White genocide. I had hoped to avoid writing on this subject entirely. I desperately hoped that by the time I was penning my next article, a week after the EFFs rally, the thorny issue of the singing of “Kill the Boer” would be out of the news cycle, but alas here we are.

For context, I happened to be at the FNB Stadium on July 29 when the EFF hosted its 10th birthday celebration. I was there, in the crowd, when Julius Malema and the EFF leadership first ascended the stage and began singing Struggle songs and chants. But it was only when I got home that night that I realised the controversial “Kill the Boer” song was chanted as part of the event.

The moment being beamed around the world, touted almost as the centrepiece of the event, was not even a footnote in my experience. Thus, the idea that this was a grand instruction to black people to perpetrate white genocide simply felt absurd to me when I first heard the accusation.

If it was meant as an instruction it was fleeting and lacked gravitas. I was certainly not galvanised to kill anyone, no less an entire race group. I say this glibly not to make light of murder, I say it this way because those who would have us believe that the threat of white genocide is real, say things like genocide casually. Words mean things. The word genocide cannot simply be bandied about without facts.

The song is decades old and the EFF has been singing “Kill the Boer” for the past 10 years. In that time, data shows that farm murders, the suggested evidence of white genocide through this song, have remained low relative to general murder statistics in SA.

According to right wing group AfriForum’s own report, farm murders have ranged between 49-55 murders a year in the last five years. This annual figure is below the daily figure of 75 murders a day in SA in 2022. It is also important to note that not all farm murders are of white people.

SA is a murder capital globally. Over 20,000 people lose their lives to violent crimes in this country every year. By community, the top 10 murder hotspots in the first quarter of 2023 includes only low-income townships in communities of African and coloured people. By that measure alone we can safely conclude that most people murdered are black.

Women are also disproportionately affected. In one quarter of 2023, over 900 women were killed in SA. So, if we are going to talk about a targeted group, amid a national crisis, I cannot understand why white people in general and white farmers in particular would claim they are especially targeted. The evidence simply does not bear this out.

What’s offensive is that the white people outraged at the song or the farm murder stats, only seem outraged at the murder or potential murders of white people. I care that white farmers are murdered as much as I care that black farm workers are murdered (as part of those same stats). I care that we are unsafe as a nation at a scale that is an epidemic. We cannot only care about social ills like murder when it affects us or people we identify with. Solidarity matters in all instances.

For SA to change, improve and become a safe and more prosperous country, we must all protect and build the state and the nation collectively.

Is the EFF’s brand of politics divisive? Yes. But there is no point in counteracting divisive politics with a divisive lie and more divisive politics. Elon Musk tweeted (or whatever he calls it now) that the New York Times in reporting about the song and the debate started by right wing nationalists and the DA, were giving a megaphone to the EFF to be divisive. I argue that it is in fact racists who have used the singing of a song, that people who were in the stadium have probably forgotten they sang, as a megaphone for the very victimhood politics they so readily accuse black people of.

As a left wing populist politician, I am sure Malema intends to stir emotions. The emotions he most successfully stirs are white people to anger rather than black people to violence.