Press coverage of Malema has tended to focus most of all on his tendency
to play on (if not actively to incite) sentiments of racial resentment
and score-Â�settling (as when he told a crowd, to “deafening applause,” that
in the South Africa he envisioned in ten years, domestic servants would
be white) together with his weakness for loose and irresponsible threats
of violence against white landholders (most famously in his deliberately
provocative use of the old struggle song “Kill the Boer”).7 There is no
doubt that a crude and demagogic racial politics is a key part of his populist
appeal as well as a key reason for the disdain expressed toward him
by many pundits and mainstream politicians. But our understanding of
the passions to which Malema gives voice will be incomplete if we see
in them only a negative resentment and not also a positive aspiration.
And that aspiration is not simply to democracy or po�liti�cal equality but to
something even more explosive and difficult to realize. It is an aspiration
to ownÂ�ership. “How,” he asks, “does South Africa belong to all of us when
the majority of our people do not own anything?”8