Don't Kill the Boer, We Need Him

How the ANC defends its credibility by conceding it has none

Photo by Rebecca Ritchie on Unsplash

The establishment media was quick to dismiss the recent Oval Office meeting between presidents Ramaphosa and Trump as an “ambush”. The Financial Times editorial “South Africa’s mugging at the White House” criticised Trump for “forcing” Ramaphosa “to watch excruciating footage of hate speech and fake evidence of burial grounds of white farmers”. According to the FT, the white genocide claim is “a lie that wilfully ignores the fact that the South Africans who suffer disproportionately from violence are non-white.”

At the meeting Ramaphosa said Trump would change his mind about the white genocide claim after hearing testimony from South Africans themselves. Trump then asked the famous golfer Retief Goosen – whose family are commercial farmers – to comment. Goosen attested that some of his father’s friends had been killed in farm attacks and that his elderly mother had been beaten up by attackers. She and his brothers live behind electric fences and the family has to deal with saboteurs who torch their farms and steal their borehole equipment.

The trade unionist Zingiswa Losi, one of Ramaphosa’s entourage, also seemed to contradict Ramaphosa’s “nothing to see hear” approach when she complained about the widescale rape and murder of elderly women in the rural areas. Losi’s defence against the white genocide claim was rather meek: “Our problem is not race, it’s crime”.

How do ANC apologists get away with brushing aside anti-white crime by freely admitting that crime in general in South Africa is out of control? Not only is crime rampant, they admit, but so is unemployment and like Scylla and Charybdis these two monsters are wrecking the country. It is unprecedented for rulers to defend their credibility by conceding they have none.

Law and order – or simply having the monopoly on violence – is the central purpose of statehood. That and jobs. If the state cannot get those right, then it has no credibility. What is the point of the white minority having surrendered power to a black majority in 1994, if it has led to a collapse of law and order and an unemployment crisis?

In the grand sweep of history it will matter little why or how – be it through crime, dysfunction, or job reservation – a black government emptied South Africa of its minorities. History will simply record that in 1994 South Africa had a “trump card” that every other African country lacked and that once it lost this the country sank back to the low standards of the continent. RW Johnson describes South Africa’s trump card as “its (mainly white) large professional, business and managerial class whose skills had helped to build South Africa’s economy, the most developed in Africa.”

The best way to get rid of a skilled minority is to limit their access to what motivates them: professional and business success. Comparing contemporary South Africa to apartheid South Africa and to 1930s Germany, Johnson refers to our contemporary race laws as “a softer (so far) version of apartheid and just as the Jews were driven out of Germany by their exclusion from employment, the same has been happening with South African whites and other minorities for some time.” According to Johnson, the ANC’s “manic ideological commitment to ‘transformation’” will “reduce the whites to the same tiny minority status they have in Zimbabwe … the result of which is an institutional and economic collapse.”

It is a mystery to Johnson why the ANC is reinventing racial classification 35 years after De Klerk announced the end of apartheid. But the answer to that is simple, if rather disturbing. It is that the ruling black elite finds themselves outcompeted by minorities in business, the academy and in the professions. And so they use the woke idea of “systemic racism” to justify preferential treatment for themselves and their children.

“Systemic racism” is the idea that past racial oppression (e.g. slavery, Jim Crow, apartheid) lingers on in the form of unconscious bias that must be corrected by activistic politicos. This is not a fringe theory. It is now mainstream. (Ask AI, including Elon Musk’s platform Grok, about “systemic racism” and it will come up with a litany of nonsense that reads like testimony at a Salem witch trial.) Because apartheid is compared with slavery in America and the Holocaust in Germany as evils “never again” to be repeated, liberal commentators cannot bring themselves to reckon with the crushing disappointment of post-white-supremacy South Africa.

As the well-known conservative YouTuber Matt Walsh puts it: “Every single left wing agenda item from the modern civil rights movement to DEI is predicated on the idea that past oppression – as they define it – justifies handouts and preferential treatment today.” But what if past oppression was not the supreme evil they say it was? As Walsh points out, post-colonial South Africa is a failure, as is post-colonial Rhodesia, which was once the breadbasket of Africa. “One after another these postcolonial African states are demonstrating colonialism wasn’t so bad after all. In fact it turns out that it was better than the alternative.”

It is only by debunking this mythology of the left – that white western heritage is the problem, when in fact in South Africa’s case it is the solution – that we will bring order and prosperity to this place. For, as RW Johnson puts it, what we have at the moment is a “programme of ‘barbarisation’, as if deliberately aimed to drive the country backwards.”

Let’s come up with our chant that will improve South Africa. “Save the Boer, let him farm, save the Boer, let him run Eskom and vital institutions.”

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