At 21, Liyema Langa is queer, Catholic and has spent three years as one of the loudest voices in student politics at Stellenbosch University. As former president of the EFF Youth Command in Stellenbosch, this International Relations student from Gqeberha built a movement in territory that was not his own. SMF News spoke to the man now stepping into the establishment he spent years fighting.
“Tomorrow it could be you. Tomorrow it could be me.” It is Liyema Langa speaking, and he is standing in a lecture hall at Stellenbosch University (SU). The room is filled with first-year students.
The video runs for less than a minute. It is February 2025. Langa stands in front of a lecture theatre that is not his, wearing a red beret, telling first-years they are not safe.
“The people on NSFAS, you guys are not safe,” he says, referring to the National Student Financial Aid Scheme.
Liyema Langa, who led the EFF Youth Command at Stellenbosch University (SU) from 2023 to 2025, is now running for the SU Student Representative Council. Here he is photographed in his bedroom, in front of his wall of heroes. PHOTO: Yusuf Kosadia-Hassen
He never tells anyone to leave, and yet by the time he finishes, they are shuffling out of their own accord. Someone films it and posts it on TikTok. The comments, which have since been turned off, were ugly. But, Langa says: “I did what I had to do. I’ll do it again.”
The man he wanted to be
Langa grew up in Gqeberha, where his father often had parliament on television as background noise. That is where he found his hero in Dr Mbuyiseni Ndlozi, the EFF’s former spokesperson. Langa was still in high school when he watched Ndlozi deliver speeches and thought: “This man is, like, my role model.”
The passion for the EFF, for the Student Representative Council (SRC) at SU, for everything that followed.
“I feel like everything that I do now comes from that, man,” he says.
Liyema Langa performing the EFF salute, in his full EFF Youth Command overalls. He claims that a DA Student Organisation recruiter once offered him a paid position to take it off. He said no. PHOTO: Yusuf Kosadia-Hassen
While still at school, he debated at national level at Grey Boys High. He brought that fire to Stellenbosch in 2023, when, by his count, only one other student was brave enough to brandish the red.
“I can give myself flowers: I’ve inspired the lives of EFF members to be proud of who they are, be able to wear red even in a predominantly white space, in a territory of the opponent,” he says.
The gamble
Ask him why he is stepping down as president of the Stellenbosch chapter of the EFF Youth Command (EFFYCSC), and he checks your wording first. He didn’t control the EFFYCSC; nobody did, he says.
“Every boat needs a captain. But a captain can’t lead alone.” And he was not leaving the EFFYCSC either; he was just not going to be the captain, he clarifies.
“Your influence is very high. Your power is limited,” Langa says about the EFFYCSC presidency.
Liyema Langa, former president of the Economic Freedom Fighters Youth Command at Stellenbosch University, in front of his vision board. He hopes to make the Model UN team competing in Thailand, travel, graduate, earn his PhD in international relations, gain fluency in German, and work in Switzerland for the World Bank. His hand covers the words he won’t let us print yet. He calls it the most personal thing in the room. PHOTO: Yusuf Kosadia-Hassen
Instead of continuing his fight against the system, and heckling the SRC during Student Parliament from the stands, what is needed is incorruptible people willing to fight the system from inside, he says.
Langa, who is standing to serve on the next SRC, says he saw how SRC members got “chowed by the institution” in the past. He wants to be the exception. The bet is made from the same instinct that brought him to Stellenbosch.
“I love a challenging place,” he says. “I love a place where you’re uncomfortable.”
The cost of wearing red
The red beret had never come cheap. When he thrust himself into student politics, he says white friends quietly unfollowed him on Instagram.
“It has also cost me relationship-wise. I remember, I was dating someone at the time, and they did not want to be affiliated with the red party,” says Langa.
“If it doesn’t work out the way that you want it to work out, it’s simply because it was not yours,” he says referring to relationships and politics.
Liyema Langa pictured from behind in his EFF Youth Command overalls. The word “Asijiki” on the back is a Xhosa and Zulu phrase meaning “we are not turning back”. PHOTO: Yusuf Kosadia-Hassen
The heaviest cost he keeps almost as a footnote. For three years, his job had been with students who could not register, could not pay their fees, and could not find accommodation. This year, in the thick of leading a protest over that, he, too, had no accommodation. So he went home.
“I got so stuck up fighting for others that I forgot to fight for myself,” he says.
“Fight, go home, fight, go home.”
The captain with no bunk on the boat.
Lost in translation
Plenty of students have told Langa, to his face, that he frightens them: The way he gets to his feet at a mass meeting. The volume.
He acknowledges that because he wears red, people assume he is violent.
“It makes me sad because I wouldn’t even hurt a fly,” he says.
But, he says, put him on a podium and something shifts. He slips, without quite meaning to, into the tongue of Julius Malema: his rhythm slows, every word lands with deliberate weight.
“I don’t become myself,” he says.
“You become the person. You become a leader.”
He does not do it on purpose; the passion takes over, he says.
When asked if there was anyone he owes an apology to, he fell silent, hesitating before returning to the question and answering: Ben Anderson.
Anderson is an SU student and a member of the DA Student Organisation (DASO). Anderson was disqualified from the 2025 SRC elections on 5 September, following an anonymous complaint about his affiliation to DASO. Five days later, Langa posted a line on his WhatsApp status: “We will moer [beat] this Ben Anderson with an apology letter.”
According to Anderson the post came in response to his decision to challenge his disqualification in student court.
Two weeks after the post circulated, Langa told SU student publication, Die Matie, on behalf of the EFFYCSC, that the organisation was “not aware of this matter”.
It is an answer Anderson finds impossible to reconcile with reality.
“I am yet to be enlightened as to how someone could be unaware of their own actions taken two weeks prior,” says Anderson.
On reflection, Langa now says that his post was “blatantly rude” and that the remark “got lost in translation.” He owed Anderson an apology, says Langa.
Anderson is unconvinced, warning that “anyone interested in student politics should approach [Langa] with caution, as I have often found him to be dishonest”.
Beyond the benches
Looking to his future, Langa does not want parliament. He has put the African Union and the World Bank on his vision board.
“I would love to analyse what the funding is for, [and] whether the funding is… necessary or not,” he says, referring to his future career plans.
Liyema Langa’s tattoos read: “Let justice be done though the heavens fall,” half in each Latin and Xhosa. He got them the day Julius Malema was sentenced. People keep reading that as a tribute; he says it is a coincidence. PHOTO: Yusuf Kosadia-Hassen
On his arm, in Latin, “Let justice be done” and isiXhosa, “though the heavens fall.” He got the tattoo on a Thursday, the same day Julius Malema was sentenced. The timing, he says, was a coincidence.
“It’s a reminder,” he says, “of the road.”
The fight nobody filmed
Liyema Langa has been epileptic since he was five. The seizures came back in 2021 as blackouts, and by 2022, he was on chronic medication.
“Matric was hard because I kept having seizures,” Langa says. “And then when you have a seizure, you forget everything. It takes a while for you to even remember what day it is.”
The falls dislocated his shoulder repeatedly until he underwent corrective surgery during his second year of university. The wound then developed a severe infection, forcing him back into theatre four times.
More of Liyema Langa’s heroes. Nicki Minaj’s message of being yourself no matter what, is something Liyema Langa resonates with, calling himself a “Barb”, the name given to Nicki Minaj superfans. Also on his wall are South African political icons like Winnie Mandela, Thabo Mbeki, Julius Malema, and his role model, Dr Mbuyiseni Quintin Ndlozi. PHOTO: Yusuf Kosadia-Hassen
His sister, Isa Langa, remembers that the infection left Langa hospitalised and alone at university over the holidays. It was “one of the most difficult moments Liyema has ever gone through as an individual, and it has made him stronger than he knows”, she says.
He finally made it home on Christmas Day of 2024.
“At home we see all the effort he puts in.. We see the exhaustion, the sacrifices, the quiet moments,” she says. “We as a family learnt what strength really looks like; not the loud one, but rather the quiet one. The one that’s about showing up, staying hopeful and praying in difficult times.”