African Affairs Advance Access originally published online on December 4, 2008
African Affairs 2009 108(430):27-48; doi:10.1093/afraf/adn064
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Jacob Zuma, the social body and the unruly power of song
Liz Gunner (Elizabeth.Gunner{at}wits.ac.za) is Professorial Research Associate at WISER (The Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research), University of the Witwatersrand. She is also a Fellow (2008) at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The article was written at NIAS and I am most grateful for the superb institutional support that NIAS provided. A far shorter piece on this topic appeared in the newsletter WISER in Brief 1, 5 (June 2007). For discussion on the present and earlier articles my thanks to Shireen Hassim and to WISER colleagues, in particular Lara Allen, Jon Hyslop, Achille Mbembe, Sarah Nuttall, Irma du Plessis, and Deborah Posel. My thanks also to colleagues of the Mediations of Violence in Africa research group at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies, Wassenaar, 2008.
This article tracks the life of the song ‘Umshini Wami’ (My Machine Gun) adopted by Jacob Zuma, the President of the African National Congress, since early 2005. It explores the wider implications of political song in the public sphere in South Africa and aims to show how ‘Umshini Wami’ helped Jacob Zuma to prominence and demonstrated a longing in the body politic for a political language other than that of a distancing and alienating technocracy. The article also explores the early pre-Zuma provenance of the song, its links to the pre-1994 struggle period and its entanglement in a seamless masculinity with little place for gendered identities in the new state to come. It argues too that the song can be seen as unstable and unruly, a signifier with a power of its own and not entirely beholden to its new owner.