Bono backs Malema's "shoot the boer"

The song has been at the centre of a politically charged controversy in South Africa, where the firebrand leader of the ruling party's youth league is locked in a legal battle with a white lobby group over whether the song should be banned as hate speech.

The U2 frontman, who is in Johannesburg ahead of a Sunday night concert for the band's 360 Degrees Tour, said in an interview with South Africa's Sunday Times that struggle music like the "shoot the farmer" song has a place.

"I was a kid and I'd sing songs I remember my uncles singing... rebel songs about the early days of the Irish Republican Army," he said, proceeding to sing a song whose lyrics spoke of carrying guns and readying them for action.

"We sang this and it's fair to say it's folk music... as this was the struggle of some people that sang it over some time," he told the newspaper.

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