A political leader in South Africa has set off a firestorm across the country after making some incendiary chants and comments at a rally where he allegedly called for his supporters to kill white people.
Over the weekend, the leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters Party Julius Malema held a rally with crowds numbering in the thousands to celebrate the party’s 10th anniversary.
There, he led the crowd in the anti-apartheid struggle song, “Kill the Boer, the Farmer” while also making gunfire sounds. The Boer refers to the white descendants of Dutch settlers in South Africa.
Once news of the chant began making headlines, tech entrepreneur and South African native Elon Musk put out a call on his social platform X, formerly known as Twitter, to President Cyril Ramaphosa asking for a response to this call for racial violence. Malema responded to Musk with “You are talking sh*t” in the Sotho language.
Ramaphosa has yet to respond, but Democratic Alliance head John Steenhuisen was quick to emphatically condemn Malema’s calls.
Malema, dubbed as a firebrand political head, did state in the past that the “Kill the Boer” song isn’t meant to be taken literally but implied that it signifies systems of oppression. The song points to a long history of land theft and repression under white minority rule, which coincidentally alludes to Malema’s goals to seize white-owned farmland in South Africa, nearly 75% of which is white-owned.
He and the Economic Freedom Fighters Party have sung that song since he started the party in 2013 when he was 32.
However, this isn’t the first time he has threatened to carry out violence against white South African citizens. Last year, in an interview with BBC, he plainly said, “When the unled revolution comes… the first target is going to be white people.” He also stated that Black elites would be at risk.
“The violence that is going to happen within South Africa is because the elite [are] disappearing and then the poor are becoming more poorer,” Malema said in that interview.
The Economic Freedom Fighters Party is a radical and militant economic emancipation movement, according to its website.
