Revisiting Mandela in the Light of the 'Kill the Boer' Ruling

‘We struggled for democratic elections - that’s why we love one-party communist states. Viva!’

Summary:

Just over a week ago, the singing of the ANC struggle song, ‘Dubul' ibhunu’ or ‘Kill the Boer’, was deemed by a South African court not to be hate speech. This is not a song or impulse outside of ANC norms - it is at the heart of the ANC and greatly complicates the common understanding of Nelson Mandela as a saintly reconciler.

As I pointed out at the time, this is a dark revelation of the true state of play in ‘the rainbow nation’.

The song is sung in the context of a murder rate for South African farmers of a 100 per 100 000 annual murder rate, three times the average rate for the rest of the country, and a 100 times higher than the murder rate Western Europe.

Put it in blunter terms: in the last seven and a half years, police have purportedly killed 144 unarmed black men in US (mostly with justification deemed legally permissible and often with black police involved). There are over 40 million black Americans. Over the same time, there have been easily more than 450 farm murders in South Africa at same time. There are only 32 000 commercial farmers in South Africa.

This is why South African farmers are working with security consultants to install trip flares, flood lights, internal barriers of barbed wire, infrared camera systems, and spotlight triggers, along with their bedside pistols and rifles. Because their attackers are terrorists.

I am no great defender of American police, but it is telling that there is no George Floyd like introspection and reckoning for these victims of rape, torture and mutilation. And unlike Floyd they were not criminals, on drugs, and resisting arrest after committing a crime. This is the exemplary of the anarcho-tyranny which South African and global progressives want for us. Imagine replacing the word ‘boer’ with ANY other group in the song. See what a judge would say about that. So much for a non-racial South African constitution.

This is the context in which a judge ruled that singing about the killing of South African farmers was merely a vibrant part of a glorious struggle - which of course also neglects the dark absurdity that the ANC’s armed struggle killed far more black South Africans than whites.

But curiously, in the media coverage of the ruling the ANC was barely mentioned at all.

Of course, the court case was brought by South African civil rights group, Afriforum (who do not only represent Afrikaners or whites - anybody can join), against the radical left-wing party, the Economic Freedom Fighters.

But it is forgotten, this song is not an EFF song. It is an ANC song.

After all, Mandela sang it himself…

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