Malema’s “Kill the boer” chant sparks global backlash
Key topics
- Malema's "Kill the Boer" chant sparks global controversy on Human Rights Day.
- Elon Musk and Marco Rubio condemn the chant, sparking media and political backlash.
- Debate over historical context and hate speech ruling fuels further division.
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By James Myburgh
Something has gone very wrong in any society where a particular minority has become fair game for this type of agitation
On Human Rights Day EFF leader Julius Malema once again led a crowd of redshirts in the chant "shoot to kill. Kill the Boer! Kill the farmer!" This was clipped by former DA MP Renaldo Gouws and posted under the heading "Happy Human Rights Day South Africa! Yes, this video was recorded today."
In his comment on this clip, which was reposted by a pseudonymous user, Elon Musk stated "Very few people know that there is a major political party in South Africa that is actively promoting white genocide… Where is the outrage? Why is there no coverage by the legacy media?" In a post on X, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated that "'Kill the Boer' is a chant that incites violence. South Africa's leaders and politicians must take action to protect Afrikaner and other disfavoured minorities." As of Tuesday afternoon, March 25, 2025, the video posted by Gouws had been viewed 62,3 million times.
Musk's intervention was met with an indignant response by News24 editor Adriaan Basson. In an open letter to the Tesla, SpaceX, and X Corp CEO he accused Musk of "tolerating fake news, misinformation and blatant lies on X." Some of Basson's claims in response are obviously erroneous, like his assertion that Gouws "called for the killing of black people" in 2010 (he did not). "Hundreds of researchers" have also not confirmed "that the primary motivation for murder is greed…." In 2022/23 only 1 468 (5%) of 27 494 murders were determined by the police to have been robbery related.
Other points made by Basson are accurate but irrelevant, in that they in no way constitute a rebuttal of what Musk was saying. These include the reality that there is no 'genocide' currently underway in South Africa, that the EFF's support is below 10% and dipping, that the majority of black South Africans are Christian, God-fearing people, and that ordinary black and white South Africans get along well. These speak to the situation as it currently is, but not to the purpose (or danger) of these kinds of death-chants, or whether we should be worried by the indifferent response by Western and local elites to them.
Basson then segues into a defence of 'kill the Boer.' He approvingly quotes the recent ruling by the Supreme Court of Appeal which found that such chants did not constitute hate speech. The court declared that "the reasonably well-informed person would understand that Mr Malema was using a historic struggle song, with the performance gestures, that go with it, as a provocative means of advancing his party's political agenda." (That agenda being the seizing of the land and wealth of the whites.) Basson claims, citing this judgment, that the term Boer "does NOT refer to farmers" but was used by the ANC to "represent the oppressive Nationalist apartheid regime." Such songs and chants calling for the death of the Boers must be viewed in this "historical context" – they had merely been calls for "an end to white supremacy."
This is a deeply misleading account of the purpose to which these songs were put by the liberation movements during the armed struggle. "Kill the Boer! Kill the Farmer!" is actually an old Zimbabwe People's Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA) chant which dates from the Bush War in Rhodesia. It was then taught to Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) cadres, along with the toyi-toyi, by their ZIPRA instructors in training camps in Zambia in the late 1970s. The words the trainees were made to chant, while doing intense physical training, included the following lines:
"Kill the Boer, the farmer!"
"Hawu! Hawu, Hawu!"
"Kill the son, the daughter!"
"Hawu! Hawu, Hawu!"
"Kill the sister, the brother!"
"Hawu! Hawu, Hawu!"
"Bulala! Bulala konke!"
(Kill, kill everybody)
The purpose of such indoctrination was to ensure that when the time came to kill, this would be done unthinkingly. This is what happened when ZIPRA guerrillas downed an Air Rhodesia Viscount plane with a SAM-7 missile southeast of Kariba on September 3, 1978. Thirty-eight of the fifty-six people onboard the flight were killed instantly in the crash. The eighteen survivors were all sitting in the back rows and were able to exit from the tail of the plane.
Five of them went to look for water, while the other thirteen remained behind to tend to the wounded among them. Hans Hansen, a survivor of the crash, told reporters that about an hour later nine guerrillas emerged from the bush. They approached the group that had remained behind and "said they were going to give us water and help. Then when they gathered us together, they said, 'you have taken our land. We are going to kill you'." The guerrillas then opened fire with AK-47s, with one woman bayonetted after being shot; "it was the most brutal thing I have ever seen," Hansen related. Hansen, his wife, and another man, managed to flee. The other ten, including one man, seven women, and two girls aged 11 and 14, were all killed.
Basson is correct that the ANC commonly used the term "Boers" to refer to "the enemy" – the white regime, members of the security services, and so on downwards. However, he is wrong to claim that farmers fell outside of that category. In the mid-1980s the ANC was seeking to unleash People's War across South Africa. It specifically sought to orchestrate violence against farmers, as it did against black "collaborators," and went out of its way to define them as legitimate military targets for guerrilla attack. This was all part of a "sustained drive to clear the white farms and harass the enemy with mine warfare."
As Oliver Tambo later reported in the ANC's January 8th statement of 1986, "the people's army, Umkhonto we Sizwe, has taken the armed struggle… into the enemy rural military zones, striking blows that have worried the enemy…" However, "much organisational and mobilisation work still needs to be done in these areas, raising to the fore such questions as the need … to rise up against the blood-sucking white soldier-farmers and to address the central task of the landless masses: seizing the land which rightfully belongs to them."
Following the ANC's unbanning these songs and chants were taught to thousands of young radicals, including Malema, during their paramilitary training. They are more accurately understood as "ideation" (of killing), rather than "incitement" (to kill). They are an effort to steadily wear down and ultimately erase all remnants of the old moral proscriptions that the young revolutionary may have imbibed as a child – "Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house… nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour's." The purpose is that when the moment arrives, and the call to action is finally issued (whether this is to attack, rob, or kill), it will be responded to unquestioningly.
Morally grounded societies do not tolerate calls to kill, nor do they tolerate gangs violently attacking and robbing people in their homes, whether on farms or in the suburbs, or anywhere else. Those taboos – the idea that certain lines should never be crossed – are fiercely enforced by political and religious leaders, intellectuals and the law. Something has gone very wrong in any society where a particular minority has become fair game for this type of agitation, and this kind of violence.
The one thing that can be said for Malema's public provocations, however, is that they expose the morally and politically complicit, as luminol lights up blood stains. What Basson's article inadvertently confirms is these chants are condoned not just by the ANC, but by an increasingly politicised judiciary, and the media as well.
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