South African President Cyril Ramaphosa defended a chant calling for the death of white farmers following his meeting with President Donald Trump last week.
Despite President Trump playing a video depicting the farmers’ persecution, Ramaphosa asserted, “I’m not going to be repeating what I’ve been saying. I would say, if there was Afrikaner farmer genocide, I can bet you these three gentlemen would not be here, including my minister of agriculture. He would not be with me.” The minister of agriculture is white.
In a recent interview in Cape Town, Ramaphosa insisted that the “Kill the Boer” slogan is a “liberation chant,” not a message that “calls upon anyone to go and be killed.”
“When it comes to the issues of arresting anyone, for any slogan, that is a sovereign issue. It’s not a matter where we need to be instructed by anyone that, ‘Go and arrest this one,'” he said. “We are very proud, sovereign country that has its own laws, that has its own processes, and we take into account what the Constitutional Court also decided, when it said that, you know that slogan, ‘Kill the Boer, kill the farmer,’ is a liberation chant and slogan, and it’s not meant to be a message that elicits or calls upon anyone to go and be killed. And that is what our court decided. So they will probably want to arrest people willy-nilly. We follow the dictates of our constitution. Because we are a constitutional state, and we are a country where freedom of expression is the bedrock of our constitutional arrangement.”
In 2023, a video emerged of Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) head Julius Malema chanting, “Kill the Boer.”
Following Ramaphosa’s meeting with Trump, Malema doubled down on his chant, issuing a statement that declared, “Kill the Boer, Kill the Farmer.”
