Noxious, but not deserving banning

No matter how noxious the spewings of the African National Congress Youth League, it serves no useful purpose to ban as “hate speech” snatches of a liberation-era song. Fiery language and emotive symbols may stir the blood but unless they demonstrably goad people into illegal actions, they should be protected as freedom of speech.

It is nevertheless amusing that ANC supporters who periodically call for banning of the old South African flag — it offends their sensibilities when the occasional stray Neanderthal brandishes it at a rugby match — should invoke history and the Constitution against the high court banning of the publication or utterance of the phrase “shoot the boer”.

The ANC is “shocked and disappointed” by the high court ruling against their struggle song Ayesaba Amagwala [The Cowards are Scared], which describes farmers and whites as dogs, cowards, robbers and rapists to be killed. AfriForum, in turn, laid a charge of hate speech against ANCYL president Julius Malema and obtained and interdict against the chant, while demanding a retraction and apology.

The high court judgement will now go on appeal. Rightly so, for all the court’s good intentions, it is an unsound ruling. ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe correctly says that attempts to ban the song are “impractical and unimplementable”, and that we are a society that “wants to wish its own history away”.

History is what each group believes it to be, for in South Africa there is no single version of the past that we all subscribe to. Nor are these various interpretations likely to be reconciled any time soon. All we can do is tolerate our diversity.

The National Party government tried for 46 years to inculcate its version of the past (and hence the future) using everything it could, including rigid ideological control of education, censorship, a slavish state media, and imprisonment for “wrong” beliefs.

The ANC is similarly keen on a history that puts it at the centre of all that is admirable, although it lacks in a democracy the range of instruments that the Nats had. The degree of contestation that exists is reflected in the Pan-Africanist Congress Youth League’s threat this week against Malema, to “injure him to death”, unless he apologises for “misrepresenting” the PAC’s role in the 1960 Sharpeville protests.

But to argue that there is no judicial solution to provocative sloganeering is not to contend that there is no political solution.

A liberation song that depicts a group of people as monstrous and that is occasionally dusted off for a nostalgic old sing-song around the ANC campfire is one thing. It’s another to be taunted with it by groups of threatening young men who appear to revel in the slaying of white farmers.

The Independent Democrats’ secretary general, Haniff Hoosen made a sensible call upon the ANC to “rise above the current tit-for-tat racial squabbles … Some among us have either failed to see the danger of our actions and words, or simply do not care,” he said.

President Jacob Zuma has repeatedly declared reconciliation to be a major goal. While there is no evidence, yet, that murderous chants have resulted in murders, Zuma cannot just shrug his shoulders.

In no democracy is it acceptable for one group to intimidate or harass another. There are plenty of precedents of how unchecked words can deteriorate into sticks and stones, machetes and machine guns.

Our history has seen tribe pitted against tribe, black against white, English-speaker against Afrikaner, Zulu against Indian, and locals against foreigners. It makes for a potentially explosive assembly of peoples.

The ANC is right that it is not law that melds a nation but the attitudes of its people to one another. As the government of the day, it should set the tone and assist that process. That it has failed to do so lamentable dereliction of governmental duty, as well as a betrayal of the ethos it proclaimed over almost a 100 years of its existence as a political force.