How not going to school saved Malema's African soul

I once read somewhere or overheard someone define a genius: a person who does what no other person has done before or is not afraid to say things that others are afraid to say.

In am not interested in the correctness or falsity of this stamen.

In South Africa, there is a pervasive culture of herd thinking where we are all the same because we are trying to be different by doing the same things to be different.

In fact, most people are afraid to be different. Thus they cannot break out of their ideological or racial cocoons, for example.

But this should not come as a surprise because much as we claim to be “united in our diversity” we do not like very much those who try to be different. They spoil the perfect arrangement of things in our imperfect new democracy.

Where am I going with all this?

I found myself thinking about how different Julius Malema is from most young people, including the salaried professional with MBA and other Harvard qualifications.

Unlike most young people his age or younger, Malema is NOT afraid to be different.

I guess it is a good thing that he did not pursue higher education as that would have bettered his soul and buttressed him to be like everybody else. You cannot expect Harvard or any university, for instance, to produce somebody who will fundamentally challenge the system.

Everybody is afraid to be somebody because that would mean doing or saying things differently.

But most young people — from the age of seven years — are taught to obey and conform to the expectations of the racial capitalist system, to become super-achievers.

They are taught to believe that politics is a “dirty game” and to be somebody they must go to school, learn to listen and obey instruction from the authorities to conform. Later, they will be rewarded with success and achievement in the form of a nice job, posh car and plush home.

As a result, most of them are too busy pursuing this material accumulation or “American Dream” if you like that they do not have time for politics.

So, when they are professionals they are characterised by one-dimensional thinking that only focuses them on work, work and more work. No time for politics.

But Malema was saved from all this educational corruption. He did not go far in school much as he has proven he has the brains to do an MBA or PhD.

In fact, he could — if any one institution chooses to consider his “prior non-conventional learning experience” at the University of Life.

It is only because Malema has not gone too far in school that he is able to follow the dictates of his instincts and conscience. With his woodwork knowledge, he has carved his life into a 21st century political sculptor that is true to himself.

If he had gone to school, he would have learnt nothing except to “suppress that which stirs in his soul so that he could gain a promotion and make a stable income”.

I have never spoken to him in real life, but what I recognise in him is someone who is intuitively connected to his own soul and thus finds it easy to plug into the main issues that make it difficult for South Africans to sleep at night.

And those issues, which will make a “united, non-racial, non-sexist, equal and just society” impossible — are the land question, economic injustice, the monopolisation of wealth by a few and racial domination.

You don’t have to be a genius to know or talk about these issues. But because everybody wants to ignore them, this is what has made Malema a contemporary genius.

Remember: a genius is someone who is willing, in our context, to talk about issues that everybody wishes would go away. A genius is willing to do what no one has done in the last 17 years of democracy.

I am tempted to say Malema is a genius. Going further at school would, simply, have corrupted him and made him predictable.