“The land issue has been with us too long,” Malema declared in 2014, calling on his supporters to “be part of the occupation of land everywhere…in South Africa.” Malema has made the redistribution of white-owned land the central tenet of his party’s platform and urged South Africans to emulate the violent confiscations carried out two decades ago in neighboring Zimbabwe by loyalists to Robert Mugabe. In 2013 the ANC castoff founded the Economic Freedom Fighters ( EFF), now South Africa’s third-largest party and a threat on the ANC’s left flank. In fact, it was Zuma whose career ended in disgrace-he left office in 2018 and was sent to prison in July 2021 for defying a court order to answer multiple charges of fraud and corruption-while Malema has had a remarkable ascent. A day later he was expelled from the ANC for his defiance of Zuma, and many analysts and journalists assured me that his political career was finished. That day, surrounded by bodyguards, Malema fired up the crowd in Zulu, the language of the country’s largest ethnic group, and worshipful spectators mobbed him after he left the stage. At the time, Malema was engaged in a battle for control of the ANC with South African president Jacob Zuma, and his incendiary rhetoric-calling for the violent expropriation of white-owned farms, leading chants of “Kill the Boer,” the Afrikaans word for farmer-was at odds with Zuma’s cautious, business-friendly style. On a scorching summer morning ten years ago, I attended a rally in a mining settlement north of Johannesburg headlined by Julius Malema, the pudgy, firebrand former leader of the African National Congress’s Youth League.
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