GARETH VAN ONSELEN: Julius Malema’s racial scapegoating is working
The EFF is filtering out the most racist, radical and angry members of the alienated morass that is the ANC support base
From behind the podium at a series of EFF rallies in KwaZulu-Natal this past weekend, EFF leader Julius Malema reproduced a range of now familiar and bigoted slurs about Indian South Africans. They included the suggestion that “the Indian community must rework their mentality that they are closer to whiteness” and that they pay “our people” a pittance, typically in form of food and old clothes, instead of money. Malema has been pushing this line hard for a couple of years now, always in KwaZulu-Natal. In 2017 he suggested that, “Here in KwaZulu-Natal, everything strategic is given to Indian families” and called on Indians to “respect Africans”, because they were “ill-treating them”. In fact, he claimed, “they are treating them worse than [the] Afrikaners”. “They don’t pay our people,” he said, “they pay them with food parcels, it must come to an end.” And so on and so forth, all of this being just a part of a long list of anti-Indian sentiments that fluctuate between racial scaremon...
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