US Secretary of State Marc Rubio has reiterated Washington’s offer of ‘asylum’ to White South Africans – whom leading Trump-administration officials, including the president himself, falsely say are being persecuted in their home country.
In the same tweet, Rubio also shared another trope in right-wing circles – namely, that the South African liberation song ‘Kill the Boer’ is an incitement to violence, even to genocide. Stemming from the apartheid era, it’s regularly chanted by South African opposition figure Julius Malema and his supporters.
But far from being a call for the targeted murder of White farmers (the eponymous Boer), it’s a call for completing the project of overcoming apartheid, whose systemic influence (even though the regime itself has fallen) is still felt in rampant inequalities across the country. Indeed, in 2022, South Africa’s High Court ruled that Malema was not guilty of hate speech when performing it publicly.
Sources
https://groundup.org.za/article/judge-rules-kill-boer—kill-farmer-not-hate-speech/