The Last Train to Zona Verde by Paul Theroux Page B

(The cowards are scared)
    Dubula dubula (Shoot shoot)
    Ayeah
    Dubula dubula (Shoot shoot)
    Ayasab’ amagwala (The cowards are scared)
    Dubula dubula (Shoot shoot)
    Awu yoh
    Dubula dubula (Shoot shoot)
    Aw dubul’ibhunu (Shoot the Boer)
    Dubula dubula (Shoot shoot)
    Except for the misguided folk who sang this with Malema at his political rallies, the song was condemned in newspaper editorials and by many citizens as hate speech, calling it an embarrassment and a backward step for the country. *
    But wait: one voice was raised in defense of Julius Malema, fat and sassy in his canary-yellow baseball cap and canary-yellow T-shirt, his fist raised, shouting “Shoot the Boer — shoot, shoot.” This supporting voice was the confident brogue of the Irish singer Paul Hewson, known to the world as the ubiquitous meddler Bono, the frontman of U2. He loved the song. The multimillionaire rocker, on his band’s “360-Degree Tour” in South Africa in 2011, had squinted through his expensive sunglasses, tipped his cowboy hat in respect, and asserted that “Shoot the Boer” had fondly put him in mind of the protest songs sung by the Irish Republican Army.
    “When I was a kid and I’d sing songs,” Bono reminisced to the
Sunday Times
in Johannesburg, “I remember my uncles singing … rebel songs about the early days of the IRA.”
    He treated the reporter to a ditty about an Irishman carrying a gun, and added, alluding to “Shoot the Boer,” “It’s fair to say it’s folk music.”
    So willing was Bono to ingratiate himself — and, in his haste or ignorance, oblivious of the grotesque murder statistics and the horror of people who feared for their lives — that he went out of his way in his approval of the racist song, bolstering his argument withthe observation that “Shoot the Boer” was a thoroughly Irish sentiment. Maybe so; though many disagreed, Irish and South Africans alike. His comments caused howls of rage by people in South Africa who noted the paradox that, just the year before, in April 2010, Bono (sharing the stage with former president Bill Clinton) had been honored by the Atlantic Council, which conferred on him the Distinguished Humanitarian Leadership Award.
    And here I was, reading this in a bus headed north through the high veldt, with a man who might well have been a Zulu in the seat in front of me, an elderly black woman behind me, and two men who were undoubtedly Boer farmers conversing in Afrikaans in the seat across the aisle.
    Into the heartland we went, down the main streets of small towns that were lined by the arcades and porticoes of hardware stores and old shops, past the immense farms and spectacular landscapes of the Northern Cape — a great relief, and uplifting after my experience of the dense dogtowns and squatter camps and townships and the fortified suburbs.
    Many of the South Africans I’d met had wanted to be reassured. How are we doing? they’d asked, but obliquely. How did South Africa compare to the country I had seen on my trip ten years before and written about in
Dark Star Safari
? I could honestly say it was brighter and better, more confident and prosperous, though none of it was due to any political initiative. The South African people had made the difference, and would continue to do so, no thanks to a government that embarrassed and insulted them with lavish personal spending, selfishness, corruption, outrageous pronouncements, hollow promises, and blatant lies.
    The new prosperity was evident as we traveled up the N1 highway past Century City, which was still being developed when I was last in South Africa and had grown to an enormous complex of houses, high-rises, and “the largest shopping mall in Africa,” Canal Walk, with hundreds of stores, resembling its sister stereotype, the residentialcommunity and shopping center in Florida or California, after which it had been modeled. And serving the same purpose: the middle-class flight from the city, seeking space