South Africa: From Reconciliation to Revanchism

On 21 May, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa traveled to Washington, in the hopes of resetting his trade relationship with the United States after President Donald Trump levied thirty percent tariffs and claimed that the South African government was complicit in a genocide of South Africa’s white farmers. On the face of it, this claim is risible. The United Nations defines genocide as the ‘intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group’.  Over thirty years after the end of Apartheid, the minority white population still owns the majority of the land. The ministers in charge of agriculture and prisons are both white Afrikaners. The white population is stable. The Afrikaners, in short, are not facing genocide.

But South Africa is complicated. Its idiosyncrasies make it hard to compare it with other countries, even if one has a strong understanding of African or colonial history. It is easy to get bogged down in the wars and the organised repression between and among the British government in London, the Afrikaners, other white settlers, Indians, Zulus, Xhosa, and other native groups. 

A key fact is that from 1948 to 1994 South Africa was ruled by the Nationalist Party, a party whose leadership had sought, unsuccessfully, to stay neutral in the Second World War, and had shown sympathy with the Nazis. At home, they introduced a policy of legal segregation known as Apartheid (Afrikaans for ‘apartness’), where the majority black population was forced onto small parcels of unproductive land while the white population became rich on the country’s fertile farmland and diamond and gold mines. When Black Africans began to organise a resistance movement, the Nationalists responded with arrests and violence.

One of these resistance leaders was a missionary educated lawyer named Nelson Mandela. In 1961, Mandela co-founded uMkhonto weSizwe (“Spear of the Nation”), which operated as the paramilitary wing of the African National Congress (ANC), a proscribed political organisation that called for an end to minority rule. For this, Mandela was branded a terrorist by the Nationalist Party. In 1964, Mandela and several other activists were found guilty of sabotage during what became known as the Rivonia Trial. He ended up serving twenty-seven years of a life sentence, which included hard labour breaking up rocks in a limestone quarry on Robben Island. Whereas the government hoped this experience would break Mandela’s will, it instead strengthened his commitment to find a way to forge a new South Africa, one that could be a home to all who lived in it. The reason that Nelson Mandela became a global icon in the 1990s, photographed with everyone from Fidel Castro to Queen Elizabeth II, was because he managed to negotiate a peaceful settlement between the minority whites who controlled the government and economy and the majority Black population. The settlement ensured Black political rights without wealth redistribution. The widely held assumption had been that, like Zimbabwe, South Africa’s dark history would ultimately erupt in race war, which, given the fact that the Nationalist Party had built nuclear weapons, could have truly been catastrophic.
        For South Africa’s embattled Afrikaner minority, the transition from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe remains the ultimate bugaboo. After achieving independence, Zimbabwe was ruled by a missionary educated teacher named Robert Mugabe, until he was deposed in a military coup in 2017, at the age of 93. When the nation transitioned to majority rule in 1980, half of Rhodesia’s 270,000 white people fled the newly christened Zimbabwe. The remaining white population largely sought accommodation with the new regime, but after twenty years of economic mismanagement, President Mugabe began to use the remaining whites, especially farmers, as scapegoats. So-called ‘war veterans’, often too young to have actually fought in the Rhodesian Bush War, began the process of taking over white owned farms, displacing or killing people who had spent their whole lives, as had their forebearers, on that land. Land was taken forcibly by the government, without compensation, something that has not happened yet in South Africa but is a stated goal of the Marxist-Leninist Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF). Over the next decade of hyperinflation Zimbabwe lost, according to the Center for Global Development, the chance to double its annual GDP. Instead, it fell to about half that of neighbouring Zambia.

In 2008, voters in Zimbabwe rejected Mugabe and his Zanu-PF party. The government called for new elections and began a campaign of political violence against the opposition Movement for a Democratic Change (MDC). The violence claimed the lives of over 160 people, and over 5,000 were tortured. The UK Foreign Secretary David Milliband reached out to South African President Jacob Zuma about an arms embargo; the South Africans turned him down. Instead, Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Jacob Zuma issued a statement ‘call[ing] for an end to any violence and intimidation and stress[ing] the importance of respect for the sovereign people of Zimbabwe and the choice they have made at the ballot box.’ In the end, the MDC boycotted the second round of voting, and Mugabe claimed his sixth presidential victory. Zimbabwe, once Africa’s breadbasket, had become a basket case. As for the white minority, today Zimbabwe is estimated to have less than twenty-five thousand white people. 

For decades now, white South Africans have feared what they call ‘Zimbabweification’. 

In the 2024 General Election, South Africa’s two leftist populist parties, the EFF and uMkhonto weSizwe (MK), received about a quarter of the popular vote. Both parties split from the ruling African National Congress (ANC) after public fallouts. The EFF are led by Julius Malema, the former leader of the ANC’s youth wing, while MK is led by Jacob Zuma, the former president who was replaced by Cyril Ramaphosa in 2018. MK’s name is a direct reference to the paramilitary violence Mandela led in the struggle against Apartheid. The leaders of both parties have sung the Apartheid era ‘Kill the Boer’ anthem - boer being the Afrikaans word for farmer. Both parties support land redistribution without compensation. While both express admiration for Mandela as a freedom fighter, they have also expressed rage and disappointment at his end of apartheid settlement.
There is much to be disappointed about. The end of Apartheid in 1994 was met with almost limitless optimism in the ‘end of history’, post Cold War milieu. When juxtaposed with the Rwandan genocide, which began the same month Mandela was elected President, it seemed as if all of the continent’s hopes would rest on the political transformation of South Africa, which would surely be accompanied with an economic transformation. The new South African constitution promised that all South Africans would have a house, food, water, and an education. In a country where the majority Black population had been forced into impoverished townships and homelands and had, under the 1953 Bantu Education Act, the educational equivalent to a British ‘Year Two’ student, these were lofty aspirations.

The Republic of South Africa does deserve credit for its political and social record: impressive progress has been made on race relations, LGBTQ rights, and democracy has endured. But they are still waiting for the economic transformation. South Africa’s economy grew at a rate of .6% last year, following .7% the year before, whereas the average subsaharan African economy grew 3.8% in 2024. While the government has built millions of units of government housing, there is still a significant backlog. While it has promised water, people in the Western Cape are asked to take short showers and refrain from watering their plants. Instead of peace, South Africa has the highest crime rate in Africa. And instead of equality, South Africa is the world’s most economically unequal country.

The majority of South Africans were born after Apartheid, and for many of them the ANC is not the party of liberation, hope, or Mandela - but rather unemployment, corruption, and electricity blackouts. While the pragmatism of the Democratic Alliance (DA) makes it attractive to South Africa’s whites and upwardly mobile middle class, those truly left behind are not interested in its centre-right calls for patience and pragmatism. Young people, in particular, voted disproportionately for the EFF and MK in 2024, while the ruling African National Congress earned an all time low of 40%. 

This left the ANC with two options: heal the divisions within the ANC by going into government with MK and the EFF, or create a grand coalition with the DA and other smaller parties. Ramaphosa opted for the latter option, treating the two leftist parties like Germany’s Christian Democrats treat the Alternative für Deutschland or like Nigel Farage treats Tommy Robinson - the strategy is to treat these parties as pariahs and keep them outside of government. They can, thanks to independent court rulings, keep singing ‘Kill the Boer’ and make other provocative statements, but they do this from the opposition benches. For now, the centre is holding.

But that does not mean that white South Africans are not, in other real ways, in danger. While genocides are organised and executed by governments (most notably in the cases of Armenia, the Holocaust, Cambodia, and Rwanda), organised campaigns of violence and terror can take place beyond the remit of the state. White farmers do face a high murder rate, and in many cases the government does not prioritise this. To live as a white South African farmer is to have private security, high walls and electric fences, CCTVs, and even a gun under the pillow - because yes, there are many people who do want to kill the boer.

White South Africans, generally, do not want to leave South Africa. In 1652, a Dutch navigator named Jan van Riebeck took command of the Cape Colony, an important trading post for the Dutch East India company. Generations of Dutch, French, and German migrants settled on the Cape, largely for economic and religious reasons. Over time, these people became known as the ‘Afrikaners’ which denotes that, despite their white skin, they are Africans, with no ties to a former nation. When the British started arriving in the early nineteenth century, they were derisively referred to as ‘soutpiel’, Afrikaans for ‘salty penis’, as they were seen as having only one foot in South Africa and the other in Britain with their genitals dangling in the ocean. The message is clear: those who stay are truly African, but those who leave are not. Over the last twenty-five years, the white population has remained mostly stable - while over six hundred thousand have left, the birth rates have meant that there are still about four and a half million white South Africans, in a country with an overall population of sixty-three million people.

So if the EFF and MK ever do enter the Union Buildings in Pretoria, the white farmers will not go quietly. Fringe groups such as the Suidlanders have made it clear that although they are a small minority, they are highly trained and well armed and ready to defend themselves in an asymmetrical war. They reference the 1899-1902 Second Boer War when the Afrikaner Republics of Transvaal and the Orange Free State held off a British army ten times their size at great embarrassment to the British Empire. It took three years, a scorched earth campaign and concentration camps to finally compel the Afrikaners to surrender. This time, they are preparing by also organising support in Australia and the United States, which leads us back to the Trump-Ramaphosa meeting. 

Of course, none of this context was on offer when President Ramaphosa visited Washington. The United States’ concerns, as many have pointed out, seem to extend from internal United States culture war narratives over race relations and DEI, rather than a genuine concern for the future of South Africa. President Trump got to play the part of the hero who speaks truth to power, raising an alarm over ‘genocide’, but when pressed by Ramaphosa’s delegation he struggled to provide specifics, instead equivocating: ‘We’re going to be discussing some of the things that are taking place in South Africa and see if we can help.’ While the world should be keeping an eye on South Africa, the White House meeting proved not to be a clarifying moment. For the United States, South African concerns remain on the global fringes; for South Africans, these unmet hopes are the front line.