Artist News

Bono comments on ‘shoot the Boer’ kerfuffle

By | Published on Friday 18 February 2011

Bono

Bono has responded to the previously reported fuss in South Africa that surrounded comments he made ahead of a gig in Johannesburg about the South African protest song ‘Ayasab’ Amagwala’ which includes the line “shoot the Boer”. The anti-white song has been controversial in South Africa of late after the head of the youth wing of South Africa’s African National Congress party, Julius Malema, sang a bit of it in public last year.

The song came up in a discussion about protest songs during an interview with South Africa’s Sunday Times, in which Bono talked about how what were once protest songs in Ireland, glorifying the early incarnations of the IRA, had now become folk songs, important to a once suppressed community, but no longer sung with the anger with which they were written.

Bono, or at least the journalist who interviewed him, applied that observation to ‘Ayasab’ Amagwala’, implying that Malema wasn’t necessarily wrong to sing it in public. It was those comments that caused some outrage in South Africa’s white community. One Afrikaans musician, Steve Hofmeyr, announcing on Twitter that he’d thrown over £400 worth of tickets to the U2 gig into a river in protest.

But Bono has now said that the whole thing was “stirred up”, and pointed out that he would never be supportive of any song that actually incited others to violence. He told Talk Radio 702: “It’s kind of a bit mad to be honest with you. We’re famous for songs of non-violence. That anyone should think we were pro-this, it’s barking, barking mad and I think it’s been stirred up”.



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