South Africa’s highest court denied on March 27 a bid to have the song “Kill the Boer” be deemed hateful speech.
“The application should be dismissed as it bears no reasonable prospects of success,” stated the order from the Constitutional Court.
The case was brought by AfriForum, a South African nongovernmental organization representing white South Africans, who constitute 7 percent of the population and own 70 percent of the farmland. South Africa consists of 62 million people.
“After this shocking court ruling, we see that this is no longer the case. We are seeing an increasing radical implementation of the Constitution. We see an increase in ideologically-driven judges,” said AfriForum CEO Kallie Kriel in a statement. “However, we are not going to become discouraged.”
“Kill the Boer” is an apartheid-era song. Boers are white settlers of primarily Dutch descent who often pursued an agrarian living in what is now South Africa. The term “Boer” has been used to refer to white farmers in the country, and the lyrics of the “Kill the Boer” song mostly consist of the word “shoot.”
Recitations of the chant often correlate with rising violence targeting white farmers, according to Ernst Roets, a South African political activist and executive director of the newly formed advocacy group Pioneer Initiative.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s senior adviser Elon Musk, who is from South Africa, posted on X last week that the song has been “actively promoting white genocide.” He has criticized the country for passing a law that he said allows for land to be seized from white people in what supporters say is an attempt to rectify the past history of apartheid.
