The first half of this year saw South Africa mark 30 years of democracy since apartheid officially ended with the country’s first free vote in April 1994. The following month, the country’s seventh post-apartheid Parliament was elected on May 29. For the first time since 1994, the African National Congress (ANC) failed to secure a majority, garnering just 40 percent of the vote. This translated to 159 of the 400 seats in the National Assembly, the lower house of Parliament. Ultimately, the election resulted in a coalition or Government of National Unity (GNU), as it is called. Both the main opposition party, called the Democratic Alliance (DA), and several other smaller parties now have a seat at the table.

Since the election, a lot of the international coverage of South Africa has alternated between outright celebrations of the ending of sole ANC rule—which the Spectator blamed for “30 years of corruption and ruin”—to despair that the ANC had left the country “on the brink of chaos,” as Bloomberg put it. Particularly in the conservative-leaning press, the consensus seems to be that multiracial democracy and ANC governance in South Africa have resulted mainly in dysfunction. This is a deceptive, insidious narrative that badly needs to be debunked.

One point that the far right has been trying, and succeeding, to push into the public discourse is the myth of “white genocide” in South Africa. The conspiracy theory is centered on the murder of white farmers and involves deliberate misrepresentation of the statistics around this crime in a country with exceptional levels of violence overall. It gathered pace as a favorite narrative of the far right a few years ago, with 2017 to 2020 showing a drastic increase in the Google search trends for both “farm murders” and “white genocide.” Behind South Africa, the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand were the top countries searching these terms. They are also the top destinations for white South Africans emigrating from the country.

In 2018, the right-wing British pundit Katie Hopkins came to South Africa to report on farm murders, creating both a documentary and an accompanying ebook about what she called “the mass-slaughter of South Africa’s whites.” In the same year, Canadian far-right blogger Lauren Southern also came to the country to make a documentary called Farmlands on the same subject. Both of them essentially argued that farm murders are so common and out of control that they cannot be considered individual, unrelated violent crimes and in fact must have tacit support from the ANC government. They argue that the attacks on farms are directly linked to proposals to nationalize South Africa’s land, which would break up and redistribute farms currently held by white farmers—a policy known as land expropriation without compensation, which has yet to be passed by South Africa’s Parliament.

The “white genocide” argument mainly centers around an incorrect interpretation of farm murder figures, which suggests that the farming profession has a murder rate of 133 per 100,000, compared to the national murder rate of 34 per 100,000. This idea was first introduced in a debate in the South African Parliament by Pieter Groenewald, the leader of the right-wing Afrikaans party Freedom Front Plus (VF+), in 2017. Groenewald based his claim on a figure by Johan Burger, a research consultant at the nonprofit Institute for Security Studies who said it was never meant to be a scientifically accurate figure—just an “indication” to show the seriousness of the situation. 

Even then, it still falls apart as a data reference. Essentially, Burger had started with the number of murders that happen on a farm or smallholding, a statistic that is recorded by the South African Police Service (SAPS). For the period he was looking at, 2015-2016, the figure was 49 murders—which includes any type of worker, visitor, or resident killed on a farm as well as “farmers” in the strict sense of the word. Then he took data from South Africa’s 2007 Census of Commercial Agriculture showing there were an estimated 32,375 full-time farmers in the country, applied the 2015-2016 farm murder figures to the 2007 census, and got 133 per 100,000. Sound the alarm bells, the whites are being murdered in South Africa!

Yet this is clearly a nonsensical figure. Not only does the SAPS murder-victim number include all people on a farm, not just full-time professional farmers, but it applies to all types of agricultural spaces—not just commercial farms, like the 2007 census data. If you include all kinds of agricultural workers on commercial and non-commercial farms, along with households who live in those agricultural areas, you have a population of an estimated 11 million people. The same murder number of 49, applied to that population, gives a much less threatening murder rate of 0.4 murders per 100,000. 

Essentially, as Kate Wilkinson wrote for Africa Check in 2017, it is “near impossible” to give an accurate figure of the murder rate on South Africa’s farms because the population is too difficult to define. However, it is certainly less than 133 per 100,000, the number the international far right continues to parrot without any consideration of where it came from.

Later in 2017, the figure was updated to 156 per 100,000 by the Afrikaans rights organization AfriForum. And it is this organization that most recently took its cause international and attracted the attention of people like Hopkins and Southern to South Africa, as its deputy CEO Ernst Roets toured the U.S. and went on Fox News to speak to Tucker Carlson in May 2018. The successful media tour really took the myth mainstream in the States, and then-President Donald Trump even tweeted about it, urging Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to “closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale killing.” With those words, the supposed plight of South Africa’s white farmers cemented itself as a cause of the moment for the far right.

The narrative soon went beyond the fringe inhabited by commentators like Hopkins and Southern and was seized on by more mainstream news outlets in the U.S., U.K., and Australia, with horrific instances of farm murders being used to suggest that the country’s entire white population was on the brink of being wiped out. (For example, one colorful headline read “‘Bury them alive!’: White South Africans fear for their future as horrific farm attacks escalate.”) In Australia, the minister for home affairs considered offering fast-tracked asylum to white South Africans, saying they needed the opportunity to flee to a “civilised country.” Other publications, such as the Telegraph, haven’t adopted the language of “genocide” but do assert that unchecked farm murders are a particular failing of South Africa, something different from its failings on other violent crime that’s “fuelling a steady exodus of whites from the farming sector.”

Even respectable newspapers like the New York Times occasionally indulge in the gory details of an attack on white farmers, a level of attention Black victims of crime in South Africa are almost never afforded in the international press. But in fact, poor Black citizens of South Africa are far more likely to be victims of violent crime and murder than white people. During the period Groenewald was looking at, when there were 49 murders on farms across the entire country, one of Cape Town’s predominantly Black townships called Khayelitsha recorded 179 murders, at a rate of approximately 116 per 100,000 people. Yet none of these murders have their gruesome details described in the Western press. None of those 179 victims, apparently, are worthy of having their stories told to people in far-flung places like the U.S. and U.K.

Meanwhile, police stations in Cape Town’s wealthier and whiter suburbs, Hout Bay and Sea Point, recorded just three and four murders respectively, with a murder rate of 12 per 100,000 people. Not the figures you’d expect in a country where the white population is facing a genocide—especially when, just down the road, the Black population is being killed at ten times the rate. Instead, the numbers suggest a much more mundane reality: that poverty and violence have created a vicious cycle in which, in certain impoverished areas, human life is too easily snuffed out. 

A common theme, regardless of whether they’re explicitly claiming farm murders are “white genocide”—and it’s generally left to those on the fringe to make that assertion—is to link the murders to the rhetoric of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), the furthest-left of South Africa’s major political parties. In particular, the EFF’s leader Julius Malema is a character the Western right-wing press loves to hate, with the Daily Mail lambasting him as a “race-baiting Marxist.” Malema has certainly thrived off the controversy he creates, particularly when it comes to statements made about the country's white population. He seems to almost enjoy his pantomime villain role in the Western media—the face of the supposedly terrifying Black masses, cajoling the crowds.

Although the most recent bubble of Western interest was in 2018 and 2019, with reports having died down since then, the killing of white farmers is never far away from being dredged up as a subject of fear and alarm and a possible indication of South Africa’s impending failed-state status. Its latest foray back into the headlines was when the world’s (sometimes) richest man, Elon Musk, late last year agreed that his former homeland may be committing genocide against white South Africans like himself.

Malema was again at the center of this furor as he, along with EFF party spokesperson Mbuyiseni Ndlozi, was taken to court in 2022 for hate speech. Both leaders had been singing an old anti-apartheid protest song called “Kill the Boer” (an Afrikaans word meaning farmer, which is generally used to describe white farmers of Dutch ancestry) at EFF rallies. The case was a civil hearing brought by AfriForum which compared the song to those sung in Rwanda ahead of, and during, the 1994 genocide there. The organization wanted Malema to be made to apologize and for both him and Ndlozi to be criminally charged with hate speech. The court dismissed the case and AfriForum appealed, but earlier this year the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) dismissed their case once again, with costs awarded to Malema and Ndlozi, concluding as follows:

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. Understood in its full context, it was a form of political speech.

Perhaps Musk and other right-wing figures, who are mostly based outside of South Africa, are just not “reasonably well-informed” enough to understand the historical context of these songs, at least according to the SCA. In addition, farm murders remain significantly lower since the emergence of the EFF in 2013 than they were in the early 2000s: the period 2001-2002 saw 140, compared with 54 over the 2023 calendar year. So it’s hard to see how the party or its rhetoric can be responsible for driving them. “Even if Mr. Malema’s performance of Dubula ibhunu [shoot the boer] may be regarded by some people to be shocking or even disturbing, the Constitution required a measure of tolerance,” the court added, affirming that Malema was entitled to freedom of speech.

Notably, around this same time, AfriForum also went to the SCA to appeal a decision by the Equality Court that flying the apartheid-era flag constituted hate speech. This time the court agreed with them and overruled the lower court on the same basis that freedom of speech covered the display of the flag. It seems that for right-wing groups like AfriForum, freedom of speech should only apply to controversial things they approve of, while controversial things they feel attacked by need to be labeled as hate speech and incitements to violence. The double standard is obvious. 

In December of 2023, the Spectator published a piece responding to the concerns of Musk, Trump, and other prominent figures and aiming to find out the “truth about South Africa’s ‘genocide’ of white farmers.” Consulting experts in the field, journalist Geoff Hill discovered that, essentially, there’s no truth to the narrative at all:

Based in Washington D.C., Genocide Watch is the world’s early warning system. It was founded in 1999 by Dr. Gregory Stanton, a professor of human-rights law, who says that “for all the tragedy of farm murders in South Africa, there is no evidence of a planned extermination.” There are instead, “opportunistic crimes,” sometimes acts of revenge by workers who are owed wages or feel aggrieved with their employers. Or just attacks carried out by thugs out for money.

 

“We have studied this for many years,” Stanton said, “and I’ve done research on the ground in South Africa. The numbers show us that white people, urban or rural, are much safer than their black counterparts, and less likely to end up on a slab at the coroner’s office.” Farmers he said, “are often vulnerable, isolated and easy targets, but that doesn’t make it genocide.”

By all rights, that should put the discussion to bed forever. Hill even notes that from the 2022 crime figures, farm murders were just over 50—a minor increase from the 49 Groenewald was looking at a few years previously, but still way down from the peak in the late ’90s, when the period 1997-1998 saw 153 farm murders.

The story is nothing new, though. Racial violence has been a long-discussed fear among whites in South Africa ever since Jan van Riebeeck first made landfall in the Cape of Good Hope in 1652. Van Riebeeck, an employee of the Dutch East India Company at the time, was actually on his way back to the Netherlands to be fired for corruption when he decided to set up a waypoint between Europe and India in the southwest corner of Africa, primarily in a bid to save his career. Right from the start, the settlers feared the native people of the land, as early settlers got into a war with local tribes within just five of years of arriving, after which they fortified their position and even grew almond hedges to protect themselves from locals. Over the centuries, this antagonism developed into the concept of swart gevaar (Black peril), a fear tactic played into by the various white governments of South Africa to suggest that white civilization was in danger from the Black masses. In his famous speech at the Rivonia trial, where he and several other anti-apartheid activists were sentenced to life in prison, Nelson Mandela spoke about white fear of African rule as one of the biggest factors preventing the country from moving towards democracy.

That fear, that lingering idea of swart gevaar, is a threat that persists in many white South Africans’ imaginings of the country. It even formed the bedrock of Oscar Pistorius’s defense case for killing his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp in 2013. Pistorius used the fear of a Black man breaking into his home to justify the fact that he panicked and shot four times at close range into his bathroom, killing Steenkamp. An irrational fear of an unknown, unnamed Black person was considered a reasonable defense for murder, and Pistorious was found guilty only of the lesser charge of “culpable homicide.” Perhaps it is unsurprising that both Pistorius and Musk attended the same private school for boys in Pretoria.

We are now over 450 years from when Van Riebeeck first came to South Africa and still, according to those on the far right, a racial civil war in which the Black population of the country wipes out the descendants of white settlers in an orgy of violence and bloodlust is “imminent.” But just as the fear of “white genocide” in South Africa has been, and will continue to be, used as a warning sign by the far right of what’s coming to the U.S. and Europe if too many non-white people move there, the country is also held up as a harbinger of doom for what governance will be like when these non-white people take power.

The right-wing narrative holds that the ANC, in its 30 years of governance, has simply mismanaged South Africa’s infrastructure and public services to a catastrophic extent. Rather than bring up the lives of the majority of South Africans to the standard enjoyed by the white minority, the idea goes, the ANC instead brought everybody down to the same level. A version of this story can be found in the Australian edition of the Spectator, where Benjamin Crocker writes that “rolling blackouts, public disorder, and impending societal collapse” were the result of a government that “attempted to redress historic racial injustices by increasing the diversity profile in both government and private sector job markets” at the expense of meritocracy and competency. In UnHerd, columnist Wessie du Toit paints a dismal picture of South Africa as a country with collapsing water infrastructure, increasing crime and homelessness, and corrupt politicians looking out for themselves rather than the country—then warns bluntly that “Britain is turning into South Africa” from its own social ills, using the country as a synonym for inevitable collapse. 

Yet the facts don’t bear this out. Many seem to be unaware of, or are simply unable to grasp, how bad life was for the vast majority of South Africans before democracy arrived. In fact, a look across some of the basic metrics of quality of life shows, for the majority of people, vast improvements in South Africa since 1994.

Despite its significant troubles and reputation for corruption now, the state-run electricity service Eskom was a shining light and an award-winning utility in the early 2000s. Its main achievement was bringing electricity to the masses after apartheid, as the number of people using it to light their houses shot up from 58.1 percent in 1996 to 94.7 percent as of 2022. Villages and informal settlements across the country were connected to the grid in a way unimaginable under apartheid.

None of this is to say that South Africa’s infrastructure, particularly power and water, is not in a dire position today. It clearly is, and Johannesburg itself is a prime example. Added to the now-regular power cuts have been recent water cuts, as the pipes and sewage system have decayed for more than three decades. Traffic lights often don’t work, even if there is power, and in the last year alone the city center experienced both a gas explosion and a major fire that killed 76 people, along with several smaller fires in illegally occupied buildings. All of these things have led publications like the Telegraph and others to quote people in South Africa saying that “things used to at least work,” or that “our country was better in the apartheid era… things worked,” as the Daily Mail did in 2021. (Of course, for the papers to avoid allegations of racism, these quotes need to come from non-white South Africans.) This is a reframe that you can hear often, both within the country and without.

Corruption has played a vastly significant role in these problems. It would certainly be a mistake to naively suggest South Africa is a utopia free from problems within its ruling party. State capture and corruption cost the country billions, arguably trillions, in money that is desperately needed for the delivery of basic services; by one estimate, corruption at Eskom alone costs $55 million per month, or $660 million a year. (There’s a chance the country has turned a corner on that front, as this year Eskom surpassed 100 days without initiating power cuts. However, as the utility’s managers felt the need to celebrate this fact with a press release, it suggests they think it was a little remarkable as well.)

But the suggestion that “things worked” previously is a gross misrepresentation, one that right-wing Western media love to find and repeat to appease their own readers about how apartheid wasn’t actually that bad. As apartheid was the purest, most distilled version of settler colonialism the world has ever seen, its crimes need to be minimized—just like the crimes of colonialism elsewhere in the world—in order to maintain a right-wing worldview and buttress the West’s claim that it’s not at fault for the problems facing people in countries it previously colonized. It’s the fault of the people there that they are poor, and historical injustices that shaped the world have no impact today; this is the argument that must be adhered to. In much the same way, any conversation about the U.K.’s role in the Atlantic slave trade is often met with a combination of everyone did slavery, Britain was the first country to end it and what about the Arab slave trade? Just as the impacts of those two crimes on the world need to be diminished, so too must the impact of apartheid on South Africa, as it shows how very relevant colonialism and oppression are to how the world has been shaped. And what better way to wash away the crimes of apartheid than to show that, now that it’s gone, the country is a corrupt, falling-apart, failed state? The subtext, barely concealed, is that Africans simply can’t govern themselves—a racist notion if ever there was one.

Yes, some white people in South Africa are having to endure power and water outages and other infrastructure problems that are new to them, and even for some non-white South Africans these problems could be new. But for the vast majority of people in the country, power, clean water, and a proper dwelling are far more available and accessible today than in 1993.

Certain incidents, like the 2014 case of a child dying in a pit latrine at school, are horrific and a stain on the country’s reputation. And yet, that kind of death is now such a rare occurrence that it makes international news. According to the most recent census data from 2022, the number of South Africans using a flush toilet connected to the sewage system has increased from 51.9 percent in 2001 to 70.8 percent, as unventilated pit toilets declined from 22.8 percent to 12.5 percent over the same period. Given the state of media censorship under apartheid, it would be impossible to say how many children died in pit latrines pre-democracy, but given the significantly higher prevalence of unsafe and unsanitary toilet facilities under apartheid, it is likely a significantly higher figure.

The narrative of systemic corruption and collapse even allows journalists and other commentators to dismiss anything South Africa may do on the international stage that the United States and its allies don’t like. It’s treated as an outrage that a country like South Africa dares to have an independent foreign policy while still having problems within the country itself. Obviously this is selectively applied: it’s only an outrage if a country goes against U.S. foreign policy, while poor countries that support the U.S. position are obviously more than entitled to have a foreign policy no matter their domestic issues.

Most notably at the moment, it is South Africa’s case against Israel for genocide at the international Court of Justice (ICJ) that is causing it to be attacked for corruption and infrastructure collapse. In a recent article for the libertarian Mises Institute, Lipton Matthews wrote that “instead of battling with Israel, probably [President] Cyril Ramaphosa should focus on improving the standards of his country.” Publications like the Jewish Chronicle have suggested that the only reason South Africa brought the case is because the corrupt ANC was paid by Iran to do so. Of course, a country like South Africa—whose liberation movements have long supported Palestine and know first-hand how their apartheid oppressors were greatly supported by Israel—couldn't possibly act like that by itself!

This is all somewhat ironic, given that a key reason South Africa did not, after 1994, become a perfect “rainbow nation” where all were equally wealthy and content is because this exact international right wing ensured that it wouldn’t. By the time democracy emerged in South Africa, the Soviet Union, a longstanding ally to Nelson Mandela and the ANC during the struggle against apartheid (unlike Western governments), was no longer in existence. The country was therefore forced into global capitalist markets. A neoliberal shift in the ANC had to take place, with party policy changing to allow increasing private access and control of South Africa’s assets (primarily mineral) for the fledgling democracy to be allowed to survive. Global capital and the right wing in the West were the driving force of this change, as the rights of private companies to exploit South Africa’s minerals and other resources were placed ahead of the party’s principles of building an egalitarian society. Economic advisors and the doctrine of the “Washington Consensus” pushed the newborn nation into prioritizing the protection of capital as the foundation of its economic outlook. In the journal Philosophy and Social Criticism, scholar Danelle Fourie argues that “these policies seem to have deepened the existing economic inequality in contemporary South African society.” Rather than ensuring an era of sustained prosperity for all, the pro-market shift in the 1990s entrenched a wealthy South African elite—which was slightly more multiracial now, but still distant and protected from the poor masses.

Not even the most naive believer in South Africa could argue that the country has no problems or that it has a faultless government where all racial and inequality issues from its past have been resolved and healed. However, the global far right’s obsession with “farm murders” and “white genocide” in South Africa reveals more about them than the country. Given their fixation on the tiny percentage of murders the actual data accounts for, clearly they value white lives over others. Those who push the narratives barely even try to make sense, as that is not the point. The purpose is to try to prove how dangerous it is to have Black people in control and to convey the sheer horror that that portends for white people when they lose power.

The same is true for arguments about South Africa’s imminent infrastructure collapse. The truth about the increase in people with access to services like electricity, clean water, and proper toilets is ignored, for the people who benefit the most aren’t white, and the white population has generally seen an increase in energy insecurity compared to their privileged position under apartheid. That is all that matters to the international right-wing press.

If they’re not outright killing you in the fields, then they’re looting from the state so completely that its basic functions are collapsing. This is what happens when white people cede power to Black people. That is the essence of the right’s view of South Africa, and it’s what they use as a harrowing example of what awaits elsewhere. It is nonsense that needs to be countered at every opportunity.