In recent days, a chilling video emerged of a stadium filled with black South Africans singing “Kill the Boer,” a fighting song calling for the murder of white South Africans. The clip went viral, shocking Western people whose idea of South Africa was fixed in the Nelson Mandela era, and who haven’t paid attention to the country since its first black president died in 2013.
The New York Times rushed to assure its readers that there was nothing to worry about. The song, it said, is a relic of “decades” of anti-apartheid struggle (false: it debuted in 1993, one year after South African whites voted to end apartheid, and one year before Mandela became president), and besides only “far Right” whites are troubled by it.
In fact, the evil song tells us more about the reality of South Africa today, three decades after apartheid’s demise, than the Times’s propaganda. The country entered the post-apartheid era relatively rich and productive, with well-developed industries and Africa’s best universities. Now, owing in large part to bad governance, South Africa is descending into economic chaos, criminal anarchy, capital flight, and rising racial hatred.
Julius Malema is the feared face of a bloody South African future. The black communist who led the stadium chant heads the Economic Freedom Force (EFF), a Marxist-Leninist, Afro-nationalist party that is the country’s third largest political grouping. It calls for mass expropriation of land from white farmers. Its leaders have made a number of racist, anti-white statements, explicitly calling for violence against whites and others it perceives as enemies.
For example, the party ended up in court a few years back by publicizing communist revolutionary Che Guevara’s quote: “A revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate.” In 2018, Malema called for the forcible removal of an elected white mayor, saying, “We are cutting the throat of whiteness.” Later, Malema claimed that he was speaking metaphorically about ending white privilege.
That’s cold comfort to South Africa’s whites, who comprise about 8% of the population of the 60 million-strong nation. Blacks, by contrast, make up 81% of the population, with the rest being of mixed race (‘coloured’) or Indian origin. Since apartheid’s end, a number of white farmers (boer is the Afrikaans word for farmer) have been murdered, and Boer leaders claim the black-majority government doesn’t care .
While overall crime has skyrocketed in South Africa, affecting citizens of every race, the farm attacks have particular salience, both because they target prosperous farmers who feed the country and because whites are a small minority who have limited capacity to defend themselves.
The misleading Times story about “Kill the Boer” symbolizes the attitude of right-thinking Western liberals, who prefer to avert their gaze from the situation in a country that thirty years ago was a model of a Hollywood happy ending. The attitude from Western media towards the racist murders of South African whites seems to be it’s not happening, and if it is, can you really blame the blacks?
Paul Maritz is a Boer—that is, a South African of Dutch descent—who is trying to raise the alarm while studying abroad. The 30-year-old political theorist is working on his Ph.D. at a major European university (he asks that I withhold its name to avoid trouble), and is willing to talk to anyone who will listen about the plight of his people. I met him in Budapest recently, and sat down with him to talk about what’s going on back home, while the West, which once focused intensely on South Africa, chooses to look away.
The last time South Africa was in the American news in a big way, Nelson Mandela was president, his African National Congress (ANC) party was in charge, and a new life was beginning for your country. Then you dropped out of the news. What’s happening now?
We always say in South Africa that it’s like the Eye of Sauron, in Lord of the Rings: the eye moves its focus. In 1994, the world decided that South Africa was good again, and the eye of the world moved away from us. Initially, South Africa probably did quite well. Foreign direct investment massively increased, and President Mandela was a poster child for the new world order [that emerged] with the fall of the Iron Curtain and everything that followed.
But as time went on, we saw that laws were more and more set against us. At first people said, “Oh, this is to be expected, don’t worry, it’s not going to change much.”
By “us,” do you mean against Boers or whites more broadly?
So, let’s step back. In South Africa, the population is broadly 80% black, 9% what we call ‘coloured,’ 9% white, and 2% Indian. Among the whites, it’s hard to say for sure, but about two-thirds are Afrikaans-speaking, descendants of what were called the Boer peoples. Now, it is true that during the Boer War, there were lots of Afrikaans people who were living in the Cape and weren’t necessarily part of the war, but generally, we don’t differentiate between northern and southern white Afrikaans-speaking people. So the word Boer applies to everyone.
My family was part of the Great Trek, which refers to groups of people who moved from the Cape up to the north to create new republics in the 1830s.
Coming back to post-1994, a lot of people have this idea that the ANC are Nelson Mandela’s party; they are democrats and African nationalists. However, a lot of them were educated in the Soviet Union and hold communist ideas. In 1988, Joe Slovo, South Africa’s first minister of housing after 1994, was a deeply committed communist, and the secretary general of the Communist Party. He said that South Africa could take the wisdom of the Soviet Union, apply it, and make it work this time. They really believed that.
Though South Africa initially was working [immediately after apartheid], there was a brewing Marxist, collectivist movement. From 2003, we’ve had legislation called B-BBEE, which stands for Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment. They revised it in 2013 to make it even more strict. You can look it up on the internet, but it basically says that you can’t list your company on the Johannesburg stock exchange or work with the government unless you fulfill certain B-BBEE stipulations. These requirements are becoming more challenging.
Like what?
You’ll have a white-owned family company started by the grandfather in the 1920s, and the father took it over in the 1960s. Now the son, who is the third-generation owner, is either forced to sell 30% of his company to a black silent partner, or he is forced to give away part of his company in order to do work with the government.
Some people might say what’s the problem? Don’t you want to be inclusive? But what is the government measuring? If you want to build a bridge, shouldn’t the question be how good a civil engineer are you? But now the question is how diverse are you? And so, we see that in South Africa, in a lot of cases, it’s not who is going to produce the very best, but who is most closely aligned to the government’s ideology? This is proven by your dedication to B-BEEE laws. This has meant that Ph.D. funding for people like me is challenging. If you are a man and you’re white in South Africa today, that can be a real challenge.
If you listen to Nelson Mandela’s speeches in 1994 and 1995, the idea was that we were going to build a country where race doesn’t matter. I cannot say that I grew up in a country where race didn’t matter. In fact, I think it mattered more than people tend to realize.
What are the practical effects of this on daily life for all South Africans, not just whites?
We have massive corruption in South Africa. What it comes down to is that you’ll have someone who was very closely linked to the government, who fulfills all these B-BBEE practices, but who is also a fellow struggler in this National Democratic Revolution, which is what the ANC call their broader movement. This person will get the government contract because of his ideological conformity, and will deliver poorly. This is a frequent outcome. This means that people who are relying on the ANC to get houses, running water, and electricity aren’t getting it.
Second, look at the national electricity provider, Eskom, which has become a running joke all over the world. Eskom has always been in the hands of the government. It was created by a previous government and was actually quite effective. But then it started becoming a tool of the state. There was a lot of corruption, and they didn’t pay heed to the warnings given to them. They were warned in 2002 that they should do something about their capacity. They didn’t really listen. In 2007 we started having rolling blackouts in South Africa. Usually it wasn’t that bad. You can live without electricity for two hours a week.
For a while it stopped and we thought that the problem had been addressed. Then it started up again in 2017 or 2018, and it became very, very bad. In February of this year, we had several areas that only had electricity for a couple of hours each week. Coupled with that, South Africa has an immense problem with the theft of copper cables. It seems that the government is not doing anything about it.
On top of that, South Africa is a very dry country. Water pipes are being stolen for the metal. The water provision is therefore going down.
South Africa is very unsafe, because the police are struggling. Electricity provision is lagging, and water provision is suffering. What it all comes down to is that living standards are dropping, investors are pulling out, and, more broadly, faith in this dream of a rainbow nation is declining.
Are living standards falling for black South Africans too?
That’s a good question. If you are linked to the government or a member of the party, you will be provided for. It is easy to get contracts, and if you work for the government, you’ll get good pay. In South Africa, the governmental sector is huge. You’ve got hundreds of thousands of people working for the government, but their output is not necessarily measured. Every year they come out and say, “We’re going to create jobs,” and what this means is that they’re simply going to try to hire away unemployment. It doesn’t mean they’re going to ramp up productivity.
A lot of black people have made their way through the education system and are doing well. Good for them! Not everyone who prospers does so because of a corrupt system. So for them, it’s going better.
But a lot of [black] people are still living in abject poverty. They have to walk to get water and use a toilet, which can be just a hole dug at the local school. We’ve had cases of raw sewage running through playgrounds. These things are still happening. If you look at global indicators, like the GINI coefficient, you’ll see that inequality has been increasing in South Africa from the year 2000, which is exactly the opposite of what was promised, right?
So I think if the ANC’s goal was to create a black middle class, they’ve more or less failed. They’ve created a black mogul class, but I don’t see the benefits of that reaching the average South African. He doesn’t have electricity. He is exposed to serious crime. And because the South African government doesn’t care to protect the northern borders of the country, we have massive illegal immigration. This also affects job opportunities. A lot of black people who have put their faith in the ANC, and who have voted for it for thirty years, don’t necessarily have a lot to show for that vote.
Why have we not heard about this in the United States and Europe?
I think there’s a narrative. The narrative is “everything is fine in South Africa.” This understanding is stuck in 1991, when the Iron Curtain fell, and liberal democracy triumphed. For the world to admit that the South African project hasn’t worked would be an immense political and ideological failure, I suppose, for the West.
Certain things were promised. The whole world celebrated this new dawn in South Africa. For the liberal establishment to recognize that that has not been working out—that murder rates are increasing, that provision of basic services is lacking, that the ANC, which was the world’s darling, has mismanaged the country as badly as it has—would be too much of an embarrassment.
Furthermore—and this might be a more controversial point—we would have to recognize the importance of merit. In South Africa, if you say that our most important goal is diversity, not merit, then you have to deny something about the reality of the human condition. That’s not something that ‘woke’ culture in the West finds itself comfortable with.
The South African experiment was ten years ahead of the world, to a certain extent, in the sense that we had these serious racial quotas a lot earlier than most other countries. When looking to fill jobs, we didn’t ask, “Can they do the job?” or “who is the most competent,” but rather if they could fill some other requirement.
I’m struck by the implicit comparison between Mandela and Martin Luther King. I was raised in an America that revered King and his dream of an America where skin color didn’t matter. Today, everything has flipped. You have liberal elites, both white and black, talking about “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” which means exactly the sort of thing you’re talking about in today’s South Africa. What lesson do you have for Americans who embrace this DEI ethic?
With a structure as complex as a modern state—vastly more complicated than anything people in the past could have imagined—if you’re going to entrust the keys of that system to someone, the most important question has to be merit. In modern times, people like to say that anyone can do it. Yes, if they have the education and the experience. There’s no one there saying that only people of a certain race can govern. That’s a lie. But you do need to appoint people to important positions who have shown they can do it.
There is an attack on merit. The claim is that merit doesn’t really matter, that it’s about nothing more than your background. If that’s how we see things, then we will make appointments to key positions based on the wrong metrics.
What would you say to people reading this who say, “This white man is only defending apartheid,” that justice seems unjust to people who have been privileged?
I’ve heard that a lot, and it’s simply not true. In South Africa, the number of people who want apartheid back is negligible. No one wants it back. What we want is a country that works. If you say a company owned by a white father and his white son can’t work with the government because of the color of their skin—and that’s exactly what the South African government is saying—then you’re saying that ability is trumped by race concerns.
In South Africa, one on one, people from different races get along well. But there is a serious threat from radical ideology (like the EFF, which sang “Kill the Boer”), and a serious threat of the state collapsing due to its inability to fulfill basic responsibilities. If South Africa is supposed to be a model for African development and a model of diversity for the rest of the world, then we should be asking serious questions of the government. How has it gotten this far? Why is the world simply overlooking the corruption (and hateful ideology) in South Africa?
Is this a matter of reverse racism? Is the West willing to give black-run governments a pass that it would never give to white-run governments?
‘Reverse racism’ is a loaded term, but I think we can talk about a correction. The global media establishment may think that if we criticize the South African government, that could be the equivalent of criticizing a strong black government, and we don’t want to do that.
Essentially, no one is arguing about the ability of a black person to govern a country. But I think in the Western media in particular, they fear that this is how it seems. So they give a hall pass, a freebie to the South African government. Maybe that was justifiable for the first five years, or at least understandable. But what we see now is that this government has been in power for thirty years, and they can’t keep the lights on. Investors have already spoken with their feet. Right now, it makes a lot more sense to invest in Rwanda or Tanzania. We see a lot of investors leaving South Africa.
The EFF is a populist political grouping in South Africa to the left of the ANC. They are aligned with the ideologies of Frantz Fanon, Lenin, Marx, and Castro. They have said that we should explore the idea of expropriation without compensation, meaning they simply want to take white farmers’ land. That would massively endanger food security for all of Africa, and I cannot foresee it being a peaceful event. Such a move would also endanger everyone’s physical security.
We have seen this happen in Zimbabwe. It’s not a theoretical danger.
Exactly. But imagine that, times 15, based on the amount of people that will be affected and the size of the economy.
In the U.S., after the George Floyd riots of 2020, police stopped enforcing the law as strictly. You know who suffered the most from the resulting violence? Black people. But the media don’t want to report that, because it didn’t fit the narrative. If South Africa collapses, I have a feeling that the Western media are going to react similarly.
I worked for a long time for the Solidarity Movement, an Afrikaner cultural organization that has a trade union and a human rights organization under it. Broadly, what we were saying is that in such a diverse country, one minority group cannot take responsibility for a whole country. Only the state can do that. But what we can take responsibility for is what’s happening locally. You can’t make sure all the roads are well kept, but you can fix the potholes in your town. You can’t make sure that the government provides enough money for teachers’ salaries, but you can make sure the school is safe. While you can’t do much about the values and morals of the whole country, you can join your local church council, and take control of Bible study under your own roof.
Localism.
Yes, a localism that reaches across racial lines to have this conversation. The Boer communities in South Africa have embarked on some farming projects with black communities that have proven successful thus far. We’ve opened conversations on a local level.
We’re seeing a lot of emigration from people who have skills and credentials and can find work overseas: doctors, dentists, financial analysts, etc. But for those who stay behind, we have to try to protect what we have, and that means getting involved locally. If you have a strong community that has prepared itself, then if this behemoth of a state collapses, then you will at least be able to protect yourself. It will affect you, but you can mitigate the damage.
It reminds me of this book I wrote called The Benedict Option. It has to do with religion. The idea is that if the whole thing is collapsing around you, then at least you can take responsibility locally—within your family and community—and build resilience. You can’t aim to save the whole thing, because that might be impossible. But you can at least save yourself, your family, and your community.
If you go back to the 1820s, 1830s, 1840s, when the Boer communities were moving into the north of what is today South Africa, the focus was on finding land to farm. People spread out, and lived far away from each other. They created lots of different towns, usually about 60km away from each other (the distance that a horse can gallop in a day, more or less). So today, we see all over South Africa small towns that were hubs of the local farming communities. The strategy of the Solidarity Movement is to identify those towns that seem to be growing, or at least remaining steady, and to focus our resources on them, instead of trying to maintain every town.
For example, we may not be able to keep five Afrikaans schools alive, but if we can pool our resources in one school, and build a good hostel there, the farmers can leave their children there all week. We will make sure that in that same town we have a good old age home, along with making sure that there is reliable electricity for all our projects. We call this the ‘concentration strategy.’ You make peace with the fact that you can’t save everything.
When I talk about The Benedict Option, I’m sometimes accused of being defeatist. My argument is that we should fight to turn things around, but that we are fools if we bet everything on the worst not happening and fail to make provision for keeping our faith alive in the collapse. Do people call you in the Solidarity Movement defeatist?
I suppose to a certain extent. I don’t think we Afrikaners have an external enemy. Think of the enmity that exists between certain nations and Israel, for example. We don’t have that. People mostly live in peace with each other. Farm murders are a problem in South Africa, but the murderers don’t discriminate between black and white as much as you might think. Black farm workers are also killed. My point is that the focus of the Solidarity Movement is not so much defense against outside enemies. It’s more about protecting the Afrikaner language and community.
Some might call it defeatist, but I say it’s realistic. Is it realistic to imagine that three million people can maintain 400 towns? The government has clearly proven that maintaining the living standards of the people is not important. They can blame apartheid or colonialism as much as they want—which they keep doing—but that doesn’t change the reality on the ground. We cannot maintain our language, culture, and protect the vulnerable members of society while trying to keep up this whole system of 400 towns.
What can we do? Well, we know that a farmer can drive 60 miles to see his elderly mother or to take his children to boarding school on a Sunday evening or a Monday morning, and pick them up on a Friday. So we select the towns that make the most sense to reinforce. These towns will become a network of service delivery.
To a certain extent, you can see this network of towns as a refuge if it all collapses. But I prefer to think of it as ‘state-proofing.’ The more dependent you become on the state, the more dependent you are on it succeeding. But if it’s clear that it’s not going to succeed, then the smartest thing to do is to make yourself as independent as possible. If you know your bank is going to fail, then you need to make yourself as independent from that bank as possible. If we are dependent on the government for electricity, for safety, for schooling, then the question becomes: How can we take as much of that out of the hands of the government as possible?
What about security? If the government falls into the hands of these radicals, they’re not going to leave you alone.
What you see in the small towns are neighborhood watches. Once a week, a man in a town will spend the whole night driving around in a car with a spotlight. Many of these neighborhood watches cooperate with the police. That is one solution.
The bigger the town gets, the easier it is to build gated communities. This is very, very common in cities like Pretoria. If enough people pay, you can gate off your community and have control over who comes in and who goes out. This is part of the solution in some places.
In South Africa, you see a lot of people arming themselves. Developing weapons proficiency is a very important thing. Most of my friends are pursuing their gun licenses at the moment. This is especially important when you get married. You don’t want to wake up, unarmed, and find someone in your house. We also have a hunting culture, so having guns is very natural.
All of that combined is what state-proofing means.
It’s impossible to avoid the element of ethnicity and tribalism in forming solidarity. If you talked about Afrikaner solidarity today to Americans, most of us would see that as racism. On the other hand, if white South Africans don’t stand together today, who else can they rely on?
Exactly. That’s where the West needs to have a serious conversation with itself. Let’s take white and black out of it. To say that a person who is blue is inherently better or worse than a person who is green, that is racism. But to say that a person is blue is not racism; that’s identifying a fact. We were promised a rainbow nation where the different colors are unity with each other. But what we have is a situation where if you don’t force all these colors to be one, it will fail. It has failed. What that means is that if you dare to say you’ll only marry someone of your own cultural group or language, then you’re racist. How does that work? Obviously, you can marry whoever you want, but it isn’t racist to make the decision to maintain your language or your culture, and marry accordingly.
In South Africa, we aren’t as ‘woke’ as the West. All races are very conservative, and we are seriously religious. But people also realize that if you are a Zulu, a Xhosa, and Afrikaner, or a white English person, you have a different culture.
I’m an Afrikaner who speaks Afrikaans, as my parents do. My people came in the 17th century. The English came in the 19th century, for very different reasons. If I married a white English girl, people in the West would look at that and say, “Oh, you’ve married someone of your own race.” That is a very, very shallow way of looking at things. I would have married someone who can’t speak to my mother in her own language, because English people in South Africa tend only to speak English. It’s a very complex situation, and people tend to water it down quite a bit.
Americans look at South Africa as black vs. white, but we have no concept of Xhosa vs. Zulu, or anything else. That matters in South Africa. It’s not like all black people are the same, any more than all white people are the same.
There’s a famous author in South Africa who said recently that in Europe and America there is a longing to frame South Africa as a simple black-white narrative, the same narrative that was used in the apartheid era. South Africa? White bad, black good, conversation over. But the reality has become so much more complex. You have black communities singing that they want to kill white people. And you have white communities living in squatter camps and houses made out of boards. People in the West don’t understand what’s going on.
We like that more people in the West, especially in conservative circles, are coming to have a more realistic understanding of South African society. I belong to a group that in 2002, had six state universities that had Afrikaans as the only language, or at least as an official language. Today there are maybe two—and I say maybe because it’s very difficult to get a Ph.D. in Afrikaans.
Now, you can say that maybe the public assets needed to be spread more widely. This is true. But we have 27 universities, and if all of them are English, that means that 95% of the people in your country are going to university in their second language. I challenge anyone to go to university in your second language. It’s not as easy as it sounds. I’m writing my Ph.D. in English, and I frequently find myself not being able to express what I want to say.
This is one thing I’ve learned by being in Hungary. They speak a very difficult, unique language, but it means everything to them, because it is the carrier of their national identity, of their culture. If they lose their language, they lose who they are. That is a thought that very few Americans ever confront, because we live in a world where English is nearly universal. We are simply not built to understand why language matters so much to other peoples.
A language, in and of itself, is just a bunch of sounds linked together. But it is also the ship upon which a culture sails. The French, if you took their language away and made them speak English, maybe they would still have their baguettes and their cheese, but their language essentially binds them. With us, we are a minority group. Our language exists only in Africa. If we lose it, we will not only lose a bunch of sounds linked together to make a language. We will lose a culture. We will lose a history. We will lose a literature.
Our history is about fleeing imperial power. A lot of South Africans with French and German surnames are descended from people who fled after the Thirty Years War. Many of them went into the wilderness of Africa outside the borders of the Dutch colony because they didn’t want to be part of it. Then the English took over the Cape colony, and people, like my forefathers, moved north to escape the British empire. The British empire hunted them down and defeated them in 1902. I’m not saying that gold and diamonds were the main reason, but they probably play a role. So you keep fleeing from empires, and you’ve maintained your language and your minority culture. But if everyone emigrates, and everyone starts speaking English, and we don’t have a university of our own, in a couple of generations, that language dies and with it, the culture.
Normally the Left would sympathize with a besieged minority. However, you are white, and Afrikaner. A lot of people in the West would say, “Oh, too bad for you—shouldn’t have done apartheid! We don’t feel sorry for you.” Similarly, in the U.S. today, there is no sympathy for, and even hostility to, white Southerners who deplore slavery and segregation, but who at the same time feel a sense of devotion to their ancestors, who, yes, were morally wrong, but there’s more to them than their sins. We also have well-funded efforts underway to delegitimize the foundations of American history by demonizing the Founding Fathers because they were wrong on race. Are there lessons from what’s happening now in South Africa that apply to the culture war underway in the U.S.?
I would like to quote the head of the Solidarity Movement, Flip Buys. He saw a lot of this coming. You can read some of his work in English. He made the important point that our forefathers weren’t heroes, but they weren’t villains either. Sure, my forefathers were part of an apartheid regime. I can’t deny that. But do I think they were scum of the earth who deserve to be destroyed? Of course not.
As someone who is new to living in Europe, it’s distressing to encounter Germans who seem to see nothing in their culture worth defending. Yes, Germany gave us the Nazis, but Germany also gave us Bach, Beethoven, and Goethe, and so many amazing things. Yet so many Germans seem willing to allow their culture to die out of guilt and shame. I feel terrible for them.
Exactly. I live in Germany, and I see that. Oftentimes, they don’t see their own culture as worth protecting. There are beautiful things. It is unfair to take a 1,300-year history, point to 12 years out of it, and say, “This is who you are.”
We Afrikaners have to deal with not being a big culture. What do I mean by this? If all Americans tomorrow stopped speaking English and stopped being Christian, both the English language and Christian faith would be fine. If all Afrikaners in South Africa stopped speaking Afrikaans, our culture would be dead. ‘Wokeness’ is not a luxury we can afford.
