Journal of African Cultural Studies, 2015

Vol. 27, No. 3, 326341, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13696815.2015.1035701

Song, identity and the state: Julius Malemas Dubul ibhunu song as
catalyst
Liz Gunnerab*
a
Centre for Anthropological Research (CfAR), University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa;
b
Department of the Languages and Cultures of Africa, SOAS, University of London, London, UK

This article tracks the entry of Julius Malema and his package of skills as a political persona
into the South African public domain. It focuses on his use of song, particularly the Dubul
ibhunu song/chant within the public space and links it to a long tradition of political song. It
sets this within a wider context of the aesthetics of power in the postcolony and within older
epistemes of performance, language and power. It also discusses the media as both actor and
acted upon in relation to Malema. It links the topic of power, rhetoric and its use to inter-
generational politics, and to the struggle of youth and the marginalized poor against an
entrenched gerontocratic elite.
Keywords: political song; Julius Malema; radical populism; language; power; youth

He would himself at times break his speech after making a point about the scarcity of land for Afri-
cans, and lead the assembly in the freedom song: Thina Sizwe Esinsundu; Sikhalela izwe lethu;
Elathathwa Abamhlophe; [M]abayeke umhlaba wethu. [We the black nation mourn for our land
which was taken by the whites; They must leave our land alone!] The songs of course were not
part of the prepared address. What a pity! (Yengwa 1970 commentary on Chief Albert Luthulis
speech ANC National Conference, King Williamstown, South Africa, June 1953)

Introduction: absence and presence

The singer of the lines quoted above is Chief Albert Luthuli, and the occasion was the African
National Congress (ANC) National Conference of June 1953 in King Williamstown, one of
his last public appearances. Luthuli drove home his point about land and African dispossession
through one of the best known of all freedom songs: Thina sizwe esinsundu (We the black
nation). By inserting the song in the manuscript of Luthulis speeches, published three years
after his death, his chronicler, M.B. Yengwa, highlighted the place of song in political life in
South Africa. At the same time, he mourned its absence from most official documents and
from the Chiefs written speech itself.
Part of the argument of my paper is that song as substance frequently has cogent political
points to make, which are folded in to rhetoric and oratory, or may be free standing. Yet, as an
expressive form within a wider text, it is often erased from the records. In the above case, we
have a rare glimpse of song and a prepared speech working together both dealing with the
burning question of land, in 1953 in South Africa in the apartheid era.

*Emails: lgunner@uj.ac.za; lizmbali2@gmail.com

2015 Journal of African Cultural Studies

 Journal of African Cultural Studies 327

Struggle songs and freedom chants are widely acknowledged as crucial in resistance during
apartheid, yet little has been written about their public life. Do they help to drive an argument, to
state or counter a widely held position and lay out another option for action or debate? Do they
sustain and give courage at difficult moments? Do they help a person think through their own
political positions, make their own speeches coherent? (Hart 2013, 5658) Do they do all of
these things at different political junctures, in a variety of nuanced ways? Do song and its
linked performative repertoires have an important role in the working out of larger political nar-
ratives? These are questions I attempt to answer in this paper. I do so through tracing Julius
Malemas use of song, in particular dubul ibhunu, in the terrain of South African politics. I
set this in relation to Jacob Zumas earlier re-introduction of the practice of song as discourse
in the public sphere through his use of the song, Umshini wami, at a time of crisis in his own pol-
itical career (Gunner 2009).
I show how Malema both learnt from, but radically departed from, Jacob Zumas embrace of
song. I consider how important song has been in his shaping of a new radical political style and
stance. You could call this style a new political narrative, a position spelt out in the 2014 book The
Coming Revolution (TCR) (Shivambu 2014). He has used song to articulate key policies, break
with the ruling ANC and stake out a new role for himself and the party he formed, the Economic
Freedom Fighters (EFF). The songs, part of his radical, populist style, showed that political song
is not the captive of a particular regime or a specific ideology. Nor is political song necessarily
song with a specific genealogy or genre. It can come from a variety of cultural and transcultural
sources. Jacob Zumas Umshini wami has links with the style of Zulu amahubo (war songs), but
often, struggle songs such as the famous Thina sizwe sung by Chief Luthuli in 1953 have their
roots in a variety of Christian hymn styles. Political song can also be drawn from genres of
popular song and be made political by its context or its words. Consider, for instance, the Brazi-
lian song O Bebado e a Equilibrista (The Drunk and the Tightrope Walker) sung in 1979 by Elis
Regina as part of the popular movement calling for the amnesty of political prisoners and exiled
academics and activists during the years of the Brazilian military dictatorship (19641985)
(Engler 2015). As in the latter example, a song can be instrumental in initiating dialogue
between subject and state, or dialogue between a subaltern political party or popular movement,
and the regime in power.
In what follows, I outline evidence of the organic, embodied role that political song has played
in the making of political discourse in South Africa. A political event 61 years after Chief Luthu-
lis speech, namely the huge meeting to launch the election manifesto of the EFF led by Julius
Malema has, I argue, many links with the 1953 meeting in King Williamstown. The rst link
is the focus on land and dispossession which drove the Luthuli speech and which also
powered the amboyant display of song, razzmatazz and political daring at the EFF election
manifesto launch in Johannesburg on 22 February 2014 in Tembisa. Second is the place of
song in the political grammar of each event, although their expression and performance may
have been significantly different. Both political moments saw song entwined with the deeper
public meaning of the total event. Each was true to the ethos of its time but also exploited
song to make meaning and engage in dialogue with a difficult power, the state.
Chief Luthulis Thina sizwe esinsundu (We the black nation) song/statement in 1953, with its
symbolic and material claims for izwe lethu (our land), may well have been part of a wider shift in
the 1950s towards militant self-assertion which was exhibited by other musical compositions
with a vigorous public life in that era (Gilbert 2007, 426; Joloasho 2014). South African political
song has usually been in Zulu or Xhosa but is often also in the Sotho/Tswana group, as is the case
with some of the songs below.
The EFF event of 22 February 2014 in some ways could not have been more different from its
1953 counterpart. It took place in a democratized South Africa, almost 25 years after the April 1990
328 L. Gunner

elections which marked the end of the apartheid era. It was held not at the periphery of political
power in terms of place like the ANC meeting of 1953, but close to its centre in the populous
city of Johannesburg. Its amboyant political spectacle was in part reminiscent of the performance
events in South Africa in the 1980s (see below); it also echoed in its style the recent top-down pol-
itical galas of Zimbabwe with their meshing of liberation and new nationalism, which has been
termed the third Chimurenga (Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Willems 2010).
At the February EFF election manifesto launch in Tembisa, and at the rally in Atteridgeville,
Pretoria, days before the May 2014 election, song was prominent. One which was sung many
times was neither new nor very old. It was a bouncy Afro-pop-style song used by the ANC
Youth League (ANCYL) and by South African Students Congress Organisation (SASCO) but
now it was adopted by the EFF with a new subject:

Malema o tshela thupa Malema will wield the stick

Thupa oa e bona thupa The stick, do you see the stick?
Thupa e yetla The beating is coming
Thupa oa e bona thupa The beating do you see the beating [coming]?

In the Atteridgeville event, the song boomed out across the stadium, with backing by DJ Chance.
Those present, with their EFF shirts and red berets, sang along with him, some miming a beating
move with a ick of their hand. The nal rendering was accompanied by motor bikes zooming
round the track, and the presence of a screen with ashing lights. At both rallies (as with the
Luthuli moment some 60 years before), there was a sense of song uniting a gathering and
being part of a moment of political deance. The song was making a statement about the inade-
quacies of President Jacob Zuma and his ANC government. Its beating promised a victory to
come for the EFF and a hiding for the ANC. The song as metonym stood for the deant presence
of youth in an African gerontocracy, a recurrent trope in African political song on the continent
(see Schumann 2012). It marked a moment of rupture with a political elite viewed as corrupt, and
its stale nationalist politics.
My broader argument is that political song has been widely acknowledged, and visually
documented (Hirsch 2002), as a presence in South African political life, but with little analysis
of its morphology within the larger discourse of the political at any given time (but see Gilbert
2007; Ramoupi 2013). In a wider context, Victor Turners work on ritual and power (1969) and
Achille Mbembes assertion of the aesthetics of power in the African postcolony (1992, 2001)
each stresses how culture operates within the political. Gramsci also reminds us of the pivotal
role of culture in the reproduction of power (1971) and Clifford Geertz argues for a set of sym-
bolic forms whose reproduction ensures the validity of a ruling political elite (1983, 124 in
Furniss and Gunner [1995] 2008). None of these positions, except Mbembes, allows suffi-
ciently for rupture and remix: that is the use of some symbolic forms and the infusion of
new ones where a new political centre vies with an older one. Even a focus on the aesthetics
of power, which Mbembe urges, needs to be qualified. He presents state and subject locked in a
carnivalesque dance of mutual necessity and self-preservation, with no possibility of dialogue
and progression. Mikael Karlstrm modifies this position by arguing for a move from the
state-centred locus of Mbembe to one of dialogue from the point of view of the ruled
subject. Then, states Karlstrm, the possibility for a dialogue with movement between subject
and state becomes a reality (2003).
In the case to hand, song assisted Malema in his dialogue with the state. It helped him to carve
out new positions vis--vis economic policy and the urgent question of the poor and the margin-
alized, who were often the youth. Also the initial focus on the dubul ibhunu song meant that
Malema was reconnecting with the deep stream of performance politics that ran like a current
at times unheeded through national life (Bozzoli 2004; Dhlomo [1939] 1977).
 Journal of African Cultural Studies 329

Political song on display and in praxis

I outline below the presence of political song at moments in South Africas recent history. I do so
in order to show that Malemas use of song, like Zumas, was true to a wider articulation of pol-
itical ideas and practice where ideas, song and kinds of performance could all work together to
make political sense, and create political constituencies. Gillian Hart has made this point well
in her comments on Jacob Zumas mastery of big imbizos (i.e. izimbizo, gatherings) in
country districts such as Bergville, in KwaZulu-Natal in the early 2000s (2013, 203).
How music, poetry and song came to be recognized internationally as important in the
struggle against apartheid has been well documented by Gilbert (2007). Through the forming
of the cultural groups, the Mayibuye Cultural Ensemble (19751980), and then the Amandla Cul-
tural Ensemble (c. 19781990) international supporters of the anti-apartheid struggle gained
understanding of how resistance was enacted, and freedom imagined, by those inside the
country or fighting from exile. Both these groups highlighted aspects of how song represented,
memorialized and gave reality to the ongoing struggle for freedom in peoples daily lives. Yet,
vital as the role of culture was for the ANC in exile, it was seen by those in command as some-
thing to be controlled. Even the expression of culture as a weapon of struggle imparted the idea
that culture could be made to do certain things and stopped from other things. Likewise, the
intervention by Albie Sachs and the debates it sparked (De Kok and Press 1990) left open the
important questions with which Gilbert ends her discussion on culture and the exile show-case
groups: Did culture ever achieve equal status with real political work? (441). Was song, there-
fore, part of the unreal presence of culture, elusive, hard to pin down, undervalued and, in some
senses, unreliable?
Within South Africa, as resistance in the 1970s and 1980s followed the repression of the
1960s, the public role of culture in the imagining of a new era was alive though patchily docu-
mented. Even towards the end of the repressive 1960s, political song as a resource for conscious-
ness, memory and resistance surfaced occasionally in the public domain. The funeral of Chief
Albert Luthuli in July 1967 in Groutville was one such moment, when the paper Ilanga (the
Sun) reported that:
Women dressed in the black skirts and green shirts, and men wearing the khaki clothes and black
berets (the uniform of Congress) accompanied Mr Luthuli, singing the time-honoured songs and
chanting its slogans. This was the rst time that Congress had shown itself in the community in
such a public way since its banning seven years ago. (Ilanga 5 August 1967 authors translation)
Clearly, the time-honoured songs and slogans of Congress, ngezingoma nezaga ezindala zika-
Khongolose, were part of the fabric of institutional and personal belonging of the ANC. They
were expressed in defiance of the harsh repression of the era and once more linked culture and
power (Gunner 2012).
As the militant youth radicalism of the late 1970s after the 1976 Soweto Uprising spread, so
too did the appetite for songs as vehicles for knowledge and solidarity. Yet, documentary evidence
for the presence of struggle songs as part of the new political culture, that elaborated the principles
of non-collaborationism with government institutions from the beginning of the 1980s, was scant
(Swilling 1987, 5). The songs circulated as part of popular culture and resistant knowledge which
crossed and re-crossed the countrys porous northern borders. Songs also circulated through cas-
settes and were considered so dangerous that possession could lead to a jail sentence. Gilbert
notes that the ANC journal Rixaka, 2, in 1986 reported a five-year jail sentence for Derek
Tsietsi Makomoreng for possessing a cassette of the music of the group Amandla (2007, 438)
(and see Botiveau 2007). Political song was an element in a bundle of items which made up a
performative grammar of knowing and doing which sustained communities and the individual
(Kavanagh 1985; Penfold 2013; Peterson 1994; Sitas 1994).
330 L. Gunner

Contrasts: song and two funerals: 1986, 2002

Youth, sacrice and a militant nationalism dened the performances of the 1980s and early 1990s.
The archived transcription of the United Democratic Front (UDF)-led funeral of the young ANC
guerrilla, Thanduxolo Mbethe in Uitenhage in the Eastern Cape in March 1986 (Gerhart and
Glaser 2010, 422429) gives insights into moments of community resistance in those parts of
the country where the UDF had afliates. Songs, oratory and religious fervour all combined to
make emotion-fraught political performances (98). Notably, we see included below a version
of the song later taken up by Julius Malema. Successive speakers envisage a free society, with
equal opportunities for education, and draw on the image, widely used across Africa in the
earlier pre-independence era, of blood watering the tree of liberation, and calling up the poetic
language of martyrs. The ery priest calls for no quarter:
This body which is here today is the shadow of God Our children are being shot every day, but we
will shoot their children too.
The songs, in Xhosa, are for Tambo, and for Mandela. Also sung is (what translates as):
Shoot guerrilla shoot (repeated 3 times)
Shoot, shoot (repeated many times) (427)
Included too is a version of the We will leave our parents (Sizobashiya abazali) song, which at
the time had pride of place both inside the country, in the MK camps, and on the cultural inter-
national circuit described by Gilbert (2007) (Sobashiya abazali (Amandla group, two males
singing) available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dD0SijyphO8). The place of the
songs and of the poet (423) in the memorial and inspirational language of this particular
funeral was exemplary of the grammar of many such events at this period. It was part of a nar-
rative which was utopian and nationalist. And one in which youth featured frequently as primary
actors.
A second funeral, set in May 2002 during the presidency of Thabo Mbeki, might at rst glance
seem remarkably similar to the 1986 event. This was the funeral in Bisho, in the Eastern Cape, of
Steve Tshwete. He was hugely popular. He had been a minister in the cabinets of both Nelson
Mandela and Thabo Mbeki, a survivor of the rst Umkhonto we Sizwe guerrilla offensive in
19611965 and Border Region leader of the UDF (Swilling 6). Bisho stadium reverberated
with song, toyi-toyi and imbongis (praise singers) noted Mawande Jack of City Press:
[President] Mbeki had been ushered to the podium by Deputy Vice-President Jacob Zuma, a gifted
singer (who) expressed his grief with a moving song describing the lament of a fallen hero: Liham-
bile iqhawe lamaqhawe! Hamba kahle we qhawe lamaqhawe. (City Press, Mawande Jack, 5 May
2002)
Here, the voices of youth which dominated the public stage of the 1980s have given way to those
of the older leaders of the new era. A hierarchy of age and power now presided: On the stage, sat
former President Nelson Mandela, Deputy President Jacob Zuma and President Thabo Mbeki.
Mbekis poetic funeral oratory which left hundreds in tears, included the line Silent tears of
despair have watered our cheeks and our motherland, an image which replaced the one of the
blood watering the African tree of liberation of the 1980s funeral.
In the stadium, the songs as part of the language of mourning, memorializing and celebration,
had plenty of space. Jack noted the energy of the crowds and the songs:
Frenzied crowds in colourful green, gold and black regalia electried the stadium by chanting liber-
ation struggle songs which told of the great sacrices Tshwete as former UDF Border president, and
ANC national organizer, had made. At times it was difcult for organizers to hold the excited crowds
at bay and the khaki-clad ANC marshals were kept busy maintaining the dignity of the funeral.
 Journal of African Cultural Studies 331

We can see here a number of points about how song was working in the new state. First, it was
somewhat unruly and second, perhaps, anachronistic, looking to the past. There was a tension.
This is well caught in Jacks capturing of the overwrought nature of the frenzied crowds chant-
ing liberation struggle songs (my italics) and the difficulties of the khaki-clad ANC marshals in
maintaining control. Song as embodied discourse was within a state which was not sure how to
manage it. It was, perhaps, in limbo. Yet, Jacob Zumas song of mourning, highlighted by Jack,
gave a formal place to song. Zuma was to build on this in the time after May 2002 in a number of
events besides his dramatic 2005 entry with Umshini wami. In doing so, he was being true to a
tradition of song within the liberation struggle. However, later events showed the limitations of
what Zuma was able to achieve through song.
It was this conguration of power and its modes of rhetoric, one tied to a backward-looking
nationalism, which Julius Malema set out to change. He did so through a new foregrounding of
political song, as part of a battle to challenge the power of the elders, and of their right to own and
reproduce the struggle past and through this the future. He did so amidst rising poverty and a
restive and disillusioned youth. There was also an increasing sense of media and digital power,
of sounds, words and images which circulated within and beyond the countrys borders at light-
ning speed. All this marked the times. I explore in the next section Julius Malemas political
vision, which foregrounded a new push on land reform, a radical economic policy, and I show
how song was a central component of his strategy.

Zumas apprentice?
Malemas use of the song for which he gained publicity, and even notoriety, in 2011 must be seen
in the context of a tradition of public performance where the actor or actors concerned have the
specic purpose of entering or initiating a public debate. There seems (in general) to have been a
space of public forgetfulness regarding the role of song, public performance and the making of the
political, which accumulated in post-1994 years. The focus on democratic centralism in the gov-
ernance of the new state (Hassim 2009a) may have brought on an erasure or a degree of amnesia
regarding the place established for myriad kinds of performance not as appendages of a historical
past, but as sites of public meaning, dialogue and dissent. In a rush to be politically modern,
some long-standing expressive forms seem to have been pushed out of view. They were,
perhaps, messy and inconvenient; African yet elusively or inconveniently so.
Malemas creation of his public persona comes in part from the continuation of a public space
of theatricality and the claiming of authority through acts of performance. These draw on estab-
lished and new repertoires which see the political and the performative as mutually reinforcing
features of the expression of modern political life. The praise poets and izimbongi, the Black Con-
sciousness poets such as Ingoapeli Madingoane, the trade union praise poets and the more literary
Soweto poets all testified to this role for the expressive in shaping political discourse and the
imagination of a national arena. Yet, was Malema with his spectacle-seeking use of the
dubul ibhunu song in 2010, and the highly publicized court case in 2011, simply copying
Jacob Zumas earlier recourse to political song and public judicial drama?
Malema had an intimate knowledge of how song worked within the political. An ANC activist
from an early age, and former SASCO leader, he was elected President of the ANCYL at the
chaotic April 2008 national conference at Mangaung. He became a public gure known far
beyond the ranks of the ANC and its supporters in the months leading up to the 2009 election
(Du Preez and Rossouw 2009, 12). His populist tactics which involved grabbing media headlines
through alarming public statements were unsettling yet intriguing. What was this young leader
hoping to achieve? Certainly it was publicity he sought, perhaps also notoriety, the dening of
a new type of rebellious political gure in an era of complacency and amnesia.
332 L. Gunner

Perhaps most of all it was a gesture to the grammar of deance embedded in much of the
arsenal of political song which had sustained those struggling for liberation over the long
decades of apartheid. Malema had been schooled from an early age in such songs and the
wider frame of reference within which they worked. ANC activists in Seshego, Malemas
home in Limpopo, conrmed that he could sing liberation songs and toyi-toyi before he went
to high school (Du Preez and Rossouw 2009, 10). More precisely, Malema has spoken of
how song, and struggle poetry were part of his political education. They were part of the repertoire
of imagining the meaning of liberation, and the texture of its language. Moreover, they were visc-
eral, somatic, suggesting the body in motion within community:
[W]e were attracted to the movement at the age of nine or so and rst we were attracted by the kind of
songs they sing and the energy they display when they sing those songs, so it was a bit exciting for a
child. But their songs sounded more like ZCC [Zion Christian Church] songs, which was the big
church, you know, in Limpopo and with that type of energy. (TCR 211)
Later in the same interview, he continues:
Ja, so, and then there was a guy who came from MK, [Umkhonto we Sizwe] called Freddie Rama-
phakela, who then started organising us as Young Pioneers and then started teaching us songs,
started teaching us poems I used to know those poems of Mzwakhe [Mbuli], I dont know them
anymore now. (TCR 212)
What this tells us is that in the turbulent transitional phase, the interregnum in South Africa of
the late 1980s and early 1990s, struggle songs were being passed on from an older to a younger
generation and they were seen as an important part of a political education. Besides this baptism in
the umbrella forms of song associated with political life in the ANC, Malema also went to the
funeral of Chris Hani in 1993 (Du Preez and Rossouw 2009). He thus witnessed one of the
great political spectacles of the dying apartheid era. All this played a part in his understanding
of politics as drama.

Not the apprentice

Malemas move from being Zumas apprentice to a more independent position took place in the
period after June 2008. It was particularly marked after the April 2009 election as it became clear
that President Zuma had no intention of tinkering with the neoliberal direction of the South
African economy. Exploiting the ANCYLs capacity for a degree of independent action, and
coupling this with political songs power to point to a key political issue, he sang the Dubul
ibhunu/Shoot the farmer/Boer song at the University of Johannesburgs Doornfontein campus,
in the inner-city, on March 2010 when addressing students as President of the ANCYL (Africa
Research Bulletin 19367/8). Malema was using political song to point to a burning issue in the
body politic, namely the slow moves towards restitution of land and the settlement of land
claims made by members of the black community in terms set out in the post-1994 constitution.
He was signalling his claim to a particular constituency, that of the youth and more widely to those
who were marginalized by the government. Land as a signifier of loss was crucial.
As Deborah James remarked in a recent book on land and restitution in South Africa, Land is
not only understood literally but has become a fulcrum for social and moral disputes (James
2007, 2). However, as she also states, no single block of action or meaning can be used to
unpack the land question:
[In the parts of Mpumalanga and Limpopo Provinces where she based her study] it is certainly the case
that the story of land occupancy has been one of black displacement by white settlers, followed by
state-endorsed separation of territories. But there have been as many differentiations within the
ranks of black landholders as there have been factors uniting them. The experience of land-holding
and land dispossession has also differed widely from one regional setting to another. (5)
 Journal of African Cultural Studies 333

Nevertheless, the dubul ibhunu song in its generalizing capacity, its populist appeal and its inci-
sive focus had the power to bring the question of land and dispossession squarely into the public
domain at a tense time for the ruling party, the ANC.
The song was not new. It had been brought back into public prominence by another son of
Seshego, Peter Mokaba, the ery leader of the ANCYL after its reconstitution in 1991. But it
had roots across the political spectrum. Used by Pan Africanist Congress members as well as
ANC and pre-dating the toyi-toyi, it was sedimented in the archive of struggle memory:

Ayesab amagwala [Only] Cowards are frightened

Dubula dubula Shoot shoot
Dubula ngesibamu Shoot with the gun
Dubul ibhunu Shoot the farmer/Boer
Dubula ngesibamu Shoot with the gun

The most astute of politicians, Malema set the song to use in establishing the issue of land as a key
pillar around which to raise his prole and make an important political intervention in a challen-
ging and controversial way.

Radical politics, radical tactics

Some four weeks after the University of Johannesburg event, Eugene TerreBlanche, leader of the
AWB (Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging) was found beaten and hacked to death on his farm near
Ventersdorp, North West Province. AfriForum, the advocacy group, swiftly laid a case against
Malemas use of the song as provocation to racial violence, and intimidating, racist hate
speech. Yet, before that, and pursuing his own political agenda, Malema visited Zimbabwe. He
was greeted at Harare airport by ruling Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front
(ZANU-PF) supporters singing Shoot the Boer, in which he joined (Africa Research Bulletin
18368). Once again, a song linked to aspirations for a better life which had to be fought for
against the burden of history crossed state borders with ease and was able to express a shared
cause with great communicative efficiency. Here, what is noteworthy is that the song had a
new setting and a different constituency.
So the drama and the narrative into which it tted resonated in a specic way. It highlighted
the shared preoccupation with the possession of land. Through the song, Malema was taking hold
of the issue and making it his own in an international and also regional setting. This was very
different from singing it on a university campus. It was the international aspect of the Harare/
Zimbabwe performance and its links with a shared history of struggle against a powerful
opponent which the new venue highlighted. It thus evoked moments in the pre-1980 Zimbabwean
second Chimurenga and the South African wars of exile. It alluded too, to a shared history of
music within political struggle (Turino 2000 especially Chapter 6).
Song had played a great part in the Zimbabwean second Chimurenga as Turinos book and the
collection of recorded songs documented by Alec Pongweni show (1982). One of the Ndebele
liberation songs which Pongweni included was Sizobashiya abazali/Siya kwamanye mazwe
(35). This was also popular with MK cadres of the Luthuli brigade under Chris Hani in the
late 1960s who worked with ZAPU forces in the Wankie campaign of 1967. It later became
one of the showcase liberation songs of the Amandla group (Gilbert 2007, 435, 433).
Dubul ibhunu, or to use its opening line, Ayesab amagwala, was part of the same archive of
the songs of struggle, even though it may not have quite had the shared use as Sizobashiya
abazali. Performed across the border at the airport in Harare, it was in one way simply travelling
north. This was replaying the cross-border traffic of political song which had been part of both the
Zimbabwean war of liberation of the 1970s and late 1960s, and the South African struggle waged
334 L. Gunner

from exile and from within the countrys borders until the release of Nelson Mandela in early
1990 (Gunner 2009). It was in the present instance, a highly effective means of highlighting a
shared South AfricaZimbabwe commitment to the cause of land reform even though
Malema was to remark later that the tactics used in Zimbabwe were to be deplored (TCR, Shi-
vambu 2014, 45).

The independence of the youth

The journey to Zimbabwe marked a move of independence on the part of Malema acting as pre-
sident of the ANCYL. He was distancing himself and the Youth League from the strictures of the
ANC parent body and the government, now led by President Jacob Zuma. It was therefore a move
of rebellious youth against its parent body and was in a way replaying for a new era the Sizoba-
shiya abazali song which had always signalled a move of youth away from parents and home, in
search of inkululeko (freedom). (Gilbert 2007, 433).
In the months that followed, Malema worked to maximize his position as one leading the way
to reverse the slow move towards land restitution in South Africa. Ayesab amagwala shorthanded
in most of the media as Dubul ibhunu (usually incorrectly spelt) became for a time his hallmark
song. It worked in much the same way as had Umshini wami for Jacob Zuma. Yet, Malema was
aware that this was a different historical moment and in part an inter-generational battle where the
constituencies and publics who had most at stake were the youth and the nations workers and
poor mired in a stagnant neoliberal economy. Zuma from 2005 to late 2007 and the ANC elections
in Polokwane had relied on song as a means of propelling himself forward calling on affect, cul-
tural knowledge and political memory. Similarly, his apprentice kept his own song close to him
as he negotiated the controversy and fear surrounding his own constant staging of the song with
its own set of affect and associations.
As the furore over the song as incitement to racial violence climaxed, and the AfriForum case
reached the South Gauteng High Court, the song was a key component of Malemas bundle of
political tools. The venue for the apprentices trial was the same as it had been for Zuma. He
had earlier faced his rape charge in the very same court, and his song was part of the barrage
of language used by supporters against those who stood for gender rights and the integrity of
the rape victim known simply as Khwezi (Hassim 2009b).
With the ANC divided over Malema, by now (April 2011) no longer president of the ANCYL,
he took centre stage outside (as well as inside) the High Court. He sang Dubul ibhunu with the
vocal support of ordinary ANC members, and of dignitaries such as Winnie Madikizela-Mandela,
who featured prominently in media coverage of the case. On the trials opening day (10 April
2011), she made a silent entrance and sat next to Malema in court. She stood close to him as,
microphone in hand, he rallied his supporters and belted out the words of the old song with
lyric modified which carried so many different and conflicting associations for the multiple audi-
ences and publics to which it now played (Dubul ibhunu song available from https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=neA30UusuhQ) (Figure 1).
The iconic photograph by Simon Mathebula printed in the (South African) Times on May 19
as the case drew to a close is of a young man, dressed in a white shirt and dark jacket, with a
microphone in one hand and the other pointing upward as he makes a point. Behind him are
the Greek columns of the South Gauteng High Court, and tucked in the left hand corner is the
head of Winnie Mandela, her head slightly to one side, listening. Zuma may have been a
master of song, but Malema understood the power of the media and the image and knew how
to play it, better perhaps than almost any other South African politician.
As the case rolled on, the focus on song as an item central to the political and national imagin-
ation was unprecedented. The evidence unfolded within the court, and views on the usage and
 Journal of African Cultural Studies 335

Figure 1. Centre of attraction: Julius Malema and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela outside the High Court in
Johannesburg. Photo: Simon Mathebula. 14 April 2011. Sunday Times (SA).

meaning of song and the wider category of the liberation song were presented. Outside, the
singing continued. The staging outside the court received massive national and international
media attention, with the BBC perhaps particularly prominent, but international press such as
The New York Times also in evidence (April 57, 2010; April 30, 2011, nytimes.com).What
became clear was that this specific song did not exist in a vacuum. It was one of a domain of poss-
ible songs, chants, slogans, a shifting store of cultural capital which could be drawn on to affirm
and give courage for the project at hand. Thus, what began to emerge was the role of song as an
element of political discourse in the public space and in the countrys history. It was a discursive
and somatic element firmly inside the making of political negotiation and action, in both the new
and old South Africa state. It was also part of what Mbembe has termed the aesthetics of power.
Not only was there a body of song performed outside the court. As the trial proceeded in 2011
within the august court building in downtown Johannesburg, with its soaring Ionic columns and
forbidding entrance, the song as part of history and the present moved to the court room within.
The use of song and specifically of the Ayesab amagwala/ Dubul isibamu/ Dubula dubula was
defended by luminaries of the struggle as part of its richest cultural capital. ANC Secretary
General Gwede Mantashe, Derek Hanekom, Deputy Minister of Science and Technology and
Collins Chabane, Minister in the Presidency all testified in Malemas defence. The poet Wally
Mongane Serote spoke eloquently for the defence. The song, he said, was part of the repertoire
of songs used in the struggle against apartheid. Similarly, the Nobel Literature Prize winner,
the late Nadine Gordimer, spoke in its defence to the BBC team who were in Johannesburg to
cover the trail of the hate speech case. Her words were heard on BBC Radio 4s breakfast
show and the event was given global coverage by the BBC World Service.
336 L. Gunner

Dubul ibhunu as pointer in the political now

A key question was whether the song plus the repertoire and archive from which it came were
items only of the past? Or were they alive within the social and political imaginary of the
South African present? Both views were set out. Serote emphasized its struggle provenance.
Keith Khoza remarked, These songs were sung before he [Malema] came along. But also
stated was the view that the song had validity in the present. In an early May report, City
Press wrote:
Malema and ANC representatives, including the partys general secretary Gwede Mantashe told the
court the lyrics were from a song from the struggle against apartheid. It was sung now as part of the
ongoing battle against economic oppression. (My italics, http://www.citypress.co.za/news/afriforum-
hits-back-at-ancyl-201105042/)
Dubul ibhunu was thus part of a new voicing of an oppositional position in dialogue with the
state. It therefore had legitimacy in the political now. The same point was made in an article
by Richard Pithouse. Malema, he claimed, was appropriating the language of popular dissent
and attempting to politicize the state of repression of the poor:
Amidst all his buffoonery he is giving a name to a truth that has until this moment been largely
repressed in most of our elite publics. [he ends]: Will we ensure that democracy effectively con-
fronts poverty or will we allow a predatory elite to manipulate the implacable and urgent moral claims
of poverty to confront democracy? (2011, my italics)
The case against Malema was settled out of court, and he was pursued by South African Revenue
Services (SARS) for dubious tender deals. The image of the dangerous young man faded briey
from the public scene. A picture that circulated in the Zulu language paper, Ilanga (the Sun) at this
time was of Malema standing in a sea of cabbages on his Limpopo farm, soon also expropriated to
cover his unpaid tax bills. With a life of bling, ANCYL fast living and mayhem behind him (Posel
2013) what was next? Not oblivion. On 16 August 2012, the Marikana shootings took place. This
was the Soweto moment of the post-apartheid era. Malema who, with his supporters, had earlier
helped to reinstate the 20,000 rock drill operatives at Impala Platinum (TCR, Shivambu 2014, 44
45), was called on by the striking miners in the aftermath of the police shootings which killed 34
men. On 18 August, he was at Marikana, while President Zuma delayed and Deputy President
Ramaphosa seemed implicated on the side of the authorities.

Song, prophets and the new narrative

I end this paper by pointing to the ways in which political song continues to have a presence in the
new post-nationalist narrative which began formally with the Soweto launch on 27 July 2013 of
the new political party, the EFF. There was no attempt to wrest ownership of the liberation
struggle from the party its founders had left behind. Gillian Hart has pointed out how Zuma
wrested from Mbeki the old hegemonic languages of contention with his own signature song
as central to that process (2013, 204). With Malemas own signature song, replete with
meaning concerning the centrality of the land issue, the political initiative was pushed further
by the new party. Meetings, rallies and memorials were much in evidence, as were new songs
or songs not before given pride of place, such as the Black Consciousness Movement song
Azania or Cape to Cairo.
In The Coming Revolution (2014), launched shortly before the election in May 2014, the
figures of Marx, Lenin and Fanon and their writings feature as a new post-national narrative
and a new positioning of race and class (Mngxitama 2014). Also restored, after long ANC
amnesia, is the Biko-inspired philosophy of Black Consciousness (Shivambu 2014, 6566).
Song as a shaping influence with a role in structuring a party identity is acknowledged. TCR
 Journal of African Cultural Studies 337

mentions its main composer, Mbuyiseni Ndlozi, his role in creating a new sense of organizational
identity, with new songs and a new organizational ethos (67). The linked clips a flash forward to
December 2014 show Ndlozi at the 2014 Mangaung EFF conference leading the Azania song. It
shows, too, the ease with which on this occasion he draws on genres of popular church music
weaving them in to political song (see EFF first elective conference 12 December 2014 Bloem-
fontein (SABC), available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihC5NLJxQI0 (Vid no. 34);
and EFF CIC Political Report 1st National Peoples Assembly 1316 December 2014 Bloemfon-
tein, available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvOWaVhI_uw (Vid no. 35)).
The central place of Marikana (and possibly of Malema) in the new body politic also featured in
visual form in 2013. Here again, the Black Consciousness presence asserted itself, this time, in paint-
ing. At the September 2013 Johannesburg Art Fair, Ayanda Mabulus huge painting Yakhal Inkomo
Black Mans Cry dominated the event. It was put on show, withdrawn and put back after pressure
from other artists including David Goldblatt. Depicting dying miners, a matador with the South
African flag for his cape, a dancing Zuma with his foot on a dying mans head, and other eminent
public figures, it spoke directly to the political crisis of the time and drew on a particular past
(Figure 2).
Its title pointed back to Wally Mongane Serotes rst volume of poetry, Yakhal Inkomo (1972),
the cry of the cattle at the slaughter house one of the key texts of the Black Consciousness poetry of
that era. Serotes volume drew on jazz as it referred in its title to Winston Mankuku Ngozis 1968
album of the same name, thus fixing, music, poetry and resistance in the same arc (Titlestad 2004).
The Mabulu painting likewise drew a connecting thread between that era of Black Consciousness
and the present Marikana moment (see also Magaziner 2010; Peffer 2009, 5). It too linked music,
poetry, painting and politics in the fluid manner typical of Black Consciousness. Malema stands
near the centre, a still figure in contrast with the frenzy around him, wearing the distinctive red
cap of the EFF and the white gown of an African prophet or member of an African independent

Figure 2. Yakhal Inkomo Black Mans Cry. Ayanda Mabulu. With permission from the artist.
338 L. Gunner

church. Thus, the painting evoked his Marikana intervention and gave him a dual role as prophetic
and political presence in the depicted moment of high national drama and rupture.
The notion of the prophet surfaced again a few months later. Percy Mabandus City Press
column, Dashiki Dialogues, focused on the launch of the EFF election manifesto in Tembisas
Mehlareng Stadium on 22 February 2014. He noted that a larger-than-life-size portrait of Malema
was hoisted up. It set him in the pose of Mao Zedong yet its artist, one Baba Khumalo, used the
religious language of black liberation theologys prophetic tradition when he said: I wanted my
leader to know that God sent him to lead us to freedom. Mabandu left his reader to untie the
message of the painting and its curious iconic symbolism. Yet, his title, Juju and the black pro-
phetic tradition perfectly captured Malemas trajectory from ANC enfant terrible to hero/prophet
within a new narrative.
The above may not seem to have clear links with political song. Yet, as different media of
performativity, they are connected. So the song and song as a multivalent resource play a role
alongside the other means by which Malema and the new party are shaping a new message
with its own ontology, far from the pre-Polokwane populism of Jacob Zuma (Sitas 2008). New
songs have superceded dubul ibhunu.
Thus, as with songs that offer critique from many regions of Africa (Finnegan 2012 [1970];
Vail and White 1991), a song which mocks, dees and denes a new foe can spring up. One such
song was used at the EFF demonstration held outside the Auckland Park SABC studios in Johan-
nesburg days after the May 2014 election. Zuma o le menemene went the song (Zuma is a crook).
It was pointed, danceable and easy to remember. It used a long tradition of public protest through
mockery within an African performance repertoire. In this instance, it related to fears that results
in Gauteng Province were being withheld deliberately and it was intended to highlight the lack of
election airtime allowed to the EFF by the SABC. It linked easily too into public dismay over
President Zumas inflated expenditure on his home in Nkandla.
A later intervention showed the range of strategies possible to the EFF, media innovations
linked to popular culture, and going viral: When the chant, by EFF MPs, We want da
money rang through Parliament in late September 2014 during a debate on the Nkandla expen-
diture issue, it also (Figures 3 and 4)

Figure 3. 27 November 2014. EFF MPs Julius Malema and Floyd Shivambu have been suspended from Par-
liament without pay. Photo: Esa Alexander. Sunday Times (SA).
 Journal of African Cultural Studies 339

Figure 4. 21 August 2014. EFF MPs remain in the National Assembly after the speaker ended proceedings so
they could be removed by security. They chanted: Give back the money, at President Jacob Zuma. Photo:
Trevor Samson. Business Day.

became the fodder for a song on the [5FM] DJ Fresh breakfast show. The shows producers used the
song For The Love of Money by The OJays as a backing track to the EFFs demands for Zuma to pay
back the money for security updates at Nkandla. Over the songs trumpets and upbeat sounds you
hear the EFF members saying: We want da money pay back that Nkandla money We
want da money. http://www.iol.co.za/news/special-features/we-want-da-money-gets-fresh-remix-1.
1739653#.VEAgWyjOXb4

To conclude, for Malema and the new party, revolutionary text and song as text go together and
move beyond a playful enactment of the aesthetics of power. Song may be partly a form of play,
but we can also read the dubul ibhunu song and its political passage as youth and the margin-
alized holding the stick with which to beat the generation of politicians who they feel have
betrayed them, and the country.

Acknowledgements
Thanks to my research assistant, Lehlohonolo Chabedi; a number of colleagues read versions of the paper.
My thanks to them all but in particular Isabel Hofmeyr, Maria Suriano, Wendy Willems and Tom Penfold;
also to Kelly Askew and to Debby Potts for editorial and logistics help in London, and to S.C. Potts. Thanks
also to Hazel Zaranyika at CfAR, and to Ayanda Thabethe for help with current SASCO and ANC songs. My
thanks to the anonymous JACS reviewers for their comments. Drafts of the paper were given at the Third
Advanced Seminar in Performance and Social Meaning, Wiser, Wits, August 2012; and at the ASAUK Con-
ference, Brighton, September 2014. I thank the NRF, and the Faculty of Humanities, University of Johan-
nesburg, for funding in support of this research. For the image reproductions, my thanks to the artist
Ayanda Mabulu based at The Bag Factory, Newtown, Johannesburg; and to Phillip Kgaphola at the
Times Media Library, Rosebank, Johannesburg.

Disclosure statement
No potential conict of interest was reported by the author.
340 L. Gunner

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