“Lindiwe Zulu is a street meid.”
The comment about the minister of small business development
dropped like deadweight into a hot conference room at the Economic Freedom
Fighters’ (EFF) headquarters in Braamfontein, Johannesburg.
We saw it go down, watched the dust settle and looked away.
EFF leader Julius Malema has said some winning one-liners in
the past, but the journalists assembled in the room on Friday didn’t know what
to do with this one.
Malema, however, toyed with it for a bit. It was day five of
his suspension from Parliament and the charismatic leader must have felt left
out of the action the previous day.
Pandemonium had erupted among the remaining EFF members in
Parliament and their new friends, the Democratic Alliance, in what has to be
the most awkward temporary alliance ever. The ANC-led house’s attempts to adopt
a resolution exonerating President Jacob Zuma from upgrades to his private home
in Nkandla resulted in several hours of filibustering, and eventually riot police being summoned.
Responding to Thursday’s events, Malema referenced one
incident, where Zulu had a verbal tiff with the EFF’s Godrich Gardee inside the
National Assembly Chamber.
Zulu signalled to Gardee to take the matter outside, Sapa
reported. Gardee did not follow her out and shaky video footage showed a
furious Zulu being physically restrained as she shouted for him to come out.
At the press conference on Friday, Malema described her
actions with disgust and repeatedly called her a “street meid”.
It is a slang phrase, more commonly pronounced “straat meid”
that generally refers to a rough woman, sometimes a prostitute, who is uncouth
and wild. Interpretations differ but Malema’s continued statements made his
understanding of the term clear.
“She’s like that … How do you take such a thing seriously? A
woman who goes to the streets and says, ‘come I’m waiting for you’.” He even
said that she had raised her skirt.
Echoing Mugabe
Malema hammered the sentiment home when he referenced
Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s similar comments about Zulu in July 2013.
When she was international relations adviser to Zuma, Zulu
questioned Zimbabwe’s readiness to hold free and fair elections, and earned
Mugabe’s ire.
He told Zuma to make Zulu “shut up” and, according to
reports, called her a “street woman”.
“Mugabe called her a street meid … he had evidence about
that,” said Malema, adding: “Mugabe didn’t apologise to South Africa – South
Africa apologised to him.”
(Malema is wrong on that. Zulu recounted how Mugabe took her aside and apologised.)
Malema quickly moved on to the next topic of his mental
rolodex of outrage. We almost missed the sexism: he slipped it between several
other laugh-out-loud statements, which had the assembled journalists eating out
of his hand.
“We need to break our virginity in a memorable way,” he said
to laughter when he described the party’s first forthcoming national conference
and the attendant teething issues.
The statement about Zulu followed just after this.
It’s difficult to confront sexism dished out as casually as
that. Like the popular kid in the class, Malema has a way of creating a
protective layer around himself in a room. He dishes out hilarious one-liners
usually at some or other person’s expense and has everyone giggling along while
he grins winningly. It’s hard to argue with that.
But I had to at least try. In the next round of questions I
stuck up my hand and asked Malema to clarify his statements about Zulu,
particularly in light of what he had said about the ANC. “I find your
statements quite sexist.”
Malema was polite but unrepentant.
“When you behave like a street meid you are a street meid
whether you are male or a female. We are not saying that only to her. If there
is a male who behaves like that we’ll call him that too …There is no other
description except street meid.”
It was a weak save but Malema was still the popular kid in
the room. He joked about it, put up his fists to emulate Zulu’s supposed stance
and had most in the room chuckling again.
ANC and sexism
As the comment proliferated on Twitter, South African author
Margie Orford captured the ugliness underlying Malema’s choice of insult.
“[It’s a] weird use of apartheid insults and sexual
discourse,” she tweeted. “[It] taps into older and deeper wounds than just
calling someone a whore straight out.”
The choice of person, too ,is interesting. Zulu is a breath
of fresh air in politics: someone who speaks frankly and unapologetically
voices her opinion. This is not the sort of woman a certain kind of South
African would like to see.
The worst part about Malema’s statements on Friday is that he
had earlier spent at least 20 minutes calling out the ruling ANC itself for
sexism. Its deployees in Parliament called the riot police in to manhandle a
black woman from the EFF when she refused to leave the house, but did not do
the same to a white man from the opposition DA.
“How do you arrest a black female and leave a white male?”
bellowed Malema. “He is not touched by police because he is a male. That is
sexism. That is what the ANC suffers from. Racism and sexism.”
Malema’s sudden
championing of gender causes after a dubious history on the issue is
nothing new.
It is a move that gender experts have slammed as
opportunistic. The EFF’s top leaders are men and Malema has made some dodgy
statements about women in the past. Most people are happy to let bygones be
bygones, however, and allow Malema his new guise as a gender champion. It’s a
welcome change, given the deathly silence on the issue from the majority of our
political leaders.
But at Friday’s press conference, the mask slipped and old
prejudices were revealed.
