Were the police right to escort Julius Malema away from Marikana?
There have been enough knee-jerk and politically motivated reactions to the question. Before we answer with a confident Yes or No, it is worth seeing that it hides many difficult and more important questions, if we care to think about them. Here is one.
How can Julius Malema's ‘right of free speech' (or, for that matter, anybody's right - Mr Malema is merely the person most anxious to advertise his individual rights at the moment) - how can Mr Malema's ‘right of free speech' be the sole issue or priority here?
There are, besides, the issues of innocent people's safety and lives and public order. All practical issues, all moral issues. What about them? Where do they come in?
As you would expect, Mr Malema maintains they have nothing to do with him and what he said to the striking miners. He did not encourage the carrying of weapons: the miners themselves decided to do that. He is not threatening the peace; he is not condoning violence. He is talking a fair wage, economic rights, equality. It is a hard line to refute, hard to break down his tone of ardent and outraged innocence. It sounds plausible. Distinguished experts have hastened to back Mr Malema up, pronouncing in the press and on TV that, in the eyes of the law, he is not guilty of this or that or the other. Not guilty of anything.
Except that everyone knows none of that is the point. Populists do not rush to the market place, or the veldt, calling for murder and mayhem in plain breach of the law. Like Mark Antony rousing the citizens of Rome to mutiny and civil war in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, they know they have to be more subtle than that:
If I were disposed to stir Your hearts and minds to mutiny and rage - cries Antony to the crowd - I should do wrong .. You are not wood, you are not stones, but men .. Oh, what would come of it?
We know the answer all too well from our history. More violence would come of it, more of the deaths that South Africa has seen more than enough of in a repressive past and now repeated under ‘democracy'.
At the miners' funerals Julius Malema allegedly predicted more people would die in the struggle. During the French Revolution, and no doubt during the countless revolutions since, the leaders always said the tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of martyrs. In SA, as elsewhere, passionate young people often like to point out that nothing worthwhile was ever achieved without bloodshed. It is worth reminding them that whenever revolutionaries speak of spilling blood, they generally have in mind other people's.
Abraham Lincoln once said that if slavery isn't wrong, nothing is wrong. But many Americans did not agree then with something that to us today is obvious: they claimed slaves as their right. If you want a moral, the moral is a right can turn out to be wrong. Julius Malema does not enjoy his rights alone; others have rights. He is not the conscience of the nation and not the only person who cares for miners and the poor.
The moral too is we need the wisdom and self-discipline to see the job is to ensure peaceful change, not revolution: that the times call for cool heads, not hot blood; pressures but not violence; contested policies, not the ‘class enemies' regularly and recklessly bandied about by the SACP and by Mr Vavi of Cosatu.
The issue for a South Africa run by a divided ruling party and crumbling tripartite alliance is not only rights, but how an ordered democracy handles dissent. It is certainly neither the way of the authorities nor the way of Mr Malema at Marikana.
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