Camalita Naicker on Marikana as an Event in the Subaltern Sphere of Politics

South Africa in the Twilight of Liberalism

Richard Pithouse, Kafila

South Africa was supposed to be different. We attained our freedom, such as these things are, after everyone else but Palestine. It was late in the day but the afternoon sun was glorious and the best people, people who had passed through the long passage of struggle, told us that we would be able to avoid the mistakes made everywhere else.

There was a mass movement that, whatever its limits, had won tremendous popular support and carried some noble ideals through its travails. Its leaders cast long shadows. Our Constitution, we were always told, was as good as they get. Liberalism, apparently vindicated by history, had its evident limits but there was, it was said, lots of room for deft manoeuvre within those constraints. We were assured that there was room for everyone at what Aimé Césaire had called the ‘rendezvous of victory’.

Malema's feminist mask slips over Zulu street meid comment

Verashni Pillay, Mail & Guardian

“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 MPs embody local-level ANC culture

Nomalanga Mkhize, Business Day

THERE’s an African idiom that warns that if you let your child be a menace to the community, one day that same child will chase you around the house with your own sjambok. The idiom warns of the stark humiliation awaiting elders who leave the disciplining of their young so late that they develop incorrigible tendencies. One could argue that ever since his expulsion in 2012, Julius Malema has been chasing the African National Congress (ANC) all about the village with its own sjambok.

Why EFF supports the land struggle

Mbuyiseni Ndlozi, The Star

Johannesburg - Section 33 of the EFF’s founding manifesto states that “the EFF will be involved in mass movements and community protests that seek the betterment of people’s lives. The EFF will also associate with movements that demand land through land occupation, aimed at making the message clear that our people do need land”.

So it should come as no surprise that Ward 86 of the EFF in Tshwane supports the community struggle in Nellmapius. Struggles like this are community struggles that come out of the material conditions of homelessness.

The Deafening Silence of the EFF's Women Leaders

Siphokazi Magadla, SACSIS

“All we are asking is that he pay back the money, why are we getting thrown out?” was the question that came from a parliamentary member of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), who was identified in a Voice of America news report, as “Female EFF member” on 21 August, the day the EFF chanted “pay back the money”, to a humiliated and ill-looking Jacob Zuma. Right before Mbuyiseni Ndlozi, the EFF spokesperson started chanting, I hoped for a longer exchange between parliamentary speaker, Baleka Mbete, and the “Female EFF member”.

Eusebius McKaizer Interviews Achille Mbembe on his article on the EFF

Juju prances into the gaps left by ANC

Achille Mbembe, Mail & Guardian

Julius Malema’s Economic Freedom Fighters is arguably the most intriguing, if controversial, political movement to emerge in the aftermath of apartheid. It has fired South Africa’s cultural imagination, attracted unprecedented levels of curiosity and raised high levels of expectation, while being subjected to enormous scrutiny.

Raymond Suttner on Democracy in the Current Conjuncture

Will The Centre Hold: Julius Malema and the EFF Take A Sho’t Left

Kwanele Sosibo, The Con

In South Africa’s platinum belt, life and politics are as hard as the earth on which they are contested: natural resources and poverty are plentiful, and support for the ruling ANC is in short supply following the brutal events at Marikana. In this article, first published in the current issue of the Chimurenga Chronic, Kwanele Sosibo revisits the launch of the Economic Freedom Fighters and confronts the opportunistic benevolence, the rhetoric of revival and the promise of renewal in the land of ‘permanently incomplete’.

Julius Malema: It's Just a Jump to the Left, And Then a Step to the Right

Richard Pithouse, SACSIS

Being against [one form of] evil doesn't make you good.

- Ernest Hemingway, Islands in the Stream, 1952

Over the last ten years or so there has been an extraordinary degree of popular protest in South Africa. The seemingly incorrigible elitism of the higher reaches of our public sphere has meant that, particularly in the absence of sustained formal organisation, popular protest has seldom won the right to represent itself in this space. For years the media, NGOs, academy and political parties were able to substitute the presentation of their own assumptions, frequently inflected with crude stereotypes, for rational and democratic engagement. However now that the scale and tenacity of popular dissent is being more widely recognised there is an astonishing array of actors trying to capture it, or bits of it, including political parties, NGOs, activists of various sorts, minor political sects, entrepreneurs, tenderpreneurs and people with religious, ethnic and cultural projects.

Julius Malema’s Economic Freedom Fighters and the South African Left

Benjamin Fogel, Africa is a Country

In geographer Gillian Hart’s excellent Rethinking the South African Crisis, she points to a rather curious phenomenon as part of her engagement with the figure of one Julius Malema and the ‘populist’ turn he represents. She notes that for a change the far left and liberal right’s politics converge in the sense that they both share the same critique of the ex-Youth League president and current commander-in-chief of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF).

EFF and the return of the warrior citizen

by Siphokazi Magadla, Thought Leader

The advent of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) has gained much attention as the first clear reconfiguration of youth politics in post-apartheid South Africa. Much has been discussed about the policies proposed by “Commander-in-Chief” Julius Malema and his commissars, especially those regarding nationalisation and the appropriation of land. While there has been some discussion about the significance of the red beret, there has been little discussion about the significance of the military nature of the language used by the EFF. This language is important in the South African context because it demonstrates the extent to which “peace” in South Africa is evidently militarised peace.