Maureen Isaacson
A monument should be built for liberation songs and it should have its own precinct.
This is according to Wally Mongane Serote, the poet, author and former MK soldier testifying in the hate speech trial in the Johannesburg High Court against ANC Youth League President Julius Malema this week.
Defending Malema – who was charged by Afriforum, an Afrikaner minority group, for singing certain lines of the song Dubulu ’ibhunu(Kill the Boer) – Serote said the songs were “as important as the Voortrekker monument”, kept “as a memory even after apartheid”.
The precinct should be built between this monument and Freedom Park, which houses the memory of the struggle for democracy.
Serote, Freedom Park’s recent CEO, called for tolerance of the past, “including versions of the past that make us feel uncomfortable.” He said “no harm” was intended by the songs.
Serote told The Sunday Independent that whites expressing “unfounded fears” about Malema simply needed to educate themselves. He said: “…Julius is a young man and thank God he is a young man in the ANC.”
Serote described the evolution of his own radical politics. “As a young man coming out of Alexandra township, I wanted to kill white people until I joined the ANC (in 1969), which taught me the principle of non-racialism.”
He characterised the songs as “heritage, an important part of history.” What Afriforum considered “objectionable utterances”, (the chorus, “shoot the boer”) were “not intended to advocate hatred”, not linked to the escalating number of farm killings, which were “nothing but criminal and barbaric acts”.
Among the elders supporting Malema, Serote stood out. His acclaimed body of literary work reveals that he has experienced several personal metaphysical transformations.
Serote has probed life in the MK camps, and relationships between men and women there, in his novel Scatter the Ashes and Go(2002). He has himself undergone the study of traditional healing and, during this week’s high profile trial, he was an articulate ambassador for the symbolic and poetic legacy of the ANC’s liberation songs.
Ibhulu or ibhunu in the context of the song symbolised white oppression and did not target individuals. The songs, which had their origins in oral culture, were a source of memorialising, entertainment and inspiration.
“In a country where the majority do not read and write, it became a means for them to have a voice. But it was important to understand that when soldiers took up arms to sing a song like Dubulu ’ibhunu(Kill the Farmer) it was in the knowledge that MK was “a sabotage army, precisely because we did not want our country to get into a quagmire of racial war. We were trained to defend civilians and no MK soldier was to attack people because they were white, spoke Afrikaans or because of ethnicity.”
In 1993 after Chris Hani’s assassination, Peter Mokaba, then ANCYL president and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela sang Kill the Farmer for the first time – in English – in Khayelitsha, in the Eastern Cape. The country was on tenterhooks in anticipation of the first democratic elections.
On April 22, 1993, the South African Press Agency quoted Mokaba as saying: “The government can go to hell if it intends charging myself and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela for inciting violence by chanting… ”Mokaba told students in Soshanguve: “The youth should prepare for war and lay their hands on those who killed SACP leader Chris Hani.”
Cyril Ramaphosa, then ANC Secretary General, said Mokaba’s personal view did not represent the views of the ANC.
Serote said, “I don’t know why people don’t understand that when Hani, our fine leader, was killed, nothing happened, not one white person died.” He wants it understood that “…colour does not matter, many white people were mobilised without choice to be under apartheid. A minority of minorities put the Nationalist Party into power. I am not saying white people did not benefit from it – they did and we should remind ourselves of it.
“AfriForum is a white supremacist minority of minorities, still trying to cling to a past that will never come back.”