So let’s make up our own struggle song and see where we get.

Kill the Venda! Kill the vendor!

And then we justify it on the grounds that it refers to one of the miserable homelands the whites tried to foist on the blacks. Kill the Mphephus, those impimpi’s!

How will this go down? What would people of Venda origin make of it? Should they just say that it was in the spirit of the times and should still be sung lest we return to the homelands?

The likes of Cyril Ramaphosa, Mathatha Tsedu and Jovial Rantao (?) should then say the meaning has changed, nobody is punting for Vendas to be killed. We’ve all shucked off our ethnic identities and are now South Africans.

So far so good. After all the Vendas did not rule over the rest with passes, sjamboks and death squads. But then what about the ugly xenophobic riots in 2008, when it was well recorded that a substantial fraction of the victims were not foreigners, but migrants from South Africa’s peripheral areas. Among them must have been a few street vendors from Venda, the type whose wares were trashed and stolen by ANC Youth League members in front of Luthuli House the other day.

And then you have ANC figurehead and Ubuntu Award recipient Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, whose hate speech letter to journalist Nomavenda Mathiane in the 1980s has been recalled again in Frontline founder Denis Beckett’s recent memoir, Radical Middle. Although Mathiane was not of Venda origin, her name alone prompted racist invective – in those times, struggle types slagged each other off as “Vendas” during tiffs. And getting in Winnie’s bad books was a serious matter, of life and death.

It is disappointing to read usually incisive observers digging up all but discredited analytical tools from the old 20^th century intellectual arms cache. Judge Colin Lamont’s ban on the Dubul’ Ibhunu song, goes one response, is “code” for the maintenance of historical white privilege.

Much sloppy thinking is evident, such as equalising the ban on one song, with a ban on not only all other struggle songs, but the whole struggle history, when the judge and even the plaintiffs were at pains to say this was not so.

I would be very surprised if the ban is upheld by the Constitutional Court. It is quite apparent too, that it may all be down to a technical problem, a provision of the Equality Law clashing with the constitution. The latter will override the former, and allow songs such as Kill the Boer and Kill the Venda. Freedom of speech is indeed a fundamental right that should not be compromised on a legal level.

But the worst sophistry occurs around that word “code”. That’s because one man’s code is another’s road to perdition. Code is what not only Afrikaner farmers, not only farmers in general, but actually all South Africans have been trying to read these past few years with twitched ears and mouths agape in apprehension.

What do the 3 000 odd usually sadistic farm murders mean?

What does it mean when an MEC for safety and security says only about 5% of murders are racial (do the sums: still a whopping 1000 or so every year)?

What if she is not just incompetent?

How does one decode the knock at the door, the rustle of leaves in the garden? Or the quite evident and widespread loathness of the police to not only act on emergency calls, but act in time? Let alone act against rampant thievery on farms?

How should Afrikaner farmers read the ANC Youth League’s public tearing up of the names of farm murder victims, followed by the constant singing of “Kill the Boer” by its leader?  Do our analysts really expect them to tell themselves, don’t worry, go to sleep again, it’s just part of the continuing struggle against apartheid?

I recently read Paul Theroux’s riveting account of his bus and train trip from Cairo to the Cape, titled Dark Star Africa. It was a most enjoyable book, packed with insight, until he got to South Africa. All sorts of mistakes became spottable, since this part of Africa one knows better than others.

But what I found most disconcerting was his account of a meeting with a man who tried to persuade him that the farm murders were part of a new genocide. Of course, it is easy to dismiss such an obvious rightwing fanatic, since there is no evidence that there is any systematic campaign behind the murders.

However, Theroux’s description of what he was shown, photographs of mutilated and disembowelled corpses of farmers, and his reaction of eventual indifference to it, is bothersome. I respect Theroux too much to say it was a callous reaction, but many others who don’t care for good writing will not have such scruples.

That Afrikaner farmers should be stereotyped and demonised, is to be expected, because apartheid was not about picnics in own affairs parks, but not to expect any counterreaction is not very smart. For them, and Afrikaners in general, such indifference and stereotyping will become code for some other conviction: the world wants us sinners dead.

This is the code that Judge Lamont read, and which forced him to make the finding mandated by the equality laws. This is also the class of code that SA’s peripherals, the Venda’s, Pedi’s, Shangaans, makwerekweres, read when xenophobic chaos tears through their neighbourhoods.

How Afrikaners as a collective will react, is a moot point, since they have little power left. But what I observe is that code such as that produced by Theroux and our analysts are helping to revive ghosts from the past much older than the struggle against apartheid, the ghosts of independence and self-determination.

A ghost has the habit of being uncontrollable, unpredictable, unreliable. She may turn out to be meek and malleable, but she might not rely on perfume and earrings like Charlize Theron or Nataniel.

Tags: #, #Afrikaner, #Boer, #Charlize Theron, #Nataniel, #Pedi, #Shangaan, #Venda