Court verdict comes as the populist politician Julius Malema faces internal disciplinary charges that could see him kicked out of the ANC. Louise Gray reports

Julius Malema, the president of the South African ANC Youth League, has been warned that he faces jail if he repeats his public calls of “Shoot the Boer”, a refrain from an apartheid-era song that advocates the killing of white Afrikaners.

Malema had sung sections of “Ayesaba Amagwala” (“The Cowards Are Scared”), a Zulu-language song that contains the words “Shoot the Boer” on many public occasions, including at a student rally in March 2010.

On 12 September 2011 at Johannesburg High Court, Judge Colin Lamont described the song as “derogatory, dehumanising and hurtful” to Afrikaans speakers living in South Africa. He ordered Malema to pay costs for the case, which was brought by AfriForum, an Afrikaaner civil rights group, and the Transvaal Agricultural Union. “People must develop new customs in an open society by giving up old practices,” said Lamont. “The enemy has become the friend, the brother.” Judge Lamont’s verdict upholds earlier rulings made last year made by high courts in both South Gauteng and Pretoria. It is presently unclear whether Malema, a young politician whose firebrand populism is viewed with alarm in many quarters, will appeal.

“Ayesaba Amagwala” is a historic song that Malema and some sections of the ANC have claimed as an important artefact of the epic struggles-era heritage. “Boer”, which translates as farmer in Afrikaans, has been to denote South Africa’s Afrikaner settlers since the 1880s. However, since the end of apartheid and the accession of South Africa’s Rainbow nation, the song has had an uneasy tenor as democracy has been established.

A precedent for Malema’s espousal of “Shoot the boer” can be seen in the chants employed by an earlier populist politician, Peter Mokaba, whose chants of “kill the boer” were censored in the 1990s. In the Johannesburg court, AfriForum expert witness, retired music academic Anne-Marie Gray, spoke of the “trance-like atmosphere” created by the repetition of “dubul’ ibhunu” (“shoot the Boer”). Accompanied by gestures and dancing, “it becomes much more aggressive and threatening… It almost sweeps you off your feet. It makes you want to do something.”

ANC watchers will see in Malema’s high court defeat a decline in the young populist politician’s fortunes. Once tipped as a successor to President Jacob Zuma as the head of the ANC, it is now likely that Malema will have to reconsider his future. In addition to the “shoot the boer” case, Malema is facing expulsion form the ANC for challenging Zuma and is under investigation for alleged bribe-taking. If found guilty, Malema could be expelled from the ANC. Outside a disciplinary hearing convened by the ANC in Johannesburg on 30 August 2011 to consider these issues, Malema’s supporters are reported to have held placards reading “South Africa for blacks only” and hurled rocks and burned t-shirts bearing Zuma’s likeness. Police fought back with tear gas and water cannon.

Just as Malema’s fierce and ambitious populism has found favour with some disadvantaged black South Africans, many of whom have seen few of the benefits of black majority rule, it has alarmed white South Africans. Since 1994 and the end of apartheid, over 3,000 farmers — the majority of them white — have been murdered in the Rainbow Nation, and in April 2010 white supremacist leader Eugène Terreblanche was murdered.

Malema has long been a thorn in the side for the ANC’s hierarchy. In contravention of official polices, he has commended Robert Mugabe’s land-grabbing exercises in neighbouring Zimbabwe and called for the nationalisation of mines. In 2009, he was fined 50,000 rand by the Equality Court for suggesting that the women who accused Zuma of raping them had actually enjoyed their sexual encounters with the president. (Zuma had been acquitted of all charges of rape three years earlier.)

While the South African judges have given an unequivocal statement on the the status of hate songs such “Ayesaba Amagwala”, it remains to be seen if Malema can be reined in.

Louise Gray writes for the Wire and New Internationalist. Her No-Nonsense Guide to World Music was published in 2009 by New Internationalist