How history of “Kill the Boer” has been distorted

Left: Kallie Kriel, leader of Afriforum (Photo: Wikimedia user Eduandup CC BY-SA 4.0). Right: EFF leader Julius Malema (Archive photo: Ashraf Hendricks)

Words can be plucked out of historical and literary context and weaponised. They can be used to harm individuals and groups or to rally bullies and persecutors. There have been classic examples in recent history, and last month there was a globally broadcast example of a more recently abused term: Boer. It came up at the White House meeting between US President Donald Trump and SA President Cyril Ramaphosa.

More than 15 years after the argument over the term and a song calling to beat and shoot the “Boer” should have been resolved in South Africa, Trump, in another display of his ignorance or, perhaps, his conscious misuse, of South African reality, raised the issue as “kill the Afrikaner farmers”. It is a distortion used by ethnic nationalists on both sides of South Africa’s main ethnic divide, and repeated often by journalists.

And so the controversy was revived, without reference to the reasons the Equality Court, in 2022, found that the song did not amount to “hate speech”. It is a classic “struggle song” which I, as a “white” South African with ancestry stretching back some 300 years, proudly sang in an exile past and continue, from time to time, to sing.

It is a song that has nothing to do with farmers. It has to do with the militant Afrikaner nationalists — amaBunu or amaBulu (in Zulu or Xhosa) — who wallowed in the mythology of the “trek boers”, rural peasants who colonised much of the interior of what is today South Africa.

The “Boers” — the amaBunu and amaBulu — of more recent times had little to do with farming. But many were — and are — the descendants of families displaced and dispossessed by the “scorched earth” policy of the British between 1899 and 1902. They grew up with tales of the horrors and indignity of British concentration camps.

Out of this history grew a virulent form of ethnic “Afrikaner” nationalism, which in an emerging industrial society dressed itself rhetorically in the garb of bold frontier folk – farmers fighting for land. To this was added the victimhood of the concentration camps and the certitude that a Calvinist God was on their side.

A hundred years ago, many of the men of this group were manual and unskilled labour, especially on the mines of the Witwatersrand. They were key to the Rand Revolt, the militant rebellion by white miners in 1922 under the now notorious slogan: “Workers of all countries Unite for a White South Africa”.

These were the roots of the hardline racist elements within the later apartheid state. Such elements always referred to themselves as “Boere”, harkening back to the war of 1899-1902 and the myths of the “Great Trek”. The anti-apartheid opposition accepted this definition: “Boers”, especially police and enforcers of apartheid and the apartheid state, were the enemy.

What has now happened, however, is that ethnic nationalists on both sides of the main South African ethnic divide, have opportunistically appropriated the terminology and the song: it suits both to claim that the words mean kill white farmers. This provides, at one and the same time, justification for a militant and potentially violent ethnic nationalism on the one hand, and claims to be a persecuted minority on the other.

Trump took the claim of “Afrikaners” being that persecuted minority a notch higher, claiming the group was subjected to “genocide”, a term more appropriate to Gaza and, perhaps, Sudan. But the fraught situation in the eastern Mediterranean does provide an historically longer and even better example of the appropriation and weaponising of words.

The conflation of the religio-nationalist ideology of Zionism not only with Judaism and the nation state of Israel, but also with antisemitism, is widely promoted. Yet the terminology and the manner of its use grew out of the pseudoscientific racism that flourished in the 19th Century. This came in response to the humanist and egalitarian ideas that also flourished in the wake of the Haitian, American and French revolutions and the writings of “enlightenment” philosophers.

In this context, antisemitism, a term coined in 1879 by a German, Wilhelm Marr, had nothing to do with the traditional Christian religious prejudice against Jews as “Christ killers”. Marr maintained that Jews were not Europeans; they were Arabs — “Semities” — interlopers to Europe. Even if they were in appearance similar and even if they had converted to Christianity, they were biologically polluted by the Arab “race”. The nonsense of “racial purity” was a concept subsequently adopted by Adolf Hitler.

In an irony missed by most, this definition qualifies the “Islamaphobia” prevalent in Europe today, as antisemitism.

But little more than 200 years ago, there was a major push back against notions of liberty and egalitarianism. It was epitomised by the Scottish anatomist, Robert Knox. In 1850, he published a treatise entitled: The Races of Men — a fragment. Knox maintained that humanity was divided into separate species in an order of superiority. At the apex were the Caucasian (white), “Saxons”, with black Africans at the bottom. In between were “Celts (the Irish), Jews and Gipsies (sic)”. Also “Chinamen, Kaffres, Red Indians, New Zealanders” (Maori?) who, “like all other animals” faced “a limited course of existence” before becoming extinct.

This was almost a decade before Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species, which clearly illustrated the common descent of humanity. But, in an age of empires, aristocracy and class divisions, this could not go unchallenged. Dressed in the language of science, an answer came in 1883 in the form of eugenics, ironically introduced by Darwin’s polymath cousin, Francis Dalton. It promoted the hierarchies of “race”, often conflated with social class.

Here are the origins of what became known as social Darwinism, a flawed and crude interpretation of the laws of heredity discovered between 1856 and 1863 by the biologist priest Gregor Mendel. Science, especially in the field of genetics, has progressed greatly since then as has much knowledge of human history, ancestry and the incredibly rich unity in diversity that is not just part of humanity but of a living planet.

Yet, outside of the technical, our social and political systems have not kept pace with scientific developments. The selfishly motivated hierarchies of class and race, peppered with religion, language and other cultural attributes, along with geographic claims to nation and state, continue to be promoted and used to deny the potential of a truly democratic, egalitarian global society.

This is the background and the history we have to confront, analyse and understand if we are to start trying to expose pseudoscience and dismantle the shackles of ignorance and superstition that have bound us for so long. We could start with one, simple mantra: There is only one race — the human race. To which we could add: on one, richly diverse, living planet.

Terry Bell is a veteran labour journalist.

Views expressed are not necessarily GroundUp’s.

Support independent journalism
Donate using Payfast