The Last Train to Zona Verde by Paul Theroux Page A

case. In the early 1960s in Nyasaland (soon to be Malawi) the defining song was “Zonse Zimene za Kamuzu Banda” — “Everything Belongs to Kamuzu Banda,” both a hymn and a prediction, in praise of the incoming prime minister, sung in villages, at political meetings, and by the students at my little school. Banda took power, suppressed and jailed the opposition, and went on to rule (the music still playing) for the next thirty-four years.
    South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma had his personal anthem,which he sang and danced to in public at every opportunity. It was a song from the struggle, about his machine gun.
    Umshini wami, umshini wami (My machine gun, my machine gun)
    We Baba (O Father)
    Awulethu, umshini wami (Please bring me my machine gun)
    An inconvenient fact is that South Africa was not liberated by all-out war and certainly not by machine-gun-toting guerrillas. There was no Gettysburg in South Africa, only the waste ground of Sharpeville, which was the site of a one-sided massacre of sixty-nine unarmed protesters. Mandela was not sprung from Robben Island by an indignant mob in a mass, Bastille-storming movement of prisoner liberation. Toward the end of his sentence, Mandela was secretly transferred to a serene, bucolic, country-house setting in the winelands where, with the connivance of the white government, he quietly awaited elections and the transfer of power.
    Violent protest, sabotage, and armed struggle had been factors, but not decisive ones, in South African independence, which was gained through stubbornness, labor unrest, paralyzing strikes, public disorder, backroom negotiations, economic sanctions, and especially foreign pressure. The South African army was well armed and overwhelming. Independence was not taken but given, and was long overdue, in the drip-drip-drip of history’s inevitability. Zuma’s machine-gun anthem, and his war dance to its tune, was merely grimly comic posturing, but it had symbolic value to a populace that still felt aggrieved.
    Julius Malema — uneducated, corrupt, canny, crazy-acting, and power mad — much resembled Zuma. He was one of Zuma’s supporters and had a personal anthem too, called “Shoot the Boer.” Like Zuma, he sang it with exaggerated gusto, hamming it up. You might be excused for thinking — if you didn’t know the meaning of thewords — that this was exuberant clowning, like a turn in a minstrel show, mimicking an “end man” in blackface, shuffling and playing for laughs; the only prop lacking was a banjo or a tambourine.
    But he was serious. A huge headline in the
Cape Argus
I was reading on the bus concerned Malema, denouncing the man for defiantly leading his followers in singing his signature hate song because it seemed he would not stop singing it. “Shoot the Boer” was perfect for a black South African politician on the make — tuneful, with few words, easy to remember, anti-white, and an incitement to murder.
    This song, too, had come out of the struggle, but the country had moved on, as it had moved on from
Bring me my machine gun
. Yet there were a great many people in South Africa who liked the message of murder and revenge, because many had yet to find any work, any wealth, any place for themselves, and they were envious of the visibly rich and enraged over them. These disaffected people were the township toughs who stoned trains, hijacked cars, and terrorized neighborhoods with brazen robberies that sent crime statistics soaring. With an annual homicide rate of 32,000, and rapes amounting to more than 70,000, South Africa led the world in 2011 in reported rapes and murders.
    Given that “Shoot the Boer” advocated the killing of white farmers, it was another dire statistic that, since apartheid was banned in 1994, more than 3,000 white farmers had been murdered by black assassins. Most of the victims had been ambushed on isolated farms in the veldt. The anthem’s lyrics in Zulu were brutally simple:
    Ayasab’ amagwala