Bono stirs up storm over ‘shoot the farmer’ song lyrics
The song is at the centre of a politically charged controversy in South Africa, where the leader of the ruling party’s youth league is locked in a legal battle with a white lobby group over whether the song should be banned as hate speech.
The U2 frontman, who was in Johannesburg ahead of a concert last night for the band’s 360 Degrees tour, said in an interview with South Africa’s Sunday Times that struggle music like the “shoot the farmer” song has a place.
“I was a kid and I’d sing songs I remember my uncles singing rebel songs about the early days of the Irish Republican Army,” he said, proceeding to sing a song about carrying guns.
But the singer went on to say such songs shouldn’t be sung in the wrong context.
Talk radio and the internet burst into discussion of whether the comments amounted to support for Julius Malema, the outspoken leader of the ruling African National Congress’s youth league, or for Afriforum, the Afrikaner lobby group seeking to have Malema banned from singing the song at rallies.
“That’s hate speech. They don’t know our history at all,” said one caller to Talk Radio 702. “He did not condone the singing of Shoot the Boer [farmer] in public,” said a comment on the Times’ website.
Malema’s song generated heated debate last year in the wake of the murder of Eugene Terre’Blanche, a white separatist leader allegedly hacked to death by two black workers on his farm.
