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Oliver Tambo, Ahmed Kathrada, Govan Mbeki and a number of other “greats” of the Struggle era had come to prominence during the Rivonia Trial in the early 1960s when they were convicted of treason. And in taking on the white judiciary they had become martyrs in the eyes of the masses.
Jacob Zuma also had his day in court during a controversial rape trial that ironically made him a man of the people in peace-time South Africa. And it was by evading a second court case in 2009 on corruption charges that he came to power.
Then came Malema, who took the stand in a televised trial to defend his singing of a Struggle song, the outcome of which was unknown when this book went to print. A ruling to ban the song is unlikely. The song is a part of South African history, and history cannot be erased. But regardless of which way the scales might tip, he handled himself impeccably at the time.
He took the stand with confidence. His tone was calm, his argument coherent.
And not once did he allow his cage to be rattled, though he was afforded ample opportunity to vent some rage. In defending himself in that very high-profile trial, Malema not only became the custodian of ANC Struggle songs, but a hero in the eyes of millions. He was back in the saddle.
It gave him an extraordinary boost and it came at an extraordinary time. He was facing a re-election for the presidency of the ANCYL two months later and despite the popular image portrayed of him during that trial, Malema had his fair share of detractors within the ranks of the youth league by then. During his first term as president he had developed an intolerant and dictatorial style of rule. Those who weren’t with him were against him and were duly ousted from the organisation’s ranks. Hence, by the time the ANCYL conference was pencilled in for June 2011, there was an army of opponents who were preparing to take him on, rallying behind Lebogang Maile, the chairman of the league in Gauteng, who would challenge Malema for the position of president.
Malema’s court days made Maile’s challenge all the more difficult. For many folk, Malema had become much more than a leader of the youth.
He was a man of the people. He was ranked among his forebears now.
It all coincided with the campaign for the local government elections of May 2011 and Malema hit the campaign trail early on, knowing it would provide him with the platform he was looking for. He was building a particular profile and the publicity he was about to earn himself would go a long way. He wasn’t thinking about the youth league conference that would follow a month later. The hate speech trial had unwittingly sewn that one up for him.
He was thinking ahead to the end of 2012, the year of the ANC’s centenary, when the comrades would return to their roots, to Mangaung where the ANC was founded, to elect the next leadership.
His desire then is to unseat the leadership he had helped put in place in 2007 so that he can continue his march towards greater power. That’s where Malema’s mind was focused halfway through 2011 when he started out on the campaign trail.
Those local elections marked a shift in the thinking of the regular voters who for years had voted with their hearts, based on the emotional attachment that so many had had to the ANC, the party that had freed them from the shackles of apartheid, the liberation movement that actually gave them the vote. But 17 years on, the electorate was now looking for results. And if the ANC couldn’t provide them, then they would have to think twice. So Malema appealed to them with charm and talked to the masses in a way that no other politician did on that campaign trail. Not even Zuma.
Malema stole the show and he, more than Zuma, became the face of the ANC – the “new” ANC – during that month-long campaign. He even had many of the media on-side. They clapped him warmly on the back for a job well done, and there was not a whisper of the controversies they had been peddling not too long before that.
A month later he secured himself a second term as ANCYL president, by which time his chest was well and truly protruding with pride. It was a remarkable turn of events in the space of 12 months. Malema had come back against all the odds and despite enormous hostility. And he seemed unstoppable. He had Malema-ised South African politics to the extent that it appeared no one could bring him down. And he was still only 30 years of age.
But beneath that brash veneer was lurking a host of dark secrets about the wheeling and the dealing that had become his way of life. They were talked about and scorned upon but never trotted out as fact until one day in July when City Press broke a story about what it called Malema’s “secret slush fund”.
And that was it. In the days and weeks that followed, details of Malema’s money making occupied inches of the country’s newspaper columns, feeding an insatiable appetite amongst his enemies who were flocking to the fore.
It wasn’t looking at all good for the man who called himself “an economic freedom fighter”. But it will not alter the current state of play in any dramatic way either.
The interregnum will linger for a while yet as the events of 2012 have still to come upon us. Then the ANC is likely to enter another phase of its own transition and wherever it goes, it will take the country with it. Only time will tell whether Malema will appear on the front line, redefining the country’s politics in the way he likes to do.
As grim as his political future now looks, that doesn’t take away from his colourful past and conspicuous present, a tale in which is embedded the stories of a thousand other cadres who make up this “new” ANC.
Sarah Malema is sitting in the living room of her Seshego home, relaying her family’s history to me, when her cellphone begins to purr. But before the 81-year-old can reach into the front pocket of her patterned dress to retrieve the handset, the voice of Jacob Zuma begins to reverberate around the small room.
Umshini wami mshini wami
khawuleth’umshini wami
Umshini wami mshini wami
And on it goes, one bar after another, as the ANC president belts out the Zulu Struggle song he has claimed as his own and which the old woman, one of his ardent supporters, has saved as her ringtone.
She answers and chats briefly. Then, with a gentle nod in my direction, she picks up where she left off and tells me about the Malema family, in sePedi, one of the Northern Sotho languages which she speaks, but which I don’t, and which her daughter, Maropeng, and grandson, Tshepo, translate into English.
lAn Inconvenient Youth: Julius Malema and the ‘new’ ANC by Fiona Forde is published by Picador Africa