South Africa’s Highest Court Rejects Request to Declare ‘Kill the Boer’ as Hate Speech
South Africa’s highest court denied on March 27 a bid to have the song “Kill the Boer” be deemed hateful speech.
“The application should be dismissed as it bears no reasonable prospects of success,” stated the order from the Constitutional Court.
The case was brought by AfriForum, a South African nongovernmental organization representing white South Africans, who constitute 7 percent of the population and own 70 percent of the farmland. South Africa consists of 62 million people.
“After this shocking court ruling, we see that this is no longer the case. We are seeing an increasing radical implementation of the Constitution. We see an increase in ideologically-driven judges,” said AfriForum CEO Kallie Kriel in a statement. “However, we are not going to become discouraged.”
“Kill the Boer” is an apartheid-era song. Boers are white settlers of primarily Dutch descent who often pursued an agrarian living in what is now South Africa. The term “Boer” has been used to refer to white farmers in the country, and the lyrics of the “Kill the Boer” song mostly consist of the word “shoot.”
Recitations of the chant often correlate with rising violence targeting white farmers, according to Ernst Roets, a South African political activist and executive director of the newly formed advocacy group Pioneer Initiative.
“When the slogan, particularly is chanted at high-profile events, by a high-profile politician, there tends to be an increase, especially in the murders on the farms,” Roets told The Epoch Times on March 28.
“The song ‘Kill the Boer, Kill the Farmer’ goes beyond mere words. It incites violence, stokes hatred, and deepens divisions within our society,” he said.
“We should be working towards unity and healing, and songs like this only serve to deepen the rifts that still exist in our country,” he continued. “Farmers play an essential role in feeding the nation, and to see their work and lives targeted by such harmful rhetoric is an affront to the values of respect and dignity we should uphold.”
The Trump administration has stopped funding to South Africa over what it said was the country’s government seizing land from white farmers.
The administration also said that “South Africa has taken aggressive positions towards the United States and its allies,” noting that the country accused Israel, instead of terrorist group Hamas, of genocide in the International Court of Justice, and reinvigorated “its relations with Iran to develop commercial, military, and nuclear arrangements.”
The United States will “promote the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation,” said the White House.
Roets, through his Pioneer Initiative, has argued that South Africa should be broken into multiple smaller sovereign states.
“The only way forward is for these nations, such as the Afrikaner people, and others … to have self-governance so that we’re not subjected to this kind of situation that we are in at the moment,” Roets told The Epoch Times.
Ryan Morgan, Jan Jekielek, and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
