On the morning of January 23, the streets of East London were awash in red. Thousands of supporters of EFF leader Julius Malema gathered outside the East London magistrate’s court, chanting, singing and waiting.
Inside, Malema awaited sentencing proceedings after being convicted on firearm-related charges — an episode that has taken nearly seven years to move from spectacle to judgment.
At issue is an incident that occurred on July 28 2018, during the EFF’s fifth anniversary rally at the Sisa Dukashe Stadium in Mdantsane.
Video footage from the event shows Malema raising a rifle and firing it into the air before a cheering crowd.
The images were circulated widely, becoming both evidence and symbol.
Acting after a complaint was lodged by AfriForum, the National Prosecuting Authority charged Malema under the Firearms Control Act with unlawful possession of a firearm and ammunition, discharging a firearm in a public space, reckless endangerment and failure to take reasonable precautions to prevent harm.
In October 2025, magistrate Twanet Olivier found Malema guilty on all counts. Sentencing was postponed to January 23, and subsequently to April 15.
The law, at least on paper, had finally spoken. But to suggest that this is merely a story about a man, a gun and a statute is to misunderstand SA’s political situation.
SA’s Firearms Control Act is among the strictest on the continent, crafted in response to staggering levels of gun violence.
It criminalises the unauthorised possession and discharge of firearms in public spaces and allows for severe custodial sentences, particularly where public safety is endangered.
The prosecution’s case against Malema relied on authenticated video evidence, corroborated footage from event organisers and witness testimony.
Nothing in the footage showed maliciousness in Malema’s gun discharge, which was celebratory.
His defence in court was that the rifle was a “toy” or did not fire live ammunition.
It was rejected as implausible by the magistrate. The court found that the defence had failed to disprove the state’s version beyond reasonable doubt.
From a strictly legal standpoint, the conviction is unremarkable. The statute is clear. The evidence was visual, public and difficult to refute.
The law, as Olivier applied it, did not inquire into Malema’s ideology or popularity.
Yet what complicates the matter is political precedent.
Those of us who grew up in the townships recall that the discharging of firearms at political rallies is not alien to SA history.
In the days before the 1994 democratic elections, celebratory gunfire was common, an expression — however dangerous — of release after decades of repression.
I recall a huge ANC rally in Soweto just before SA attained democracy, where supporters fired weapons into the air shortly before Nelson Mandela took the stage.
Mandela reprimanded them, sternly and publicly, insisting that freedom could not be inaugurated through lawlessness, but no prosecutions followed.
The new democracy, still fragile and acutely aware of the combustible emotions of the moment, chose to ignore the incident.
White right-wing politics at the time was in retreat, disoriented by the collapse of apartheid and the moral, organisational and international defeat of its ideological project.
The death of Eugene Terre’Blanche — both as a political force and, later, as a political and personal farce — symbolised the waning of militant Afrikaner nationalism as a mass mobilising threat.
What remnants remained were fragmented, defensive and largely excluded from the shaping of the post-apartheid legal and moral order.
In that context, the state exercised restraint out of a calculated commitment towards the stabilisation of our politics and societies.
The priority was to heal the wounds of the past and consolidate a democratic culture, not to criminalise the unruly populists.
Three decades later, the terrain has shifted.
White right-wing politics has reconstituted itself as juridical and media-savvy self-identified victims of our political status quo who are less inclined to political rallying in uniformed formations, but more adept at litigating and national and international lobbying based mostly on unfounded grievances.
The law, once a shield against political violence, is now also a site of political contestation.
It is within this altered landscape that Malema’s case must be understood.
It is not a simple application of statute to fact, but a reflection of how power, memory and legalism have been reconfigured in a post-reconciliation SA that is increasingly impatient with ambiguity and far less forgiving of symbolic transgression.
To confound issues even further is the fact that there are historical instances, such as the Day of the Covenant/Vow, now the Day of Reconciliation, and the legacy of the Great Trek, where Afrikaners still mark their celebrations through acts that mirror, evoke, or use simulated, mock, or actual firepower.
These acts are often tied to the “civil religion” of Afrikanerdom re-enactments, of the “laager mentality” (defensive mindset).
Have they ever been taken to court for it?
The question many South Africans quietly ask is not whether Malema violated the law — he plainly did — but why this violation, and not others, has been pursued with such singular determination.
And what purpose will the incarceration, if it happens, of Malema serve except to radicalise black politics, especially that of the youth who form the greater part of EFF support?
Malema’s prosecution must, by necessity, be understood against this charged political backdrop.
From the outset, he and his supporters framed the case as politically motivated and racially inflected — a legal manoeuvre designed to weaken a leader whose politics unsettle the post-apartheid consensus.
Malema has accused the judiciary and law enforcement of systemic bias and selective enforcement, arguing that the law is being weaponised against a radical black political project.
On the other side stands AfriForum, a civil-rights organisation widely perceived as a vehicle for conservative Afrikaner interests and nostalgia for apartheid system order, which has insisted that the case is about accountability and the equal application of the law.
In its telling, Malema’s conviction affirms that no-one, however powerful or provocative, stands above legal restraint.
The DA echoed this view, welcoming the guilty verdict as a victory for the rule of law, and a rebuke to what it describes as Malema’s flirtation with political violence.
Thus the courtroom became a stage for a broader ideological contest.
To Malema’s critics, the conviction confirms long-standing concerns about recklessness and demagoguery.
To his supporters, it represents a calculated attempt to discipline black radicalism through legal means.
Malema remains one of the most polarising figures in SA public life.
To admirers, he is a fearless tribune of the dispossessed, articulating demands for land expropriation and economic redistribution that mainstream politics prefers to postpone indefinitely.
To detractors, he is a dangerous populist, prone to authoritarian theatrics, symbolic violence and radical upset of an economic structure that remains defined by the apartheid order of minority whites owning the majority of national production tools and wealth.
Both assessments contain elements of truth.
Malema’s political genius lies in his ability to channel historical grievance into contemporary mobilisation.
His flaw is his willingness to blur the line between symbolism and endangerment.
Firing a rifle into a dense crowd may have been intended as theatrical bravado, but it is precisely the kind of gesture that a constitutional democracy, scarred by violence, must treat seriously.
The state was right to intervene. The question is whether it intervenes consistently and to what purpose.
To claim that the Malema case is apolitical is disingenuous.
Law in SA does not operate in a vacuum; it moves through a landscape shaped by colonial dispossession, apartheid brutality and an incomplete transition.
The involvement of AfriForum, the protracted nature of the proceedings and the language surrounding the case all ensure that it resonates far beyond the facts of the charge sheet.
For Malema, being prosecuted at the urging of a group associated with white minority interests reinforces a narrative of racial antagonism.
For others, the conviction represents a crucial stress test of whether SA’s institutions can hold powerful figures accountable without capitulating to intimidation.
Both readings coexist, uneasily.
Malema has vowed to appeal all the way to the Constitutional Court, framing his legal battle as part of a broader struggle against judicial overreach.
Legally, the appeal will turn on evidentiary questions and statutory interpretation.
Politically, it offers the EFF an opportunity to galvanise its base and cast itself as the victim of institutional hostility.
Should the conviction be upheld and a custodial sentence be imposed without the option of a fine, Malema could be barred from parliament — a development that would force the EFF to confront questions of succession and strategy at a critical juncture.
What is largely absent from the public debate is a deeper reckoning with how white right-wing political activism, increasingly aggressive and internationalised, is reshaping SA’s political climate.
By relentlessly pursuing spectacle, inside courts and across global media, these actors risk eroding the fragile norms of reconciliation that have held the country together.
In doing so, they are succeeding in provoking a reactionary radical black politics defined by anger rather than transformation.
If that becomes the enduring legacy of this case, SA will have lost more than it gained.
For most black people, especially the young and black, this Malema gun case is not simply about firearms.
It is about memory, power and the unresolved tension between law and justice in a society still negotiating its atrocious past.
Mphuthumi Ntabeni is a writer born in Komani.