Special Report Transcript Episode 48, Section 2, Time 09:44

‘Kill the Boer, Kill the Famer.’ // We need to talk about African tradition. This was not a statement. It’s not a statement of any kind and wouldn’t be read by any of this African youth as a statement. In Xhosa, this particular form of art is called ‘igwijo’ and igwijo is not a statement, is not a political statement, it’s a chant. For instance, ‘amaKwenkwe,’ [young men] when they’re going over long distances they would be doing this thing. It’s not a statement. You see part of the problem with this is that somebody who comes from outside of that African culture interpreted it and indeed when you write there. Peter Mokaba said, ‘kill a Boer, kill a farmer,’ he didn’t in the sense of a statement which represents policy and it would not have been taken as a statement that represents policy. So, there’s no ANC policy which says, ‘kill a farmer, kill a boer’ and all that. But there would be amagwijo of all sorts. You have a Zulu song, not quite igwijo but its traditional songs, ‘Ngeke ngiye mina KwaZulu kwafela uma wam.’ Now, that’s not a statement that I’m making that I’ll never visit Zululand, it’s a song. I really don’t think that this … certainly …I don’t know whether Peter is here, he likes doing these things and you could do different ones and you could translate them. There are different chants, and they would be saying different things, different things about the struggle. This particular one was picked out as I say, and interpreted from outside of African culture and presented as a political statement. It never was. // Would I be correct in saying that what you’ve communicated to us is more or less what we have in most traditional cultures, also Afrikaans, songs like ‘Siembamba, mamma se kindjie, draai sy nek om, gooi hom in die sloot, trap op sy kop dan is hy dood,’ [Simbamba, mother’s little child, wring his neck, throw him in the gutter, step on his head till he’s dead] but you rock the baby to sleep. That’s what you’re saying to us.

Notes: ANC rally; Thabo Mbeki; Laughter; Wynand Malan (Truth Commissioner); Laughter

References: there are no references for this transcript