This piece is about, or is going to be about, little Julie Malema, the president of the ANC Yoof League, but I need to begin with an anecdote from which we shall, I trust, segue into the meat, if not the heart, of the matter.

A couple of weeks ago, someone by the name of AM Stainbank took out a half-page "advertisement' in the Mail&Guardian in which, as best as I could make out, he was castigating me for having written an article 10 or 11 years ago about the apartheid museum and the Krok twins, Solly and Abe.

But, to be honest, I couldn't really work out what the ad was about. Also, as far as I know, I've never even met this fellow. Stainbank could be the person who writes rude notes on Politicsweb under the name "Plutarch" or he could be from the ANC youth league. I just don't know.

Far more interesting, I thought, was that the M&G would run such a bizarre ad without asking me what the hell it was supposed to be about or at least calling in the Dung Beetles (Sam Sole and Stefaans Brummer) to investigate it.

What have I ever done to Nic Dawes, Drew Forrest, Tanya "pampoentjie" Pampalone and Laura Grant that they should do this to me? Why would they let someone try to sully my good name? My subscription payments are almost up to date, so what's the problem?

Well, "money doesn't talk/ It swears," as Bob Dylan sang. Eish; where does this oke get the money to pay for a half-page ad in the M&G?

Anyway, a couple of days after the ad appeared, early on a Sunday morn, as I was negotiating the muddy terrain of Emmarentia dam, hoping that I would run into Caroline Southey or one of the other attractive women who ramble there of a weekend, I received a telephone call from my friend, Ben.

"Jeremy," he said, "I have just read this long article about you in the M&G. As far as I could work out, the writer seems to be saying that you and the Krok brothers are a bunch of c****. Now that, I would have assumed, is common cause. So why does this fellow have to write at such confusing length to make the point?"

... Dear readers, the reason I have told you this story is to demonstrate just what an acute observer of the human condition Ben is - because, just a couple of days ago, he once again roused me from my early-morning reverie.

"Do you think," he asked me, "that we are living in Nazi Germany? That we are, that is, going on living blindly here even though intolerable things are about to happen - much as our brethren did in Germany?"

"What are you on about?" I asked.

"It's Malema. Didn't you hear what he said? He wants to take your land and then he's going to take your woman too."

"He can have my woman," I replied, "but he certainly can't have my land. C'mon, he's just an exceedingly annoying buffoon. You can't take him seriously," I added.

"Well," said Ben, "the thing is that he might be a buffoon who talks crap but his constituency is buffoonish and they like what he says. And no one in the ANC tells him to stick it. Zuma does nothing. And now he - he, Malema, this punk - has called for the disciplining of Derek Hanekom, a senior ANC member, because Hanekom has said he won't accept the ‘nationalisation' of land. And no one in the ANC does anything."

"Ja, but Ben," I said, "Hanekom has traditionally been the white whipping boy in the ANC. You want to humiliate a honky in the ANC, he's your man ..."

"Anyway," said Ben, "don't be an asshole. This runt has in a couple of days destroyed a year's foreign investment and pushed the unemployment rate even higher. No one overseas is going to invest in this country with Malema spouting this sort of stuff. He's a nightmare for the economy. Ironically, it's Cosatu that might come to our rescue when it comes to Malema - they don't want any more jobs lost."

Spurred by Ben's concern, I did a little lite research and discovered that in his column this week Justice Malala had suddenly discovered - while musing on the Malema matter - that Jacob G Zuma is not a man to underestimate and that Juju should watch his tongue.

It's a slightly odd article because its basic premise is that Zuma cooked up the clever plot that got him into the country in 1990 to start the negotiations for regime change - and he (Zuma) is therefore very smart. But I seem to recall that it was the boere who put the plan together, so ... Anyway, the point is that Malema has grabbed everyone's attention in the last few days.

For example, that arbiter of morality and motherhood, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela apparently said that young Julie was "like her former husband" and that those who ignored him were doing so at their own peril. (I know this courtesy of a copy of The New Age, which its proprietors seem to be handing out gratis at every place and opportunity - I got it from the guard at the gates of Helen Joseph Hospital. This would have tickled the old girl no end.)

On Politicsweb, Ryan "Giggs" Coetzee, a DA strategist obviously agreed with Ben. He said that Malema was obviously a "very powerful man with a very dangerous agenda" - for three reasons: his demagogic skills, his implacability, and, above all, that he is "likely to have a large enough bloc of votes on the floor of the ANC's elective conference in Manguang next December to significantly influence, or even control, its outcome."

This was sounding serious - it was sounding as though I needed to take Malema a great deal more seriously than previously.

What about Zuma though? What was he thinking about the little prat? I couldn't get put through to the president so I phoned my old comrade (not in arms exactly - but we did attend a great many political rallies together), Zizi "Codpiece" Kodwa, the chief's spokesperson.

He seemed bewildered by my enquiries and even more nonplussed by my observation that the abelungu and a few others were a trifle upset by Malema's maunderings.

But - I don't know, the Union Buildings seems to affect people oddly - because Zizi claimed that the "old man" had not given Malema a second thought - "Why should he? It's a youth league conference - they have to report back to the ANC" - and followed this sage reaction with more ANC boilerplate/codswallop about the autonomy of the leagues and the history of the youth league as a vanguard of the revolution, blah blah.

In short, I failed dismally in my attempt to find out what JGZ was thinking about the Malema brouhaha.

I was further confused when I read that the revolution would, according to Juju, be "leaderless" and that capitalists had a "rat mindset" and that, moreover, the revolution would start in Alexandra, from where, said Juju, "the poor would open the fridge and get the cheese".

So who are the rats here and who the mice? The capitalists or the poor? Is Juju a leader or are we leaderless chickens? Do I know any more about Juju than Stainbank?

Pass the cheese, would you?

Jeremy Gordin is author of Zuma: A Biography. This article was published with the assistance of the Friedrich-Naumann-Stiftung für die Freiheit.

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