Diplomacy, Trump style: murders in South Africa?
The president of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, has been visiting the White House, and he and Trump were having a press conference when Trump resorted to some audio-visual aids to make a point:
President Donald Trump confronted South African President Cyril Ramaphosa with a video of South African communists calling for the murder of white farmers.
Just watch. You’ll notice Ramaphosa sometimes just listening to the video, not watching it. …
The video includes a video of burial sites of murdered white farmers.
Ramaphosa asked Trump is anyone told him the location of the burial site: “I’d like to know where that is.”
Trump did not have the exact location.
“We need to find out,” Ramaphosa responded.
So, is this happening? When I’ve looked it up in the past, I get a lot of sites saying it’s not directed at white farmers per se; it’s just a high murder rate in South Africa as a whole. Great. Fabulous.
You can find that argument here, for example:
Yet Wandile Sihlobo, chief economist of the Agricultural Business Chamber of South Africa, said that the spirit of NAMPO this week reaffirms that “genocide” of white South African farmers “was imaginary and not happening in our country.”
“We’re all disturbed that the U.S. side is alleging that there’s genocide and mistreatment of white farmers in South Africa. It is incorrect,” said Sihlobo, who is also co-author of the book “The Uncomfortable Truth About South Africa’s Agriculture.”
“If anything, the sector continues to flourish. [Trump’s] comments are misinformed and not mirroring the reality on the ground in the country,” he said.
The New York Times reported 225 people were killed on South African farms over a four-year period ending in 2024. Of those deaths, 101 were Black current or former workers living on farms, and 53 were farmers, who are usually white.
That doesn’t add up to the total of 225, but let’s just assume it’s more whites than blacks. Is this racial ratio representative of the farm population as a whole? And why are farmers being targeted? Isn’t that targeting whites, if whites are overrepresented in that group? And what of the open incitement to murder of whites by certain public figures, who are promoting an old song entitled “Kill the Boer”? That’s pretty explicit:
Dubul’ ibhunu”, translated as shoot the Boer, kill the Boer or kill the farmer, is a controversial South African anti-Apartheid song. It is sung in Xhosa or Zulu. The song originates in the struggle against apartheid when it was first sung to protest the Afrikaner-dominated apartheid government of South Africa. It gained new prominence after 2010 following its use at political rallies held by the African National Congress (ANC) and Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF).
South African courts ruled it to be a form of hate speech in 2010, a ruling that was later overturned in 2022. Supporters of the song see it as a song that articulates an important part of South Africa’s history, is an important part of political discourse, and that its meaning has been misconstrued as advocating killing Boers or farmers. Opponents of the song argue that it can be seen to bear a literal interpretation and therefore constitutes an incitement to violence and hate speech.
Any song that advocates shooting and/or killing a racial group is a call to violence against that group, and it’s ridiculous to claim it’s not. The question is what to do about the song in terms of free speech versus incitement, and whether white farmers are indeed being disproportionately killed because of their race. There’s a great deal of verbiage on both sides of this, and I certainly don’t know what’s actually happening in terms of murder statistics and I despair of ever getting the truth. I doubt the South African government is telling the truth, however (they’re much too concerned with the supposed “genocide” Israel is committing against Gazans).
I wrote a post in 2018 on the subject of laws allowing the confiscation of land from South African farmers, likening it to the even worse situation in Zimbabwe. Here’s an excerpt:
Also, when you read the words of leaders of the more radical party, the [EFF], it is not reassuring, either about the financial future of South Africa or about the situation not escalating in a Zimbabwe-type direction:
“There have been concerns among South Africa’s white minority that the motion will encourage attacks on farmers, and the EFF’s leader Julius Malema has previously been convicted of hate speech for singing anti-white songs like ‘Shoot the Boer [Farmer]’…
“’In this process, white people ought to accept the crime of apartheid and colonisation and how these crimes impacted on black people’ Mr Ndlozi said. Whites could ‘show remorse by ceding land they inherited through anti-black racist dispossession’, he suggested, adding: ‘Justice leads to reconciliation.'”
“Justice”—for example, the “justice” in the US known as affirmative action—does not always lead to reconciliation. The people who own the South African farms now have certainly benefited from what happened in the past—the exclusion of black people from land ownership in most of the country, among other rights that were denied—but the present-day farmers were for the most part not the perpetrators of apartheid and they are the legal owners of their land. What’s more, they have skills in developing and tending that land.
This past January, Ramaphosa signed a land seizure law that allows seizure to occur without compensation, under certain conditions. There’s no question that the atmosphere, combined with the threats in the song, is ominous for white farmers, and that it makes sense for them to want to leave. But what’s actually occurring there in terms of murders is very difficult to ascertain.
Why are we even debating this?
I can reel off at least five or six Marxist states that all went by the same playbook:
1) Take over power and promise landowners that their holdings would be protected.
2) Find a reason that the landowners are enemies of the state (“Kulaks”) and expropriate their lands and turn them over the regime’s favored group.
3) The regime’s favorite group proves totally incompetent at farming the newly seized lands.
4) The state takes over full control of the seized lands (“forced collectivization”).
5) State control proves disastrous. In at least 3 of the 6 examples I can think off, mass famine results, with casualties in the millions. In all of them, agricultural production basically never recovers in comparison to privately held farms around the world.
Just wait, within a decade there will be famine in South Africa. Remember, you heard it here first.
Young Hegelian:
I don’t think we’re debating the fact that land confiscation will be a disaster for South Africa. I believe even my 2018 post indicated that.
Nor are we debating the fact that the murder rate in that country is sky high.
The only question is whether whites are specifically being targeted to be murder victims because of their race. I can’t find objective data on that, and I don’t think such data exists, although I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that they are.
Neo:
There’s no objective data on the murder of white farmers because the Black government doesn’t want that info out in the public domain. Just like the Dems and the Fake News didn’t want the world to know that Joe Biden wasn’t competent to be President.
Today a PGA golfer who is a native of SA said at the White House that his dad personally knows white farmers who have been killed.
It’s happening.
If the NYT, WaPo and CNN were real news organizations, they’d send reporters there to find out.
With the example of Zimbabwe before them, South Africans of Dutch or British ancestry are surely justified in their fears. The crime rate in general is very high. People with the means to do so live in barred homes and compounds.
I have no opinion on what’s happening in SA . I’m totally ignorant on the subject. However, the lefty friends erupted into calling Trump a big POS for treating a respected leader of another country in that manner.
Why is this visit happening anyhow? What issues are at hand (apart from these questions of mistreatment in SA)? What does SA want from the US, and on the flipside, what does the US seek from SA?
Cornhead:
I’m aware of why there’s no objective data.
I spent 3 years as the US Consul in Kwa-Zulu Natal, years that coincided with the rise of Julius Malema and the EFF. It is correct that crime is to blame for many of the farm murders, but that is a smokescreen used by the SA gov’t and its excusers. White farmers are targeted, and more would have been killed were they not armed to the teeth. Mission Pretoria and all of the consulates reported this to Washington regularly, or tried to, that is. This was during the Obama regime and was pushed under the table, not to be reported on.
After a career as a diplomat with more than 10 of those years in Africa, I never met a more venal, corrupt cohort of liars and thieves than the post-apartheid gov’t of South Africa. Ramaphosa pretended today to not be aware of the row of crosses that each stood for a murdered farmer (and his wife and children). That is an outright lie, and no, that isn’t just my opinion.
A friend here in the US asked me today how, after the event at the WH, could Ramaphose ever not lose face. My answer was: easy, he’ll just return to SA and continue to lie, and he knows that the Western and SA (and Chinese and Arab) media will cover for him.
I liked the movie “Blood Diamonds.”
There is an African warlord in it that depicts how things probably are. Leonardo Decaprio was the star. He had a saying, “TIA.” “This is Africa.” It is meant ironically.
I know a guy from NE that went to Africa to build a giant farm. He had to have armed guards with him all the time. He moved back to NE.
> what’s actually occurring there in terms of murders is very difficult to ascertain.
Let’s not find out. If I, for one, had to choose between getting fewer people killed and knowing with greater certainty and precision how many people would be killed if I took no action, I’d rather choose the former. I think that’s what any reasonable person would do if the underlying conceptual model is in any way more sound than “climate change”.
TL;DR when someone is saying he’s going to kill you, believe him.
@neo
> The only question is whether whites are specifically being targeted to be murder victims because of their race.
What makes you at all even suppose that they aren’t?
What else but tribal warfare would you be looking for in a society that has renounced the rule of law and endorsed, instead of it, the “collective guilt” concept?
Of course its evangelists would tell you “we aren’t doing it because we hate the white people, but because other white people did wrong to our ancestors, and because those white people are disproportionately rich as a result”.
How are you even taking that at face value?
Isn’t it as founded as the blood libel, or as “but they killed Jesus”?
And that was sierra leone where they employed a south african firm executive outcomes to put down that warlord, who was supported in part by victor bout
Bout having been sprung and now supporting the houthis
I’ve known more than a few expats from Rhodesia and South Africa…all have begged family to flee…but those farms and businesses are generations of wealth and family history that will be forfeit and leaving the graves of your ancestors hurts worse. It is terrible bind for those who leave knowing their loved ones are like lambs to the slaughter.
@neo,
“The only question is whether whites are specifically being targeted to be murder victims because of their race.”
And the point of my previous post is that of course they are. It’s just de-kulakization by another name. If the regime didn’t have it in for these farmers there wouldn’t be legislation permitting expropriation and the constant rhetorical drumbeat from state officials for their murder.
No, the reason the white farmers in SA are still there is because, unlike all the other kulaks in the examples above, these are armed to the teeth. A concerted move against them would be bloody for state security forces and impossible to keep quiet on the world stage. It’s safer for the SA state to murder them one at a time
@John+Guilfoyle
> generations of wealth and family history that will be forfeit and leaving the graves of your ancestors hurts worse
They’ll do a better job fighting the injustice — and taking their revenge — as faithful Americans.
I know (albeit chiefly remotely) a few Russians who, having fled from the commies, joined the US Army, its special units, or worked for the CIA (in the days when the agency actually served the purpose of its establishment).
They won’t forfeit anything. They’ll have better options at fighting back in every way.
I suppose if you asked the question asked of Ivy League presidents; “If the same things were said about African Americans on your campus, would that be a problem?” were applied to the plight of white farmers…”What if it were or had been said about South African blacks?”.
Probably a different response.
The Trump administration cut off foreign aid to South Africa after the passage of the law permitting seizure of land without compensation. Perhaps Ramaphosa was here to see if he could bamboozle Trump into believing that white farmers are not being dispossessed and targeted. It seems he failed.
“They’ll do a better job fighting the injustice — and taking their revenge — as faithful Americans.”
I’m talking about folks in their 80s who’ve already done their fighting against previous communist incursions & border wars from the countries around them. I know families that have lost in excess of $4-8million AUD in land & capital alone. Who nigh stroke out when they hear “farms aren’t ceased”…AND…the graves of their ancestors. It’s hard to be sanguine about someone else’s sacrifice.
And I don’t see any “revenge” being taken against the murderers in this lifetime except perhaps when they all starve to death or wind up killing each other tribe vs tribe like the old old days.
I guess it’s the old, “know when to hold ’em & know when to fold ’em” Let Africa be Africa again.
@ physicsguy > “the lefty friends erupted … for treating a respected leader of another country in that manner.”
The lefty friends do not live in a sane world.
But I suspect you know that.
Confrontation on that level in that location is unprecedented*, perhaps, but not unwarranted.
IMO we have spent too many decades failing to confront “respected” leaders who needed to be knocked up side the head because of their explicit or covert condonation of murder and theft.
However, last time I looked, Castro and Chavez were “respected leaders” (to at least some of the world’s population). So were Stalin and Lenin. And Mao (WH Christmas ornaments anyone?).
Not to mention all the “austere religious leaders” and their ilk.
If the Leftists had it in for SA for some reason, they would be complaining that Trump was meeting with him at all, or (counter-factual) that he DIDN’T confront Ramaphosa for at least implicitly supporting the killing of the Boer farmers.
(Put Putin in the chair instead and anyone here can run the script).
It all comes down to what serves The Narrative today.
*Rare, but not unheard of. With a bit of tit-for-tat.
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/the-open-loathing-between-barack-obama-and-benjamin-netanyahu-just-got-worse-10015845.html
And granted Reagan’s speech didn’t occur in the Oval Office, but “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” is pretty blunt.
@John Guilfoyle
> I’m talking about folks in their 80s
Then I guess they can, at least, win by letting their oppressors pound sand, ending their days in peace and leaving memoirs and records for the posterity to build upon.
Sorry not sorry. I’ve been taught to always look for the benefits of survival.
@AesopFan
> IMO we have spent too many decades failing to confront “respected” leaders who needed to be knocked up side the head because of their explicit or covert condonation of murder and theft.
Exactly. We’ve invested too much in the so-called “international order” as if it would bring any stability, predictability or, God forbid, rule of law. (I am not even mentioning “individual rights”.)
Bury all of them. If that constitutes an “international incident”, it’s only for the better. Slay one sacred cow at a time, but don’t ever stop.
And we’re off to Mugabe land!!!
Solzhenitsyn talked about how the communists took the attitude that the kulaks got their farms through nefarious means and therefore it should be given to the proletariat who didn’t know anything about farming. In short order it turned into a cluster you-know-what. As in Zimbabwe, the same thing will happen in South Africa in about 5-10 years. Wonder who will be blamed?
A.S also said that the way Stalin viewed the prison system, the prisoners (no matter how heinous or vicious their crimes) were viewed as victims of the system and were made prison trustees. Sort of a precursor of “restorative justice” today.
Victor Davis Hanson would subsequently confirm this in one of his own columns.
I would not have given the SA President any public airtime. Instead, meet him in private, state the case against SA, and challenge him to reform his country. No aid, no trade until he can show proof that there is no sanctioned racism in SA. Then hold a joint presser and see if he got the message.
Trump shamed him in public and that’s probably going to get some vindictive rebound from the left and the UN. Maybe that’s what Trump wants.
SA has more and better infrastructure than Zimbabwe had. It will take longer for them to sink into poverty. Ironically, SA is where the white Zimbabweans went when they had to flee Mugabe and his minions.
I understand the love those Boer farmers have for the country. Like Kenya and Tanzania, where I’ve visited, there is something very powerful about the beauty and wildness of southeastern Africa. It grabbed ahold of me while just visiting. I swear, I would have loved to have lived there if I could make a living.
Unfortunately, Africa is sliding back into what it was in pre-colonial times. It will become the Dark Continent again unless things change.
frantz fanon, one of the wellsprings of the critical race movement would agree
i disagree ramaphosa should have been confronted,
meanwhile the Brotherhood has claimed two victims tonight in DC,
hats off to you Effendi’s Mahdawi and Khalil and miss oz turk