On a scorching summer morning ten years ago, I attended a rally in a mining settlement north of Johannesburg headlined by Julius Malema, the pudgy, firebrand former leader of the African National Congress’s Youth League. At the time, Malema was engaged in a battle for control of the ANC with South African president Jacob Zuma, and his incendiary rhetoric—calling for the violent expropriation of white-owned farms, leading chants of “Kill the Boer,” the Afrikaans word for farmer—was at odds with Zuma’s cautious, business-friendly style. That day, surrounded by bodyguards, Malema fired up the crowd in Zulu, the language of the country’s largest ethnic group, and worshipful spectators mobbed him after he left the stage. A day later he was expelled from the ANC for his defiance of Zuma, and many analysts and journalists assured me that his political career was finished.

In fact, it was Zuma whose career ended in disgrace—he left office in 2018 and was sent to prison in July 2021 for defying a court order to answer multiple charges of fraud and corruption—while Malema has had a remarkable ascent. In 2013 the ANC castoff founded the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), now South Africa’s third-largest party and a threat on the ANC’s left flank. Malema has made the redistribution of white-owned land the central tenet of his party’s platform and urged South Africans to emulate the violent confiscations carried out two decades ago in neighboring Zimbabwe by loyalists to Robert Mugabe. “The land issue has been with us too long,” Malema declared in 2014, calling on his supporters to “be part of the occupation of land everywhere…in South Africa.”

The inequality of landownership remains one of the thorniest legacies of South Africa’s apartheid system. The Natives Land Act of 1913 set aside about 10 percent of the country as Black “reserves” and prohibited Blacks from leasing or purchasing any land outside those often barren territories. A quarter-century after Black-majority rule began, according to a 2019 report in Harper’s, whites are 8 percent of South Africa’s population of 56 million but own 72 percent of privately held farmland. Blacks, who make up 81 percent of the population, own 4 percent. In much of rural South Africa, the Black population remains trapped in a near-feudal system, relegated to shacks with limited access to electricity and running water, and working for a pittance on the estates of white commercial farmers. Under pressure from the EFF, President Cyril Ramaphosa pledged in January 2022 to redistribute land without compensation, although such measures are given no chance of passage because of resistance from opposition parties in Parliament. “Without the land,” the EFF’s deputy head, Floyd Shivambu, has said, “you won’t be able to economically empower the black majority.”

In postapartheid South Africa, the escalating rhetoric about forced land redistribution has helped feed a counternarrative in which the white minority are the victims. White activists, many of them from rural areas, have accused the ANC government of stoking resentments among its constituents and failing to protect white farmers from racially motivated attacks on their homesteads. In October 2020, after a young farmer, Brendin Horner, was found murdered and tied to a pole at his home in Free State province—a bastion of Afrikaner conservatives that was known during the apartheid era as the Orange Free State—250 fellow farmers gathered in front of the local courthouse in protest. (Two Black men were arrested for the killings; they were acquitted in November 2021.) Government officials deny that white farmers are being targeted and point out that in a country with one of the world’s highest overall murder rates, they make up only a tiny percentage of the victims. In 2019, for instance, of the 21,325 murders in South Africa, forty-nine were of white farmers. Nevertheless, the Horner killing fueled claims that rural landholders were becoming targets of a “white genocide.”

Those exaggerated allegations have found a receptive audience as far away as the United States, where right-wing television hosts, news editors, and politicians have used them to whip up white insecurities in the Black Lives Matter era. In 2017 Simon Roche, a leader of a Christian survivalist group called the Suidlanders (an Afrikaans word meaning Southlanders), toured the US and shared lies about mass killings of white farmers with the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. In May 2018 another Afrikaner white supremacist, Ernst Roets, appeared on Fox News as a guest of Tucker Carlson, who began the segment by claiming that white farmers were being “targeted in a wave of barbaric and horrifying murders.” Carlson continued making such claims, and in August 2018 President Donald Trump tweeted that he had asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo “to closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers.” The tweet provoked an uproar in South Africa and a retort from Ramaphosa that Trump had been “misinformed.”

Continue reading
for just $1 an issue!

Choose a Digital subscription or our best deal—All Access—that includes print and digital issues, full archive access, and the NYR App!


Or register for a free account to read just this article. Register.

Already a subscriber?

Continue reading for just $1 an issue and get a FREE notebook! Continue reading
for just $1 an issue.

Choose a Digital subscription or our best deal—All Access—and we will send you a free pocket notebook! Choose a Digital subscription or our best deal—All Access—that includes print and digital issues, full archive access, and the NYR App!


Or register for a free account to read just this article. Register.

Already a subscriber?

Advertisement