The Last Train to Zona Verde by Paul Theroux

courts for uttering hate speech, Malema was a possible future leader of South Africa. Indeed, he was a leader now, though a divisive one. Only thirty years old, but wealthy, dangerous, and vindictive, he was just reckless enough to seek the highest office. The current president, Jacob Zuma, who, as his mentor, seemed an older, cannier version of this arrogant bully, had begun to fear him. Like Zuma, Malema had — so newspaper investigationsreported — enriched himself through shady deals and backhanders in state contracts. As a result, he owned a newly built mansion in a posh suburb of Johannesburg.
    Malema had presided over the Youth League since 2008, and pictures of him, fist upraised, ranting at a microphone, from year to year showed him sequentially swelling, an intense black wire of a man transformed, growing fatter and balder until his big smooth head was almost without features, like an overinflated balloon with eyes swollen to wicked slits, a face that did not achieve any expression except when, with popping eyes and bared teeth, he succeeded in inspiring fear by spreading racist menace.
    Popular among the black urban poor for his unapologetic insults, his bellowed speeches were widely quoted. So were his unruly press conferences, where he went out of his way to humiliate journalists and anyone else who disagreed with him, especially members of the foreign press. His abuse was memorable for being blunt: “stupid,” “imperialist,” “little tea girl,” “go away!” It seemed that no one in the government knew what to do with him, and that malicious thought gave him pleasure, because the more he was censured, the greater was his defiance.
    Those noisy obedient souls who were his following had the leisure to show up any time, anywhere they were summoned, to cheer him, wave signs, and jump up and down — his audience’s peculiar display of approval was energetic jumping, giving a Malema rally the look of an enormous aerobics class. These jumpers were nearly all young, unemployed males from the townships — hardly reassuring to Malema’s opponents (of whom there were many) since the largest proportion of out-of-work South Africans lived in the townships. They were the many millions with nothing to do and nowhere to go, for whom Malema offered a diabolical sort of hope in the politics of racial incitement.
    Demagoguery in Africa, as far as speechifying was concerned, had never mattered much. Though spitting and screaming speecheswere fairly common among up-and-coming party hacks, a gift for oratory was not crucial to an African politician aiming to be a tyrant. The traditional chiefs and kings did not engage in public speaking, but merely whispered their wishes to their right-hand man — the
porte-parole
in West African kingship, the “chief’s messenger” in East and Central Africa — the mouthpiece who conveyed the words that had to be obeyed.
    Though the sympathies and howls of the rabble, the poor, the mob, might be helpful, they were seldom decisive factors in promoting a man to power, unless the mob was also well armed. In every African tyranny it was the army’s loyalty to the leader and its impartial cruelty that made the difference. Once a leader established himself as a dictator, he controlled his country through the army and the police, supplemented by the thuggery of self-appointed intimidators in the ruling party’s youth league. Speechmaking was irrelevant; if you had armed men on your side, no further persuasion was needed. An African dictator could be a mute and merciless enforcer and spend many decades in power without ever being seen in public.
    But, oddly and perhaps unique to Africa, music always mattered to the political process. Never mind the speeches — who had the patience to listen to the lies? Along with the gun, music was the most persuasive influence in African political life, as it was in African culture; politics was dominated by rousing songs. This had always been the