Julius Malema: the man who scarred South Africa

For as long as anyone can remember, white South Africans have feared that a wild and dangerous black man would get his hands on too much power. He would be charismatic and he would be angry. He would be coarse, garish and corrupt. The ranks of his followers would swell. He would convince them that everything white people have always had – the swimming pools, the cars, the holidays by the sea – should be shared, not at some deferred time, but now, right now.

This fearful vision is wired into white South African DNA. From the extreme left to the far right, there isn't a white leader in the last century who has not warned of a racial timebomb. Around dinner tables and at barbecues, generations of white South Africans have died a thousand deaths, imagining the black leader who will turn on them.

And so, when black South Africans voted the African National Congress (ANC) into power in 1994, the organisation's gentility and grace seemed a rebuke to these rude fears. Nelson Mandela opened his arms and forgave. That his forgiveness was genuine was apparent for all to see. That he could forgive without losing honour was the secret to his magic.

His successor, Thabo Mbeki, was an altogether different creature, brittle and secretive and quick to take offence. He saw white racism wherever he looked. He was also a self-proclaimed prophet with some alarming ideas. But Mbeki was a far stretch from the ogre of white nightmares: he was evidence that black leaders could be difficult and opaque, not that they could be scary.

So used were white people to these genteel black leaders that when the character of their nightmares stepped into the real world in 2007, they mistook him for a clown. Julius Malema was lean and young and casually dressed, his taste for champagne and Breitling watches as yet unacquired, and from the moment he opened his mouth, it was clear he was offering a dare. I will bring the roughest streets of this country on to the national stage, he was saying. I will promise violence and anger. Do you have what it takes to take me on?

He was written off as a joke, a flash in the pan. But as 2008 turned into 2009, and nobody stopped him, the laughter became increasingly nervous. Malema grew fat and rich, the sources of his wealth increasingly suspicious. As his speeches grew more outrageous, so his influence in the ANC seemed to grow. He became known as the organisation's kingmaker, the man whose support any pretender to the presidency would need to capture. And still nobody stopped him. Last Saturday, finally, a disciplinary committee of the ANC upheld a five-year suspension slapped on Malema for bringing the organisation into disrepute. Among his wrongdoings was to have called for regime change in Botswana, South Africa's peaceful and prosperous neighbour. It seems that Malema's dramatic and tempestuous political career may be over for now. But in the meantime, he has changed the face of South African politics.

At another moment in the nation's history, Malema's star would have burned up and vanished early, but what the pundits who laughed at him didn't seem to want to understand was that when Malema rose to prominence, the tectonic plates under the ANC were shifting. The organisation's flag remained the same, its headquarters in downtown Johannesburg remained unchanged, but the organisation itself was becoming an entirely new beast, and Malema was only the most dramatic manifestation.

I first saw the ANC up close in 1992, not long after the ban on the organisation was lifted and its leaders returned from exile. I was a 22-year-old university student lucky enough to have landed a part-time job taking minutes at the Convention for a Democratic South Africa, the forum that negotiated South Africa's transition to democracy. What has stayed with me from those months I sat taking minutes is not a particular incident but a feeling, a spirit. More particularly, it was the spirit exuded by the men and women who represented the ANC.

Quite simply, they possessed the poise of people who knew they were making history. The ANC's chief negotiators, Cyril Ramaphosa and Joe Slovo, were suave and elegant men. They exuded the easy grace of victors and the intelligence of people who knew they were in control. In their hands, the work of constitutional negotiations became a delicate art.

The other protagonists shrivelled in comparison. The ruling National Party, soon exhausted by the demoralising business of negotiating itself out of power, grew increasingly tetchy and graceless. The black leaders of apartheid's old Bantustans were visibly nervous, uncertain about what to do and say on this new terrain. The ANC was in the stratosphere way above them. I relished what it would do to my country once it took power.

In the mid-90s, I went away for three years to study, and in the time after I came back, things began to change fast. The ANC was governing and it was proving hard for them. Slowly, through a fog of denial, the organisation was edging towards the terrifying knowledge that it was not the master of South Africa's destiny. It could not contain unemployment to acceptable levels – between 1980 and 1995, the national rate of joblessness grew from less than 10% to 17.7%, then accelerated to 27.1% in 2003 – and it could not switch on the tap of foreign investment. In 1996, it adopted economic policies made-to-Washington-order – liberalising the economy, cutting the fiscal deficit, planning to privatise utilities – but the gush of foreign money never followed. Nor could the ANC switch off the tap of crime. While daily life among the poor probably grew less violent, the country's middle-class suburbs were subjected to a wave of carjackings and armed robberies it seemed powerless to stop.

The ANC's first response to the realisation that it was not in control was paranoia. Its leaders began speaking of all sorts of conspiracies hatched in the west. The most infamous of these was Mbeki's insistence that the idea that HIV caused Aids was an illusion invented by the pharmaceutical industry.

Few people realised it at the time, for it would have taken a heavy dose of cynicism to believe, but what came after the paranoia was a kind of nihilism – a shrugging of the shoulders; a growing sense, never spoken out loud, that if state power could not be used to change South Africa, it could certainly be used to get wealth, power and esteem.

In retrospect, the catalyst came in 2005 when President Mbeki fired his deputy, Jacob Zuma, ostensibly because Zuma stood accused of corruption, but also to clear the way for Mbeki to choose his own successor. Instead of meekly accepting his banishment, Zuma fought back. He did so with populist swagger, presenting himself as a wronged son of the soil, and invited a broad swath of the disaffected to follow him.

Zuma gathered behind him a coalition of all those in the ANC-led alliance whom Mbeki had stung, wounded and left out in the cold, a considerable and diverse bunch ranging from the trade union movement and the Communist party to an assortment of regional and ethnic business interests. The insurgency Zuma led thus resembled a garish and motley carnival. What sort of political language he spoke depended upon which of his many constituencies he was addressing. It was not clear what he stood for, other than a desire to become president.

The fight between Zuma and Mbeki threatened not only to tear the ANC apart; it appeared also to be corrupting the South African state. Senior officials in the intelligence ministry were found to have followed and monitored Mbeki's lieutenants. The various political factions vying for power were connected to webs of opaque business interests. South African politics began to exude a stench not whiffed since the apartheid years. It was in these rough and nasty new times that men such as Julius Malema began to flourish.

Malema was born in 1981, to a single mother who was a domestic worker. He grew up poor in a place called Seshego, a segregated black township attached to the provincial town of Pietersberg (now Polokwane), a redoubt of Afrikaner conservatism. Malema claims that as a child he was trained to use a gun in an underground cell of the ANC's armed wing, but the story has just one dubious corroborator. And his followers have said that when the South African Communist party's beloved leader, Chris Hani, was assassinated in 1993, the 12-year-old Malema stuck a pistol in his pocket, jumped on a bus and went to Johannesburg to fight in the impending civil war. There are no witnesses to this act of courage.

Undisputed, though, is that Malema was a militant and very successful political activist at high school. In the late 90s, he climbed through the ranks of the Congress of South African Students, the ANC-aligned body that had led thousands of children to the barricades to fight apartheid. Malema became known as tough, playing dirty against those who opposed him for office, disbanding branches of the organisation that did not support him and at times taking to his opponents with his fists. Absorbed in politics, he failed his final year of school, but kept passing each new political test with flying colours, becoming the provincial leader of the ANC Youth League in his home province of Limpopo in 2007.

It proved a fortuitous time to come of age. The ANC was holding a national conference that December in Malema's home town, Polokwane, with Zuma challenging Mbeki for the presidency. It was to be the organisation's denouement.

Among the many factions and groups that chose to line up behind Zuma was the ANC Youth League. Its outrageous provincial secretary proved an ideal weapon in the war against Mbeki. At first, Malema's speeches seemed too outlandish to take seriously. He accused Mbeki of betraying black aspirations and demanded that the mines be nationalised and white farmland confiscated. South Africa's racial minorities gasped in horror; they assumed these questions had been put to bed when the ANC came to power. Zuma would tell the world every so often that there was no debate in the ANC about nationalisation, and that young people should be excused for their exuberance.

More disturbing than his ideas was Malema's style and tone. He brought a scent of menace to national politics. In the blunt, crude insults he threw at Mbeki, white journalists and others were suggestions of violence. And then, in the heat of the ANC's battle for succession, he declared publicly that the youth were not only prepared to die for Zuma, they would kill for him, too. Again, Zuma merely muttered about youthful exuberance.

Back then, Malema was thought of as one of the many morbid symptoms of a battle for power. Both sides were playing dirty and he was one tool among many, a useful idiot who, once the fight was over, would be zipped up and put away.

In December 2007, Zuma defeated Mbeki and became president of the ANC; 15 months later, the organisation handsomely won a general election and Zuma became president of South Africa. Malema, in the meantime, had been elected president of the ANC Youth League. Many thought he would now settle, or be forced to do so.

It did not turn out that way. Within months of taking office, the broad and unwieldy coalition that had brought Zuma to power had begun to crack. As Zuma had found Malema a useful ally against Mbeki, so those who wanted to oust Zuma found Malema equally useful. Before long, he had accused Zuma of selling out the South African masses as Mbeki had done before him. He raised again, with increasing urgency, the issues of nationalism and land redistribution. An ANC conference with powers to elect a new president was scheduled to be held in December 2012. Malema announced the ANC Youth League wanted a new president for the ANC and for South Africa.

If Malema was indeed a cartoon character, he was among those that refuse to die, reappearing more dogged and menacing and larger each time, his lean face now chubby, his flat stomach an ample belly. He built a garish house in Sandton, the wealthiest district of Johannesburg. He developed a taste for expensive watches and French champagne. He and his entourage would spend raucous weekends in luxury resorts, paying with wads of cash pulled carelessly from their pockets.

The once scruffy youth became a stickler for sartorial decorum. Sitting in a hotel lobby in Caracus, Venezuela, in 2010, where he hoped to meet with President Hugo Chávez, Malema upbraided his biographer, Fiona Forde, for her open sandals and her black and brown leather bag.

"Fiona," she reports him goading, "the leather in your shoes is supposed to match the leather in your belt and watch. So if you wear brown leather shoes" – he pointed at his own Yves Saint Laurent slip-ons – "you must wear a brown leather belt."

It has, of course, been asked where Malema gets his money. His modest ANC Youth League salary does not pay for Breitling watches, let alone a mansion. Last year, the newspaper City Press published an exposé revealing that several businessmen who had won lucrative tenders from the Limpopo provincial government had deposited handsome sums into an account held by a Malema family trust.

But that is surely not all. It has long been suspected Malema has secret financial backers in the ANC's upper echelons. Some have also asked whether Malema is being paid to talk about nationalising the mines. The political commentator Steven Friedman believes behind the call for nationalisation is a bid "to assist politically connected business people to offload underperforming mining assets and influence the issuing of licences".

The most interesting question about Malema is why it took so long for either the ANC or the government to move against him. At one point, the revenue service muttered something about investigating his riches, but appeared not to act. News broke in 2011 that the detective arm of the police was about to arrest him on charges of corruption, but nothing materialised. There are two schools of thought. One is that powerful ANC factions find Malema useful enough to protect him – in which case this once noble liberation movement has truly lost its soul and become nothing more than a scramble for office and its rewards. The other suggestion is perhaps more interesting: that the ANC took so long to stop Malema because what he says resonates with both rank-and-file members and growing numbers of ordinary people. In other words, while the ANC suffered serious damage from not stopping him, it sensed that it also needed him.

As soon as one leaves the closed and rarefied world of punditry, the question of what people think of Malema does indeed become pretty complicated. Between 2005 and 2007, I got to know a rural South African village very well. In the book I wrote about it, I gave it the name Ithanga. It lies in the ANC stronghold of the Eastern Cape, just outside a poor rural town called Lusikisiki. Since Malema rose to prominence, I have visited a few times. People talk about him a great deal, as they do in all walks of South African life. But here there is something markedly different about the tones in which he is described. There are, to be sure, many here who loathe him and would love to see him fall; the middle-aged, in particular, find his rudeness an affront. Nonetheless, even the dignified and the genteel speak of his ideas, if not his style, with a measure of respect. They have received as a revelation the story he tells about their country. He says that when black people won South Africa at the ballot box, whites began to hide power in invisible places: in multinational corporations and in the media, in laboratories and the judiciary, in closed systems of specialist knowledge. He says his mission is to go and find power where it hides and retrieve it.

The moment Malema tells this story, people instantly recognise it as true. For in these villages life has always been shaped by invisible powers exercised by people far away – like the powers that wooed all adult men to work in the goldmines at the beginning of the 20th century, then retrenched all their great-grandsons 90 years later.

There is something else Malema says that resonates with people here. Through the course of the 20th century, the ANC led a struggle for what it called "national liberation". Behind the simple word "national" is an enormous assumption: it is that South Africa will be free only when its fate is determined by South Africans. "The people shall govern," the ANC's guiding document, the Freedom Charter, famously declares. This takes as a given that South Africa is a sovereign entity.

There is an obvious sense in which this isn't quite true. South Africa is an agglomeration of land, minerals, technologies and labour that are traded on global markets, and South Africans are only partially in control of the terms on which they enter this trade. They are thus in charge of their own destiny only in a heavily qualified sense.

When English drinkers decide South African wines are no longer "cheap at the price", for instance, South Africa must either exploit its grape-pickers even more or retrench many of them. When China starts producing T-shirts at half the price South Africans do, the country watches helplessly as an industry shrivels and dies.

Here is where Malema comes in. He dips into the ANC's history and takes from it old and familiar ideas: nationalisation of mines, expropriation of land. With these, he reminds South Africans of the deepest meaning of "national liberation": the idea that a people is in charge of its fate. He tells the ANC it is not governing as it always promised it would; that it is betraying its own history. This resonates very deeply indeed. Malema's fantasy that a country can entirely control its own fate is not only seductive, it is the very essence of what the ANC meant whenever it spoke about freedom.

On 8 January, the ANC held its centenary celebrations in a large sports stadium in the provincial town of Bloemfontein. Despite his suspension, Malema sat among the VIPs. When his presence was announced on the public address system, the roar was deafening. The party elders gathered on the stage would have immediately imbibed what that roar meant. It did not mean that Malema had sufficient support to set up a rival party outside the ANC. The old liberation movement's reputation remains much too formidable for that. What the roar meant was that South Africans have acquired a taste for the new brand of volatile populism Malema has brought to national politics. Malema himself may disappear for now, but he has shown future pretenders in the ANC a new way of acquiring power. There is little doubt that his brand of politics will return.