Historical delusions: Malema rewrites the past

Watching the EFF’s muted seventh birthday celebrations unfold online last week, I was reminded of the much-misquoted and much-misapplied line from Ulysses, James Joyce’s famous potboiler: "History … is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."

It’s a sentiment that applies to all our top three political parties, to different degrees. History is not on their side any more — at least not recent history, riddled as it is with examples of their failures, compromises and downright criminality.

The EFF celebrated its seventh birthday with a "virtual rally" of more than two hours on its social media platforms, titled "Celebrating the seven non-negotiable cardinal pillars".

I watched a good chunk of the 01:48:28 highlights package, before turning to the faster option of reading the transcript.

It’s worth noting just how much the import of Julius Malema’s words is given greater significance by his personality. It’s also striking just how hard the EFF tries to situate itself in a much wider origin history than the mundane reality that could usefully, if crudely, be summed up as Malema needing a new brand to hitch his populism to after the ANC shunned him.

Struggle history is one of the great brand values of the ANC, whose value has been eroded over time thanks to a litany of corruption and ineptitude. (Malema’s dig, when he refers to the ANC as "the former liberation movement", is particularly apposite.)

Or, as Malema puts it in his speech (and it’s hard to disagree with him): "The post-1994 government has played an active role in reproducing the inequalities and imbalances of the past by not doing anything to transform the economy and being active participants in maintaining the status quo."

Struggle history is also an arena in which the DA, that staunch defender of the rights of roast chickens and hairdressers, is sometimes found sadly wanting, as much as it tries to disown its ugly stepfather, the New National Party.

It’s not a history that the EFF, formed as it was out of the parvenus of the ANC Youth League, can stake much of a claim to, despite its co-opting of struggle heroes such as Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. So, instead, the party has turned to a longer view of history.

Floyd Shivambu introducing Malema’s monologue gives you a flavour of this strategy. "We can count him among the great pan-Africanists in the whole African continent. We can count him in the same line as Marcus Garvey, as Haile Selassie, as Kwame Nkrumah … and all the revolutionaries that fought for the unity of the African continent. The commander-in-chief who is leading the war for economic freedom, the commander-in-chief who is leading the July 26 movement here in SA."

It’s quite a lineup of revolutionaries to insert Malema into, as well as situating the EFF in the reflected glory of the Cuban July 26 revolutionary movement.

Malema’s address to, inter alia, "members of the war council, the central command team … fellow fighters and fearless ground forces of the revolution", hammers home this claim on a more general struggle history. (And it’s worth noticing, again, the military stylings of the C-in-C. I sincerely hope we don’t look back at these from the vantage point of some bloody populist moment as blatant warning signals we chose to ignore.)

"We celebrate an organisation that exists in the long bloodline of anti-colonialists who fought to defend the land of African people from all those who wish to exploit us. Our movement has survived all the doomsayers. We have defeated all those who thought we were made on Twitter, on social media and on newspapers. We have followed in the footsteps of King Hintsa, King Shaka, King Moshoeshoe, Queen Nzinga, of King Sekhukhune and are determined to complete the fight of our ancestors to defend our land."

The EFF is trying two things here. First, to fight the perception that it’s a movement that only means something because of the peculiarly skewed reach of imperialist social media platforms, coupled with the sensation-seeking attention of the media. And, second, to give itself an ersatz history that, like the ANC’s struggle history, can be deployed as a distraction when current corruption surfaces.

For the EFF, as with the ANC, history — the rewriting of history, and the persistent claims to a past that can no longer legitimately be used to validate the present — is a weapon of propaganda. Unfortunately for the party, though, history starts yesterday.

Finance minister Tito Mboweni recently tweeted: "We should be working together to defeat the virus. Not see this as an opportunity to defraud the state and unwell people. We are watching you and there has [sic] to be consequences. For sure. Game over!"

Rather than the groundswell of support he possibly expected, he received a host of replies telling him he should be addressing this to his fellow party members, with pointed reference to several recent government scandals.

A reply from FM columnist Justice Malala highlights the ANC’s attempt to elide the last unhappy chunk of its history. "Chief, has no-one told you that you guys are running the country? Have been for 26 years? You all speak here like you are civilians. Govern, man!"

An even better example of using history, if we define history as a series of facts, was in a recent article on News24 about the Glorious Commander-in-Chief’s address to the world. Every time the writer reported one of Malema’s revisionist statements, he added in a link to the factual counter.

So when Malema claimed: "The EFF continued to have one of the most peaceful national conferences in the history of SA, where members contested each other freely," the reporter added the rider: "At the time, there were reports that the election of the EFF’s top six leaders was marred by clashes between delegates and the EFF’s paramilitary security unit, known as the Defenders of the Revolution."

When Malema denied links to corporate interests, saying: "You are not a fighter if you do not live among the poor masses of our people," the reporter added: "In 2018, it was reported that Malema and his family live in a home in Hyde Park, Joburg, owned by Adriano Mazzotti, who is a director of cigarette-manufacturing company Carnilinx."

It might be time to build a bot that can do this on Twitter — automatically link to actual historical facts that refute the attempts by political parties to sweep their crimes and misdemeanours under the rug of rewoven history.

Malema is aware of the awkward facts of recent history, when he tells us: "No fighter can ever be confused by Stratcom or doubt his or her generational mission, as long as you make the EFF Founding Manifesto your daily bread."

One shudders to think what the syllabus will look like if the EFF ever gets to build the Winnie Mandela Combined School it’s calling for.

In effect, Malema wants to dictate how EFF members understand history. In his conclusion, he says: "Look at us now, we are the only organisation of thinkers in SA. The rest are amoebas, following each other into darkness. We don’t have time for that, we are leading through superior logic."

Let’s hope news organisations survive this Covid-19 rupture with enough resources intact to counter some of the wilder digressions of "superior logic", because it’s vital that they keep supplying us with the facts necessary to mitigate political parties and their attempts at "history capture".