Malema: By mourning and praising the queen, you are celebrating colonialism

Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) leader Julius Malema has criticised black people who are mourning the death of Queen Elizabeth II, saying they were celebrating colonialism.

The queen died on Thursday afternoon following a long battle with ill-health, Buckingham Palace confirmed in a statement.

Addressing a crowd following a march by different political parties to the Public Protector’s office on Friday, Malema said those are mourning the death of the queen are no different from Helen Zille.

“Heh we mourn the queen, we mourn the queen, but when Helen Zille tweeted and said colonialism was not all bad, you all said she is racist, ‘how can she praise colonialism?’ By mourning and praising the queen, you are celebrating colonialism, you are not different from Helen Zille,” said Malema.

“We were not colonised by the land called Britain, but the leadership of Britain that killed our people. We must not be asked to do wrong things here, we are very clear; the queen does not represent anything good. Britain has got a lot of gold yet they don’t have a single mine of gold. Those are stolen goods. We must talk about reparations, we must talk about the return of the gold and stolen diamonds and not these issues which are not important to us.

“How can you be oppressed for so many years and still have nothing to show that you’ve been liberated. You have no land, bank or mine. The only thing you have is hatred of other Africans. It was this Britain that gave us surnames, we didn’t have surnames, we used to call each other with our clan names. The surnames and addresses? We did not have an address because we used to move from one place to another according to the season. So today we are given addresses, borders and surnames because we must be controlled by a certain nation which we must celebrate.”

Zille made headlines following her tweets concerning colonialism on her return from a trip to Singapore in 2017.

In one of the tweets, Zille stated that “for those claiming legacy of colonialism was ONLY negative, think of our independent judiciary, transport, infrastructure, piped water etc.”

A complaint was later laid with public protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane by ANC member of the Western Cape provincial legislature, Khayalethu Magaxa.

In her report, Mkhwebane found that Zille had violated the Constitution and the Executive Ethics Code and that her tweets brought back a lot of pain and suffering to victims of apartheid and “celebrated the oppression, exploitation, racism and poverty which were the direct result of the legacy of colonialism”.

She found that the tweets divided society on racial grounds, were offensive and insensitive to a section of the South African population and were likely to cause racial tensions, divisions and violence in South Africa.

In court papers, Zille denied that the tweets could be interpreted in the way Mkhwebane and Magaxa did and said the tweets, read in context, expressed her view that in spite of the overall negativity of colonialism, its legacy had nevertheless left the country with some benefits.

“I did not state, and do not believe, that colonialism is worthy of celebration … I recognise that colonialism and apartheid subjugated and oppressed the majority in South Africa and benefited a minority on the basis of race.

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“This is indeed indefensible and I do not support, justify, praise or promote it in any way.”

Earlier this year, the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) set aside, with costs, the North Gauteng High Court’s dismissal of Zille’s application to have Mkhwebane’s report on her colonialism tweets reviewed.