Читать книгу The World According to Julius Malema - Max du Preez - Страница 4

The early years

Malema was born on 3 March 1981 into a poverty-stricken township called Masakeng Zone 1 in Seshego, Limpopo. His father was absent; he was brought up by his mother, Flora, a domestic worker, and his grandmother, Sarah.

“You will find the poorest people in Masakeng,” Malema says, “and my family was the poorest of the poor.” He likes to refer to his “peasant” background in interviews. He told the Sowetan daily newspaper in April 2009: “Having gone to school without shoes or proper uniform and during lunch times not knowing where you will get your next meal, those are the conditions we grew up under.”

Flora Malema was a devout Christian and not very politically inclined. When the young Julius ran into trouble at school, it was Granny Sarah who rushed to his defence – “my mother was afraid of the authorities”. Julius soon grew much closer to his grandmother, who was, and still is, according to him, a committed ANC activist. In a rare glimpse into his private life, he told Talk Radio 702’s Jenny Crwys-Williams in November 2008: “I became more comfortable with her politically than with my mother.” His mother died in 2005, but Malema has remained very close to his granny – he still phones her every day of his life.

Malema was only nine years old when he ran away from home and sneaked onto a bus carrying ANC members to Johannesburg to see Nelson Mandela, who had just been released from jail after 27 years behind bars. When he returned home the next day, family members say, he was a different boy. In 1993 he ran away again, this time to attend the funeral of MK and SACP struggle icon Chris Hani, who had been assassinated by a right-wing fanatic.

Malema gets vague when asked about his earliest political activities, but stories abound of how he joined the ANC’s Masupatsela (trailblazers) movement at the age of nine and how the local comrades taught him to make petrol bombs and barricades of burning tyres when he was only 12. ANC activists in Seshego confirm that Malema was a “child activist”, trained ANC marshal and that he could toyi-toyi and sing liberation songs long before he went to high school.

He was only 14 when he became leader of the ANC Youth League in his home town. At 16 he was chairman of the Congress of South African Students (Cosas) in Limpopo and was elected its national president four years later.

How does one explain Malema’s complete obsession with the ANC and politics in general since even before adolescence? He has repeatedly stated that he is not interested in getting married, because he is “married to the ANC”; he has only ever read political books, all biographies of ANC politicians; he says his “whole being belongs to the ANC”; he says even when he goes to clubs or restaurants to socialise he only talks about politics.

Perhaps growing up without a father – he says he has never known his father and has no need to get to know him – could explain a lot. When Crwys-Williams asked him whether not having a father left a gap in his life, he responded: “Perhaps those conditions made us to understand why there is a need for us to participate in the struggle and fight against the injustice caused by the apartheid regime. When you grow up under people who appreciate you and who are always there to support you, that gap, you don’t feel it. Because in the ANC, the leaders of the ANC have played a father figure role in my life and they still do that even today.”

Malema failed grade 8 and had to repeat grade 9, after, he says, he had been expelled for political activities. He only wrote his matric exams when he was 21. He wasn’t a great student: in 2008 the media got hold of his matric results and revealed that he had just scraped through, failing both mathematics and woodwork. His school friends at Mohlakaneng High maintain that this was more a consequence of his preoccupation with political activities than due to a lack of intelligence or an inability to learn. Observing him across his desk in Luthuli House it doesn’t appear as if a lack of grey matter is one of his shortcomings.

But his weak academic background has probably contributed to his strong anti-intellectual streak. His full-frontal attack on the then Minister of Education, Naledi Pandor, for having a “fake American accent” (she has an English accent, actually) and several snide remarks about Thabo Mbeki’s intellectualism, are examples. Malema is also fond of telling interviewers that many senior leaders are the products of “squatter camps and villages rather than universities”, and that university degrees “don’t guarantee wisdom”. He told the Sowetan in an interview that he was very proud of Jacob Zuma “who was not educated at universities in London or America, but was taught by his own people in Nkandla”.

(Sunday Times journalist and author Fred Khumalo once wrote about Malema, whom he called an ihlongandlebe or “contumelious nincompoop”: “On second thoughts, I think I have to thank the gods of academia for denying Malema the stamina for rigorous study. Imagine a highly educated Malema.”)

Malema’s leadership of Cosas was marked by violent and unruly behaviour, especially during a march on the Gauteng Department of Education in Johannesburg in 2002 when Cosas members looted shops, vandalised property and stole from street traders. In 2003, when he was objecting to fraud and theft charges brought against Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, he declared that Cosas would burn down the jail if she were to be locked up.

Malema says he was a “fundamentalist” in his youth. He told Crwys-Williams: “When you grow up, you grow up a fundamentalist, a communist hard-core, you think everything has got to do with communism.” When asked whom he wanted to meet most, he said: “You always have this ambition that perhaps one day one should have a chance to talk to Fidel (Castro) and hear where they come from with this background. Because, you know that amongst the remaining communists Fidel represents the real communism.”

Malema was elected president at the chaotic 2008 national conference of the Youth League at Mangaung in Bloemfontein, where the delegates displayed the worst behaviour ever recorded at an ANC event. Mostly drunk, they disrupted speakers and made sure no real discussion could take place. The conference had to be dismissed eventually, but not before the election of the top five leaders had taken place and Malema came out victorious (it was alleged that he spent vast amounts of money during his campaign). The prevailing image of the conference will be the young delegate, probably under the influence of alcohol, pulling down his pants and flashing his bare bottom at opponents of Malema’s candidature.

Another conference had to be scheduled at the Nasrec conference centre outside Johannesburg months later to elect the rest of the league’s national executive committee, an event that was the opposite of the Mangaung conference. Quietly and with no big upsets, the conference drafted its resolutions and elected the rest of the leadership. No one was surprised by the turnaround – this time the stakes were not as high. The supporters of Jacob Zuma knew that Malema would be a key factor in the 2009 election campaign, and they needed to make sure their man got the job. Once that had been sorted out at Mangaung, there was little to lose and the Nasrec conference went off without a glitch.