South Africa’s firebrand opposition leader on Saturday vowed to keep using controversial chants that featured in a contentious White House meeting between the US and South African presidents.
During talks in Washington on Wednesday, US President Donald Trump ambushed his South African counterpart Cyril Ramaphosa by showing a four-minute-long video in support of his claims of a “white genocide” in the country that overcame decades of apartheid.
Julius Malema, a 44-year-old opposition politician, was the main character in the video, seen in several clips wearing the red beret of his populist, Marxist-inspired Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) party and chanting calls to “cut the throat of whiteness” as well as a controversial anti-apartheid song “Kill the Boer, kill the farmer”.
The decades-old “Kill the Boer” rallying cry was born during the struggle against the brutal policies of white-minority rule, and its use since the end of apartheid in 1994 infuriates parties that represent white South Africans, with many attempting to get it banned.
A ban in 2010 was lifted after courts said it does not constitute hate speech and instead should be regarded in its historical context, and for the fact that it was being used by Malema only as a “provocative means of advancing his party’s political agenda”.
Speaking at a regional election on Saturday, Malema said the controversial lyrics were “the heritage of our struggle” and vowed to keep on using them.
“It is not my song. I did not compose this song,” Malema said in televised comments. “The struggle heroes composed this song. All I am doing it to defend the legacy of our struggle.”
“Therefore I will never stop singing” the song, he said. “That will be a betrayal to the struggle of our people.”
Malema, 44, is an opposition politician, leader of the anti-capitalist and anti-US EFF that he founded in 2013 after being thrown out of the youth league of the ruling African National Congress, where he was accused of fomenting divisions.
He portrays himself as the defender of society’s most disadvantaged and has attracted largely young supporters angry at the large social inequalities that exist in South Africa 30 years after the end of apartheid.
In the tense Oval Office meeting, Ramaphosa and his delegation distanced themselves from Malema’s rhetoric.
