EFF ramps up support for Malema:
As support is being mobilised across the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) ahead of leader Julius Malema’s return to the dock next week, unease grows within the party over the potential outcome of his pre-sentencing proceedings.
Party structures across provinces are coordinating for supporters expected to gather outside the East London magistrates court, where proceedings will resume before magistrate Twanett Olivier.
In January, thousands of supporters gathered outside the court, wearing party regalia and chanting slogans in defense of their leader.
Party officials said buses were arranged from multiple provinces to show a coordinated national effort to demonstrate unity.
A similar turnout is expected when proceedings resume, with mobilisation efforts intensified in recent weeks through branch structures and regional command teams.
A senior leader told the Mail & Guardian that the mobilisation is not only about supporting Malema in court but also about reinforcing internal cohesion at a time of uncertainty.
“Seeing what our party has gone through in the recent months, this will help us in our work to rebuild our structures following electoral setbacks, making the upcoming court appearance a focal point for demonstrating organisational strength,” the leader explained.
Malema was convicted in October last year on charges linked to the discharge of a firearm during the party’s fifth anniversary rally in Mdantsane in the Eastern Cape in 2018.
The court found him guilty of unlawful possession of a firearm and ammunition, discharging a firearm in a built-up area and reckless endangerment after video footage showed him firing a rifle into the air while addressing supporters.
Pre-sentencing proceedings, which began earlier this year, were postponed, leaving the party in uncertainty as it awaits the court’s decision.
If Malema is sentenced to more than 12 months without a fine, he will be disqualified from parliament and barred from public office for five years, a development that could significantly alter his formal political role.
As the court date approaches, some East London residents and business owners have raised concerns about safety and the potential for unrest if the outcome goes against Malema.
“We have seen before how quickly things can change when emotions are high,” said a shop owner near the court.
“People are worried that if the judgment does not go his way, the situation could become unpredictable.”
“It is not just about the court case, it is about the crowds,” said a resident.
“We are concerned about safety and whether businesses will be able to operate normally.”
Some business owners said they were considering adjusting operating hours on the day of the court appearance, citing uncertainty about how large crowds could affect access to the area.
Police presence is expected to be heightened around the court, with officers set to monitor the situation and maintain order, according to the national spokesperson of the South African Police Service, Athlenda Mathe.
“There will be police presence to ensure the safety of every citizen in and surrounding the court,” Mathe said.
EFF spokesperson Sinawo Thambo said the party viewed the case as politically motivated, describing it as “a political attack” and expressing no confidence in the magistrate.
He said the matter was being used to target Julius Malema, adding that the party would appeal “any nonsense sentence”.
The mobilisation comes as internal discussions intensify over leadership continuity, with senior party members expressing concern about the implications of a prison sentence.
Senior party members said the delay in sentencing has heightened anxiety among supporters, with concerns increasingly raised in branch meetings and provincial structures.
“There is discomfort on the ground as people are asking what happens if the commander-in-chief (CIC) is put behind bars. We cannot lose the CIC,” said a senior Gauteng leader.
Another senior official said the party had begun internal conversations about how leadership responsibilities would be managed if Malema were incarcerated.
“The organisation has to continue functioning and we are confident in our leaders. “However, it is hard to imagine the party not being led by the CIC. He brings the vision and direction we need, so we are mobilising to ensure there is sufficient support no matter the outcome,” the official said.
The leader added that while discussions about continuity had taken place, there was reluctance to formalise any succession planning. “There are conversations about how responsibilities can be shared but nobody wants to be seen as preparing for his absence,” the official said.
Discussions have included the possibility of maintaining Malema as CIC while delegating day-to-day operations to senior officials.
Deputy president Godrich Gardee has been mentioned in internal discussions as a leader who could assume greater responsibility, although insiders say there is no consensus within the party on potential successors.
“Gardee has experience but he is not the CIC and we are not de-campaigning him. It’s just that our observation shows that while we have confidence in our deputy president, election results may be in trouble,” a senior central command member said.
Legal analyst Ulrich Roux said sentencing is guided by what he described as the triad of factors, namely the offender, the offence and the interests of society.
“The court must balance punishment and fairness, considering both deterrence and the accused’s circumstances,” Roux said.
Direct imprisonment remains an option, with Malema facing a potential sentence of up to 15 years, although courts have imposed lesser penalties in cases where mitigating circumstances are accepted.
He has indicated that he intends to appeal the conviction, although an appeal does not automatically suspend a sentence and would require a separate application.
Political analyst Ralph Mathekga said the EFF’s structure is closely tied to Malema’s leadership, making questions of continuity particularly significant at this stage. “It is a party built around him. That is why questions about continuity become important when his position is uncertain.”
Political analyst Asanda Ngoasheng said the visible mobilisation of supporters ahead of the court appearance reflects both the party’s organisational strength and its electoral positioning.
“The turnout will demonstrate a political party that has not just members but active members, which is particularly significant in an election year,” Ngoasheng said.
She said the nature of the support also raised broader questions, given that Malema has already been convicted and is now in the sentencing phase.
“This raises questions about society’s engagement with the rule of law. Why do we see large numbers of people supporting someone who has been found guilty of a criminal offense?”
She added that the offence itself, involving the discharge of a firearm in a public setting, should be understood in the context of the country’s high levels of gun violence. “This is not something that should be normalised or encouraged. In a country facing serious levels of gun-related crime, such actions carry significant risk.”
Analysts also warned that a custodial sentence could have complex political consequences. While it could disqualify Malema from parliament, it could also strengthen his symbolic standing within the party and among supporters.
They cautioned that such an outcome could also trigger instability among sections of his support base, particularly if the sentence is perceived as unjust.
Party officials said mobilisation for court appearances is being used to reinforce unity, demonstrate organisational strength and canvass support ahead of the local government elections. “The message is that the organisation stands with its leader,” a senior leader said.
In a house once filled with 15 souls, only three of us remain: my mother, my five-month-old uncle and me.
I set that sentence down as plainly as I can, because plainness is what it deserves. No flourish. No rhetorical preparation. One moment, there were 15 people who had names and histories and habits and faces I knew.
Then, in the particular efficiency of organised slaughter, they were gone. The Interahamwe militia and the Presidential Guard had done their brutal “work” and moved on, leaving in their wake a silence that was not the silence of peace but one of erasure and ruin.
My mother ran into the street. I do not know what she expected to find there; perhaps she expected nothing and was simply obeying the oldest animal instinct — movement, action, the refusal to remain still inside a catastrophe.
A United Nations peacekeeping truck passed by. She pleaded with the peacekeepers. She begged with whatever remained of her voice. Her cries were met not with compassion but with cold indifference. The peacekeepers pointed their guns at her and drove on.
I have returned to that image many times in the years since. The guns pointed not at an enemy but at a woman kneeling in a street in Kigali, asking to be helped. There is something in that gesture — the deliberate aiming of a weapon at grief — that seems to me to contain the whole moral catastrophe of the international response to Rwanda in 1994.
The UN had been deployed to protect. On that day, in that street, protection wore a uniform and looked the other way.
I was too young to grasp the full weight of that moment. What I understood was my mother’s face. I had never seen her collapse like that — not her body but something deeper: the interior architecture of her belief that the world might yet respond to suffering with care.
I watched that certainty leave her. It left quickly. It was then she understood, her spirit stripped bare, that she was utterly alone.
Desperate and shaken, she made the only agonising choice available to her. She entrusted me to a Hutu family she had considered a friend. “I had to take a chance,” she told me years later. “All I could see was death.”
The family set out for Cyangugu, in the south-west of Rwanda. I became, for the purposes of survival, their umwana — their son.
Akazi: The grammar of slaughter
Along the road to Cyangugu there were roadblocks. Many roadblocks. At each one, the family referred to me as umwana — their son. I, too, played the role, because the role was the only thing standing between me and a machete.
I do not use that word carelessly. I mean it literally: a machete, or a club, or, if one were fortunate, a firearm. The tools were varied; the outcome was not.
I want to pause here because I think it is important to be precise about what “playing a role” means for a child. It meant reading the atmosphere of each roadblock — the mood of the men with weapons, the quality of their attention, whether they were bored or energised, whether they had already killed that day or were yet to start.
It meant performing a kind of ordinary filial normalcy while your entire nervous system was lit with terror. It meant learning, at an age when most children are learning the names of animals and the shapes of clouds, how to calibrate the precise expression that would keep you alive.
We reached Cyangugu. And there, the nature of my situation clarified itself; everything shifted.
The husband and wife began akazi. In Kinyarwanda, akazi means simply work. It is an ordinary word — the kind you might overhear in a market or a kitchen.
During the genocide, it became something else entirely. It became the coded language, the grammar of slaughter: an everyday word used to conceal the unspeakable, to wrap the mass killing of Tutsi in the familiar syntax of daily life.
Foreigners might not have caught its meaning but every Rwandan — victim and perpetrator alike — understood what akazi meant in those months. It meant killing Tutsi. It was the ordinary made monstrous, a mask for extraordinary horror.
They did not kill me swiftly. Instead, the family’s days fell into a rhythm: leaving at dawn for akazi, returning home for lunch, setting out again in the afternoon.
I have thought a great deal about this rhythm — the domesticity of it, the terrible ordinariness.
What strikes me most is the texture: the way it was slotted into the routines of an ordinary day, indistinguishable from the outside from any other kind of labour.
The men and women who committed genocide did not, for the most part, spend their days in a state of sustained frenzy. They worked. They came home. They ate. They slept.
The evenings they reserved for me — a sinister ritual within their insidious plan. I had to maintain my performance as their son, especially whenever other genocidal militia, the Interahamwe, came by.
It was a theatre of survival, a fragile shield against an ever-present threat. I was both actor and audience, knowing that a single faltering line — a wrong word, a wrong expression, a flicker of visible fear — could end the performance permanently.
Bukavu: Another kind of captivity
As the Rwandan Patriotic Army advanced, liberating town after town, the family joined the vast exodus of Hutu across the border into Bukavu, in South Kivu, in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo.
They were, by the standards of that migration, fortunate. Their connections in Bukavu allowed them to secure a small house, while hundreds of thousands of others were swallowed by the sprawling refugee camps that had sprung up overnight around an overwhelmed city.
There, my forced kinship took a new form. I became their domestic servant, marking the beginning of another kind of captivity. My days were structured by chores: fetching water over long distances, collecting firewood and queuing for meagre food rations at the distribution centres. For nearly two years, I lived at the margins of survival — barefoot, hungry, subsisting on scraps.
And yet, even in Bukavu, the performance continued. I was still umwana. The city was thick with genocide perpetrators, with soldiers of the defeated genocidal army, with people who had killed and who might kill again.
A single doubt cast upon my identity — a single moment in which someone looked at me too carefully and wondered — could have been fatal.
My survival depended not merely on concealment, on not being seen but on active inhabitation: on being the son, publicly, convincingly, every single day.
Nelson Gashagaza is a survivor and writer.
Gabi Motuba and the sound of sacred resistance:
The rediscovery of territory, the breaching of the voice, the strain on the body, the musical gaze of the subject, the subject becoming musical space, the state of mere suspension; this is the orbit Gabi Motuba dwells in — a world of eternal singing and swinging.
Gabi’s sound refuses to sit on the surface of time or at the bottom of language. She sings, she swings, which is to say she resocialises a survival melody to propel a feeling, a freedom sentiment into the universe. Let us contemplate the musical imagination and sonic flourishes of this vocal savant.
For the Pretoria-born jazz vocalist, composer and educator — and 2026 Standard Bank Young Artist Award winner for Jazz — the recognition feels fitting. In South Africa, musical innovation has always been bound up with resistance.
The novelty of the award lies in its reverence of artists who have produced distinctive works that
are shaping the artistic and cultural terrain.
For the current temperate jazz world and cultural milieu, Gabi’s work might appear as bombastic and assaulting to the senses due to its unflinching aesthetical attitude and boldness. She also strikes a curious presence with an ever-expanding corpus that declares itself timeous in the work of grieving the otherwise devalued life.
This is where one should pause and listen to her injunction. In Gabi’s unravelling sonic arc, experienced in three distinctive works — Sanctum Sanctorium (2016), her collaboration with her life partner Tumi Mogorosi, Tefiti — Goddess of Creation (2018) and its corollary The Sabbath (2024) — we encounter a musical eclecticism that essentially calls itself jazz, that is classical in posture and characterised by voice, strings, reeds, drums, combative breathing and dense silences.
But dig this: as a voice pedagogue, spirit, auteur, improviser, bluesopher, chiaroscurist, architect of the mise-en-scène of the sacred and the lamentable, Gabi is neither peerless in formal register nor in political inclination.
It is true that she evidences a sophisticated command of diverse singing styles and vocal techniques such as scatting, screaming, humming, growling, non-lyrical singing and wordless vocables that augur a defiant phonation with strange sonic shapes.
Hence, when she conjures the breathy onset or shifts from falsettos to raspy, guttural sounds of fury thrown into the ether, into memory, she inevitably calls Thandiswa Mazwai, Cécile McLorin Salvant and indeed, Siya Makhuzeni, “Big Sis”.
And yet, as an inheritor of a long, blues, tradition, Gabi also confesses a truth to Billie Holiday and Abbey Lincoln: that the modern jazz vocal form rests on precarious ground so long as it forgets to revel in the logic of the scream whose physiognomy is as burdened as the black lives it mourns.
On our way to being corpses, we are confronted with countless encounters that insinuate death — be it physical, civic or social — and so our interpretations of ourselves and our world become defined by a finitude, the Heideggerian type that intimates our dissolution as flesh and spirit.
Gabi’s response to this devastation: The Sabbath. By far her most capacious foray into the theme of death, which resonates so deeply and so personally due to her late father’s untimely transcendence to the Elysian Fields, The Sabbath is Gabi’s rejoinder to the falsity of the fleetingness of grief.
To then re-compose it as a landscape, grief under Gabi’s insurgent sonic gaze assumes a different comportment, an ideological form whose life-world is expressed in the every day, often in spectacular forms if we recall shattering moments like the Marikana massacre, the killing of Andries Tatane and of Uyinene Mrwetyana or the 2021 July riots.
All these moments, which tell of the eternal recurrence of South Africa’s bursts of episodic violence, are mournable and permanent in our collective psyche. Ultimately, this is where we find ourselves, in the domain of the incomprehensible. But Gabi vibrates differently, higher, spiritually if you will.
The Sabbath is a sermonic text. Its 11 epistles, from The Black Adhan to Amen, are just as well prayerful solicitations that sonify that which eludes speech as they retrieve the power of the almighty.
The sonification takes seriously the socio-aesthetical importance of the black church whose spiritual and emotional resources become the psychic raw materials needed for the freedom-thinking of a historically disparaged people.
We begin to see with greater clarity how this work intervenes: since the wanton violence inflicted on black life is unending, so too remains inexhaustible our resistance to it. It is not surprising then that the last composition from The Sabbath takes this sentiment in stride.
In an unfurling elliptical form, Gabi sings with the fullest guttural conviction, “Amen, Amen, Amen, Amen…”, as though aware that the utterance is neither the sole province of Christian hymnody since it discerns from different musical geographies nor that its intrinsic message, “so be it”, is in and of itself a call and response gesture.
The metaphorical conditioning here is palpable. Neither defeatism nor stoic revivalism, “so be it”, as Gabi’s holy declaration goes, reckons with the harms of this wretched earth. Thus, “so be it” announces the rebellious strength and endurance of the permanently minoritised.
If you’d care to indulge another assumption here: the specificity of Gabi being a singer is in itself important on at least two fronts.
With the exception of Mogorosi’s epoch defining Project Elo (2013), Gabi has hardly been featured in other distinctive works in South African jazz, which suggests that her virtuosity has been largely conditioned from and within her own musical prowess.
Further still, the journey she is on has not yet seen her avail herself to the category of the “singer-instrumentalist”, that is, the singer-pianist, singer-guitarist, singer-bassist and so on.
What we have seen from her is an attempt to exhaust the category of singing in its singularity.
If we locate her work in the ambit of freedom sounding, this should alert us to the poundage of singing lamentations and prayers because for Gabi, even with its dense scripturality, Amen after all remains a plea, and a rebellious chant. This too constitutes that swing sense — that freedom groove that is so complicatedly written into the music and performance of black life.
You can’t wonder about it enough; Gabi’s performances hold as much importance — and spiritual weight — as Sunday sermons. We can even say that the black church claims Gabi and that she likewise claims its syllables, scriptures, musical and spiritual resources. She is not only deeply moved by its excesses of beauty but Gabi seems equally enamoured by its material iconographies.
Can we deny in her work the affective register of the Anglican church bell ringing, in tow, rhythmically or the distinct humming and murmuration of the Methodist church?
Better yet, can we ignore the gesticulative accompaniment of her hands that simulate notes and insurrectionary harmonies?
The hands do something more — they direct us to Gabi’s penchant for conduction as her forays into this terrain with the Morris Isaacson Music School demonstrated. But there is also a sense that her conduction looms larger.
Could it be that Ofentse Pitse, the daring conductor of Kabza De Small’s Red Bull’s Symphonic Orchestra performance, whispers to Gabi: “Hey sis, thank you for letting me into your world, for showing me that your assemblage of gesturalism, emotion and form on the podium are but coalescing properties of self-knowing”?
After all, the kinematic features of music-related movements conceal an unnerving reality: the modern technologies we call our bodies are, in their beauty and batteredness, the foremost sites of speech, resistance and refuge.
It is irrefutable that the penal truth of this colonial, extractive, modernity we inhabit is one that ritualises violence, producing living-corpses and endless deathscapes.
Out of necessity Gabi sings, she swings black life and her conduction is continuously marshalling an imminent feeling of self-sovereignty.
For an album whose conclusions seem simple, we are yet to fully reckon with its ambitions towards freedom-making. Ultimately, this is the work of The Sabbath. This is the work Gabi is sent to do.
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