HANS PIENAAR: Malema and the farmers: an issue of life and death

I hold no brief for AfriForum, which brought the “Kill the Boer” case against the EFF leader Julius Malema that has played out in the courts over the past two weeks. But some startling symptoms of our political malaise have emerged from the court battle that we can deal with by making use of rudimentary Freudian operations on the unconscious, such as condensation and displacement. It’s not that difficult if one thinks in electrical terms, of batteries in parallel (displacement) and in series (condensation, or overdetermination).

Examples of overdetermination are the neatly packaged eight-minute Malema “highlights” on YouTube, to go with claims, even in the most left-wing of publications, that he came across as a man of integrity and wiped the floor with AfriForum’s counsel, Mark Oppenheimer. And that the EFF won, hands down, in the court of public opinion even before the verdict was given.

This is wrong, in very practical terms to start with. AfriForum, which runs farm watches across SA, had to bring the case because fields were burnt after the Senekal drama, when the suspect in the murder of Brendan Horner appeared in court. The EFF crowd and leaders broke the law by singing “Kill the Boer” outside court, but added another song — that the fire brigade should be called because they are going to burn farms.

For farmers, AfriForum’s action is of life and death importance; it will help them make crucial decisions about their safety. Precisely because Malema was declared the “winner”. The world outside the farm has said in so many words that the verdict does not matter any more, that farmers are on their own. The rule of law is no more.

Apart from that, Malema gave AfriForum a sound bite to die for: Oppenheimer got him to squirm as he said under oath that someone will one day call for the murder of whites and he might be that person. This makes fools out of the Human Rights Commission of SA for finding that his previous declaration on the matter was just a joke.

Malema’s clarification was ignored in the media, which instead gave us more overdetermination by focusing on the testimony by expert witness Liz Gunner. She insisted that the song merely followed tradition and reinforced the necessity of land reform.

Now, I don’t disagree that much land was robbed in colonial times — I wrote about it in my book Die Derde Oorlog teen Mapoch — and that the “boer” once was a potent symbol of white rule cultivated by the apartheid and colonial regimes and therefore a legitimate target.

But that symbol has been all but neutered since the demise of the Nationalists, not least by the absence of any of the state subsidies farmers in other countries get. As for the mess of land reform, the incompetent ANC government should be the target; the wording should be “Kill the Bro, Kill the Cadre”. 

Gunner also gave a good example of displacement. When Oppenheimer asked her to hypothesise on a genocidal meaning in light of Malema’s remarks, she said that was beyond her expertise and not her job, despite being an academic paid to hypothesise — she displaced the literal interpretation of the word “kill” to 19th century history. 

Another was supplied by eNCA news when it reported on the testimony of Gabriel Crouse that the EFF crowd was singing about burning farms. Instead of covering this properly, let alone informing us what the outcome of the fires was or where we stand with the Horner case, it chose to focus at length on Crouse’s connections as an activist-journalist.

Energy diverted

Many white people too, anxious about being seen on the same page as AfriForum, are fond of equating it with the EFF as the opposite ends of extremism. They are keen to join the ANC complex in displacing the horrors of torture and slaughter by calling farm murders ordinary crime. Some ANC functionaries have said, with that knowing air of the cadre, that only about 5% are racially motivated. But if you take 3,000 murders as your benchmark, that’s still 150 race murders, seven or so a year in a country where such purported murders lead to riots and destruction if the victims are black. Contrast the callous indifference here with a scenario elsewhere: say 150 similar murders in Britain, or Australia, not to speak of the US.

What happens with displacement in psychological theories, very roughly, is that the mind’s energy is diverted into other channels. What this means politically can be explained by asking a reductio ad absurdum question: what happens if the criminals, those 95% just doing their jobs, and the 5% racist killers, run out of farmers? They go for other people.

In reality, this is happening, we just don’t know about it because it is subsumed in the vast other reaches of the political unconscious, those I mentioned earlier. The suspect in the Horner murder was caught when he began boasting about his deed; you can be sure others are boasting elsewhere too. Crime intelligence should pick that up — either they are too incompetent, or not telling us, which should then prompt the question: why not?

Lived experience

Even if there is no boasting, all of this should give us a simple formula: catch a farm murderer/torturer and you will remove a voracious danger to the rest of us. Yet the state, supported by the indifference of the commentariat, refuses to dedicate resources to this, washing its hands by saying it is just ordinary crime.

The most powerful engine of the political unconscious is lived experience, a beloved concept among activists. Farm murders are the suppressed lived experience of a majority of white people, those of us with relatives and friends living on farms. Sure, it can never be as bad as the hellish lives in squatter camps, but still I have sleepless nights over family members. I can’t help it. I worry about my agri-engineer nephew, and whether he should not go back to the Congo where he worked for some time, since it is safer there.

All this anxiety is displaced, sometimes literally, when farmers emigrate or get second farms in other countries to flee to. But also when they start thinking about “semigrating” to the Western Cape. The independence movement is not very well supported, but that’s on the surface. Something might be happening subconsciously that may endanger the republic: who knows?

• Pienaar is an author and fellow of the Johannesburg Institute of Advanced Study.