South Africa has recently been prominent in the US media. As we are all painfully aware, the mainstream media in the US, as in the West in general, is politically left-wing, and South Africa is not a good look for them just at the moment. In the 1980s, when their hero Nelson Mandela was ascendant, you couldn’t turn on the TV without being vexed by some documentary about apartheid. When I was at university during that decade, and bands came to play on campus, we would go and watch them in Mandela Hall. Thabo Mbeki, Mandela’s successor as post-apartheid President, went to the same university. Now, since white rule ceded to black, South Africa is best forgotten about by the media, and filed away with Venezuela and Cuba.

President Trump, however, made a special dispensation for 59 white South Africans to relocate to the US, an executive decision which incensed the media, and the left in general. MS-13 gang-banger? Come on in. Fentanyl mule? Step this way, and welcome. White South African? Woah, not so fast. But surely, as the left have told us every day for about a decade, these people have white privilege. Can they not use this to save themselves, like a comic-book hero activating his super-power?

Trump didn’t stop with the invitation to a few dozen white Afrikaner farmers. He also invited the current ANC (African National Congress) President of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, to the White House. Ramaphosa sat in the same chair in which Keir Starmer and Volodymyr Zelensky recently squirmed, and world leaders must view that particular seat with the same enthusiasm as a death-row prisoner in Texas would view the electric chair. Dimming the lights, Trump played a video showing, among other things, the leader of the South African opposition, Julius Malema, claiming that his party, the EFF (Economic Freedom Fighters), had not called for the killing of white people – yet. Malema can also be seen on stage leading the singing of a song whose main lyric runs, “Kill the Boer! (another name for South African whites). Kill the farmer!” And he is not some fringe act. He is addressing a stadium crowd of the size normally associated with South American Rolling Stones concerts. Trump also had a word for the American press about the situation in this failing state; “It’s a genocide and you don’t want to write about it.” Fortunately, new media feel no such compunction.

Here is a short video on life in a white South African camp. You may need sub-titles, as the Afrikaners’ English accent is very strong. You may also be angered by watching it, if you owe your fealty to the white race, because this is what is happening to whites, today, in a majority black country, and many suspect that will happen to Western nations in a few decades’ time, when whites become a minority. This is how blacks really are, which is why you don’t see them on TV except in dramas, soap operas, and advertisements, where they are always portrayed in the most positive light.

There is no running water at this camp, and intermittent electricity. Many of the disenfranchised have lost their jobs because they are not black. However, despite being the victims of exacerbated racialism, they do not display the air of victimhood blacks routinely spray on as though it were cheap perfume. While a mother is preparing a rare meal with meat in it, armed blacks show up and take their food. These gangsters call themselves “Economic Freedom Fighters”, but they are simply black thieves. The persecution and murder of whites is by no means new, however, and this video is just a taster for what has been happening in this blighted country since the end of apartheid.

In 2011, a journalist named Ilana Mercer published a book about the worsening situation in South Africa since white rule ended. The daughter of an anti-apartheid activist, one would expect something cosmetic and fervently anti-white, but Into the Cannibal’s Pot is neither. Mercer begins her introduction by highlighting how difficult it was to get the book out at all. Come up with an Out of Africa, or a Cry, the Beloved Country, and the publishers will be lining up. “And don’t even think”, she adds, “about writing anything less than a hagiography of Nelson Mandela.” Anything closer to the actual state of affairs will not be so warmly received. It is a gauge of the situation in South Africa fifteen years ago that the daughter of an anti-apartheid campaigner feels able to say the following of the post-apartheid changeover: “One day a white, relatively well-educated minority dominated all institutions; the next a skills-deficient black majority took over.”

Mercer’s book, as a snapshot of post-Apartheid South Africa, is already a decade and a half old, and even at that time, white men were not allowed to compose more than 10% of any company’s payroll. The ANC had a novel approach to race relations:

The ruling ANC is largely composed of the Xhosa Bantu tribe. The Xhosa are also well-represented among the Africans armed with automatic weapons, who roam the countryside killing Afrikaner farmers.

The very first chapter, “Crime the Beloved Country”, is an inventory of violent murder and rape, 10% of the latter crime committed against children aged three or younger. Then, a rape occurred every 26 seconds in South Africa, and I don’t imagine that figure has gone down. In 2024, the top five countries in the world for rape – and therefore the least safe for women and children – were as follows:

1. Botswana
2. Lesotho
3. South Africa
4. India
5. Sweden

Number 5 is the most appalling, the others unsurprising. Cape Town is now the world’s fourth most dangerous city. It is scarcely surprising that “apartheid nostalgia”, looking back to a white-run age, was and is not limited to the Afrikaners.

This first chapter is a very tough read. As the author notes concerning racial disparity: “Interracial encounter rates do not account for the sheer hatred manifested in the appalling attacks on white South Africans.”

Chapter 2 changes the angle slightly, comparing Afrikaners to the Kulaks, but still the statistics and the descriptions of murder continue to appall. All the attendant media silence and claims of white over-reaction were as present then as they are now.

The natural response is; where’s the fight-back? But you can’t do that in South Africa. The odds, if you are white, are not on your side. The church is not even on your side. The Episcopalian Church in America just ended a long-standing commitment to help immigrants as soon as the few dozen Afrikaners entered the equation by coming to America. Again, this abandonment is not new. Mercer notes of 2011: “There has been a trickle of South Africans applying for asylum in the United States on the grounds of racial persecution. Almost all have been deported.”

Trump has at least changed that.

Mercer claims that 20% of South Africans were HIV-positive at the time of her book, whereas the current figure apparently stands at 12.5%. The two figures don’t realistically tally, and ascertaining the accuracy of figures coming out of this shambolic hell-hole is not easy. Protecting real figures is a big part of the drive to sanitize African behavior. Mbeki constantly claimed AIDS was an invention of the white man and aimed at the black. It is a common belief that taking a shower is sufficient to protect against HIV infection. There are truths waiting in South Africa which the MSM have absolutely no interest in reporting because they want to keep them hidden where they are, in the new heart of darkness.

New media have gone where the MSM fear to tread. Here is a documentary by English commenter and entertainer, Katie Hopkins, from 2018. Things seemed to have escalated in the seven years since Mercer’s book, and Hopkins obviously finds it hard to go on during the documentary. To watch this and not be sickened to tears, you would need either to be black, or a white liberal, preferably a white liberal woman, for extra protection against what would normally be an expected emotional response to the slaughter, using maximum cruelty, of your fellow whites. Hopkins speaks to the editor of a national newspaper, who casually informs her that her publication doesn’t run stories on farm murders because “they just don’t do that much for the paper”. Stories of attacks on blacks are far more popular with readers. Hopkins speaks to informers, who get legitimate farm jobs then tell organized gangs how to gain access to the farm on which they are working. Hopkins also visits a witch-doctor, who gives the assailants a potion to make them strong during their upcoming attacks. Children’s genitals are used as muti, a potency potion.

Leaving South Africa after making the film, Hopkins was detained and ultimately banned from ever returning. Her crime was “spreading racial hatred.” American independent journalist Lauren Southern made a film called Farmlands, also in 2018, and this also gives an excellent history of the development of South Africa. Mercer’s book also gives a good potted history of the country as it moved from white to black rule.

There is no food security now that whites have ceded control of the farms, albeit under duress. In the 1980s/1990s, South Africa was a net exporter of food. Those days have long gone, and by 2010, just 16 years after the end of apartheid, they are net importers. Exactly the same thing happened in Zimbabwe after the end of white rule. Blacks simply can’t farm, a curious quirk of evolution. As of three months ago, 90% of the farms expropriated had failed, covering four million hectares of perfectly serviceable soil. When I write “expropriate””, that is not strictly fair. Of course, the government paid the white farmers for their farms – from taxes – at around 10% of the market value. There is a 20-minute video on that expropriation here, by an Afrikaner, but something must be wrong with YouTube, because I could neither “like” the video nor subscribe to the gentleman’s channel. That little tweak by the very censorious YouTube must have been recent, because it is a well-watched video. Channeling the ANC, leftist magazine The Economist mouthed about the alleged need for “making white farmers transfer forty percent of their farms by value to black shareholders.” This magazine endearingly describes the ANC as a “friendly monolith.” Mercer doesn’t find a great deal of friendliness. “With our boxes of matches and our necklaces, we shall liberate this country,” proclaimed Mandela’s increasingly deranged wife, Winnie, to The New York Times. “Necklaces” are car-tires filled with gasoline and placed around a victim’s neck before being lit.

Before taking up American citizenship, Elon Musk was a very famous white South African, and his father, Errol, still lives in South Africa. He gives an interview here to The Spectator which is illuminating. On the subject of black land appropriation, he says, “blacks are just not inclined to intensive farming”. Subsistence farming, yes, just not the other stuff. “If the white farmers disappear”, he adds, “starvation will follow”. Then, of course, the white man will be asked to help out once again.

We are all familiar, I’m sure, with The Bell Curve, and one of its central tenets, that intelligence is partly evolutionarily determined by geography. In short, bananas and papayas were not falling off the trees in what is now Scandinavia, and so the first northern European settlers had to grow food themselves, which led to farming techniques allowing them to prosper and also, over time, led to an advantage in intelligence among the northern nations which was never needed in the southern hemisphere, where food was lush and plentiful.

I have a theory, for what it’s worth, although I may be late to the party. It occurred to me while watching an interview with Chicago Mayor, Brandon Johnson. Mayor Johnson is a political phenomenon. No political observer though it possible to find a black mayor worse than Lori Lightfoot, but Chicago came through. Currently cruising on a 7% approval rating, Johnson told an interviewer that he made a point of hiring blacks because they are “the most generous people”, kinder and gentler than whites. I think blacks hate whites with so much energy because they are angry that we don’t hate them. We commodified them, and our attitude towards them is not one of enmity, but one of utility, and now they have no real use-value for whites. Quite the opposite. And, if not countered, this hatred will grow anywhere there are blacks in significant numbers. The sub-title to Ilana Mercer’s book is; A Lesson for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa. It is a lesson to be heeded. Someone is going to have to fight because if one side starts a war and the other side fails to engage, there can only be one victor.

I have written and researched a few pieces which have upset or depressed me, but I can’t think of a worse one. Cry, the beloved country? No. No, I don’t think so. Something from Shakespeare seems more appropriate, and much to be wished for. Cry havoc! And let slip the dogs of war.

https://counter-currents.com/2025/05/a-south-african-tragedy