Far-left South African politician Julius Malema claimed the UK government blocked his entry to prevent him from appearing at a conference hosted by Cambridge University.
Malema, the leader of the communist-black-nationalist Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) party, claimed that he received a letter informing of his visa rejection hours before he was set to depart from South Africa on Wednesday to attend an event hosted by the African Society of the ancient University of Cambridge.
The radical politician said that he was provided with “no substantial justification” and thus surmised that the decision to block his entry was an “attempt to silence a dissenting political perspective,” adding that it was “unacceptable and spineless.”
In a statement, the EFF party said that it “condemns in the strongest terms the deliberate failure by the British High Commission to process the visa application by the Commander in Chief and President of the EFF, Julius Malema.”
“This is nothing more than an expression of bureaucratic process being used to suppress political dissent and to ban the voices of the EFF from building global solidarity against Western Imperialism,” the leftist party added.
The EFF suggested that the move was in response to the party’s criticism of “the United Kingdom for its role in the atrocities of colonialism particularly the role of the British Monarchy in the slave trade, its role in the sustaining of the genocide of the Palestinian people by Israel and the continued resistance by Britain regarding the paying of reparations to victims of colonial conquest.”
The communist party also asserted that blocking Malema from entering the country demonstrated the “continued control” of the British Monarchy over the political system in the UK, and claimed that the Royal Family “remain aggrieved” by the EFF’s criticism of Queen Elizabeth following her death in 2022.
Malema, the party said, planned on using his trip to Britain to visit the Queen’s grave “to confirm that the woman who was at the centre of the pain inflicted on Africa and her people, was indeed departed from this world and that our people can find justice and peace through her departure.”
The EFF leader was set to speak before the 11th Annual Cambridge Africa Together Conference at an event dubbed “The Making of Africa’s Future President’s”.
According to the BBC, a letter from the UK Home Office to Malema claimed that his visa was not processed in time due to “unfortunate timing of some recent UK Bank Holidays”. UK High Commissioner to South Africa, Antony Phillipson reportedly said that he wanted to “personally apologise” to Malema over the incident.
Malema has frequently faced criticism over his anti-white racist rhetoric, including his frequent performances of the song “Kill the Boer, the farmer,” a reference to the Anglo-Dutch white heritage population in South Africa.
While Malema and his supporters have claimed that the lyrics of the song are not to be taken literally, arguing that it is merely an anti-Apartheid song, others have accused him of stoking further violence against Afrikaner farmers, who have faced thousands of attacks and hundreds of murders since the early 1990s
In February, U.S. President Donald Trump issued an executive order to open up refugee status to Afrikaner farmers in response to the leftist South African government’s Expropriation Act, which permits the state to seize their land without financial compensation.
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