After banning our songs, what next?

the song “Dubula ibhunu”, and ended with its ban by South African high court Judge Colin Lamont Monday last week.
It is important to examine the implications of the challenge and the ban within the context of international law.
It is also important to examine how this ruling will impact on apartheid practices which the Afrikaner community and former colonialists might deem offensive and undesirable.
The preamble to United Nations General Assembly’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights states in part: “… the recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice, and peace in the world…” and “… the advent in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people…”
Article 19 states:
“Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impact information and ideas through any media regardless of frontiers.”
In this regard, I have often wondered why the law is sometimes described in very uncomplimentary terms – “the law is an ***” – until this ruling deemed that a 70-year old anti-apartheid struggle song constituted hate speech and should therefore not be sung, in public nor in private. One single act silenced us all. It also exonerated the evil system of apartheid, and made the Truth and Reconciliation exercise a non-event.
This single ruling was translated by revolutionaries the world over as an act of aggression against southern Africa’s liberation movements.
It was a clear demonstration that as a people who fought for self-determination, we cannot celebrate yet. The freedom which we got at a heavy price is under threat from Roman-Dutch law. Not Zulu law, not Xhosa law, but Roman-Dutch law which has placed itself above Africa’s laws.
The law seeks once again to use that fine print to gag people because that law knows full well that the full price is what the people want: total economic emancipation of Africa.
I ask: they have started with our cultural forms of expression through song. Tomorrow, what will they be after? What will they seek to silence considering the bounties they are getting in Africa?
This interpretation of the law is using the very tactic they employed when they colonised Africa. We remember those dark historical moments when everything African was deemed barbaric and unacceptable, but they still wanted it.
To Afrikaners, architects of the evil apartheid system, this was a victory against Julius Malema, ANC Youth League leader whose actions are a thorn in their flesh because of their dominance of South Africa’s economy.
What is very surprising is that we have a system claiming victory against an individual, but at the same time failing to realise that the said individual is part of a people with norms and values.
We can also argue until the cows come home about the meaning of the song and its implications on today’s society, but the bottom line as far as I am concerned is that in a South Africa that claims to have one of the best constitutions, we have just seen that freedom of expression is under threat, again. When a court of law bans a song, it is nothing but censorship, which has no place in a modern world and its villagised nature.
But more critically, what the judge did last week was to censor our liberation struggles, and the manner they were fought. Judge Lamont also used the law to determine how the African narrative should be told.
Song and dance were an integral part of our revolutions to dislodge settler colonialism and now neo-colonialism. It was not coincidental that this form of communication that appeals to the people was used. It is a cultural trait that we are proud of.
Ours is an oral culture, and these liberation songs were nothing but an extension of our being. We continue to sing them for posterity and because there is this stark realisation that political independence was the first step to the final realisation of our sovereignty.
If we were to put together all the songs sung since the white man landed in Africa and then add them to songs sung by the ANC’s Umkhonto weSizwe; Zanla, Zipra, Swapo, Frelimo, MPLA what would we come up with? Would Judge Lamont find them offensive and ban them? Using which yardstick?
I have done my fair share of singing South African liberation war songs, and as long as they are a part of our being, I see no reason why I should stop.
O thina siyalila eAfrika (O, we cry in Africa)
Sikhalela ilizwe lethu iAfrika (We cry out for our land)
Elathathwa ngabamhlophe iAfrica (That was robbed by the whites Africa).
The paradox is that these same courts at one point deemed apartheid a justifiable law.
What the law is also telling us is that apartheid cannot be recreated in books and/other artistic forms as historical pieces because this would encourage hate.
The banning of “Dubula ibhunu” is nothing but a statement that courts of law can silence people’s history, no matter how ugly.
Okay, Malema might not publicly sing the song, but what does the law say about others singing this song?
What does it also say about the mediums that carry recordings of the song and/or materials like books where the lyrics are recorded? Should they be burnt or expurgated from libraries and the Internet?
The Judge’s ruling also made people look at the interpretation of the law and the linguistic element in the song.
Judge Lamont in his argument said to determine whether the song was hate speech, it is the view of those who see it as such that must be used. “If the words have different meanings then each meaning must be considered and be accepted as a meaning,” said Lamont. “The search is not to discover an exclusive meaning but to find the meaning the target group would reasonably attribute to the words.”
He argued further, “All hate speech has an effect. Not only upon the target group but also upon the group participating in the utterance,” said Lamont.
Former South African president Frederick de Klerk last Friday concurred: “It is the only exception in our Constitution, negotiated between all parties in this country – saying, yes, freedom of speech (is) one of the cornerstones, but no hate speech, that’s the one exception”.He added, “The lawyer in me says it’s hate speech and the linguistic in me calls it hate speech.”
How amazing considering that apartheid afforded De Klerk the privileges that gave rise to the composition and singing of “Dubula ibhunu”.
Before the ruling, a South African activist had argued: “What happened in South Africa is that those who do not speak the language and who were not involved in the singing of the songs, have been allowed to interpret – out of ignorance – what those songs meant, using their own terms of reference and then consign them too to historical oblivion. But where was the ANC?
“Surely it would have been simple enough to explain what the many songs that spoke of ‘ukubulala amabhunu’ were referring to.
“In Zulu and Xhosa, ‘ibhunu’ or ‘amabhunu’ (plural) does not refer to Boer, in the sense of the Boer people – as in, say, the Boers of the Voortrekker Monument. Just because ‘Boer’ also means ‘farmer’ in Afrikaans, does not mean that ‘ibhunu’ means ‘farmer’ in Zulu or Xhosa! This is such a ridiculous interpretation that one would have thought that a six-year old child could have pointed it out to the learned judge (“Fetch me a six-year old child!’ – as Groucho Marx once spat out in a memorable comic aside).
“No, when the comrades sang their songs, in Angola, Tanzania, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and in South Africa, ‘ibhunu’ meant the enemy – a greedy, selfish, brutal upholder of a criminal system of racial oppression and exploitation. And if any in today’s ‘Rainbow Nation’ feels this applies to them, there is all the more reason why the songs should be sung.”
Do other liberation movements agree with Judge Lamont’s decision or they are with the ANC?