JOHANNESBURG: A video projected by US President Donald Trump to support false claims of “persecution” of white South Africans prominently featured Julius Malema, a firebrand politician known for his radical rhetoric.
Trump ambushed President Cyril Ramaphosa with the 4:30-minute video shown in the Oval Office on Wednesday during talks at which South Africa wanted to salvage bilateral ties and push back on baseless claims from the United States about a “white genocide.”
Malema was the main character, seen in several clips wearing the red beret of his populist, marxist-inspired Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) party and chanting calls to “cut the throat of whiteness” as well as a controversial anti-apartheid song “Kill the Boer, kill the farmer.”
Trump falsely said he was a government official, insinuating his inflammatory slogans reflected an official policy against South Africa’s white minority.
But Malema, 33, is an opposition politician, leader of the anti-capitalist and anti-US EFF that he founded in 2013 after being thrown out of the youth league of the ruling African National Congress (ANC), where he was accused of fomenting divisions.
He portrays himself as the defender of society’s most disadvantaged and has attracted largely young supporters angry at the large social inequalities that exist in South Africa 30 years after the end of apartheid.
Renowned for its theatrics, his party gained prominence advocating radical reforms including land redistribution and nationalizing key economic sectors.
But the party only came fourth in last year’s elections, with 9.5 percent of the vote, and it has lost popularity since, with several of its top brass leaving to join a new party of former president Jacob Zuma, uMkhonto weSizwe (MK).
In the tense Oval Office meeting, Ramaphosa and his delegation distanced themselves from Malema’s rhetoric.
Agriculture Minister John Steenhuisen, a member of the center-right Democratic Alliance, told Trump he joined Ramaphosa’s multiparty coalition “precisely to keep these people out of power.”
“I’m the biggest target of that rabble-rouser,” businessman Johann Rupert told Trump.
The decades-old “Kill the Boer” rallying cry was born during the struggle against the brutal policies of white-minority rule, and its use since the end of apartheid in 1994 infuriates parties that represent white South Africans, with many attempting to get it banned.
A ban in 2010 was lifted after courts said it does not constitute hate speech and instead should be regarded in its historical context, and for the fact that it was being used by Malema only as a “provocative means of advancing his party’s political agenda.”
“But why wouldn’t you arrest that man?” Trump asked Ramaphosa Wednesday.
“In a Constitutional democracy... a person cannot be arrested when what they are doing is explicitly permitted in law,” political scientist Sandile Swana told AFP.
Although controversial, the vocal Malema was exerting the “fundamental rights of freedom of expression,” he said.
In the context of the anti-apartheid struggle, “Kill the Boer” had “nothing to do with the killing of a specific white man, but with the killing of the system of apartheid,” he said.
Malema mocked the meeting at the White House on social media as “A group of older men meet in Washington to gossip about me.”
The party later accused Ramaphosa of “betraying the struggle for land and dignity.”
“Surrounded by elites like Johann Rupert and John Steenhuisen, Ramaphosa denounced a liberation song upheld by South Africa’s highest courts and failed to defend the nation against the false narrative of white genocide,” it said.
