FORMER ANC youth leader Julius Malema has suggested that South Africa white people should have their land taken from them, through violence if necessary.
The example of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe was an inspiration, he told a gathering of Mugabe’s Zanu-PF youth wing in Harare last weekend. He said Africans should not have to pay current landowners anything for land which, he maintained, white people had acquired through violence.
“Actually they killed people to get that land and those minerals. We are not going to give them money when we take the land back because it will be like we are thanking them with money for killing our people.
“We will never do that; little did they know that we are not scared of blood. We are scared of defeat. We don’t want to be defeated but seeing blood is not what we are scared of as long as that blood delivers what belongs to us, we are prepared to go to that extent,” he was quoted saying by Zimbabwean media.
The former African National Congress Youth League leader was in Zimbabwe last weekend to attend a wedding when he called on white people to surrender their land because “when they came from Europe they did not carry any land into South Africa”. The firebrand politician’s political fortunes have revived since he aligned himself with striking miners in South Africa and maintained black South Africans should not have to pay for resources white people, he says, committed murder to get.
However, since his expulsion from the ANC early this year, he has been charged with money laundering relating to a multimillion rand tender fraud in his home province of Limpopo, and more charges are expected to be made against him in the coming months.
Mr Malema told his audience he had travelled to Zimbabwe to gain inspiration and wisdom, so he could return to South Africa and “double the spirit of fighting against imperialist forces”, rather than to escape his legal woes.
“We are coming here to Zimbabwe not because we are running away from problems, but to come and gain strength because what you have achieved is an inspiration to Africa,” he said.
The white pressure group Afriforum responded to Mr Malema’s account of South African history by saying if he was advocating the return of land to indigenous South Africans in his latest outburst then he too must hand over what he has acquired in recent years.
“Malema’s ancestors also migrated southward [from central Africa] and arrived here in South Africa without land,” chairman Charl Oberholzer said.
