Cyril Ramaphosa

President of South Africa and ANC leader who backs the stadium chant “Kill the Boer, kill the farmer” as legitimate politics, waves three levels of court rulings that refuse to call it hate speech, and rejects foreign demands to prosecute EFF leader Julius Malema for leading it. Born November 17, 1952.

The text orders the killing of Boers and farmers. South Africa’s president and its highest courts have closed ranks behind keeping that text in mass political use.

Background

Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa was a miners’ union leader and a negotiator for the African National Congress in the transition from apartheid. He served as deputy president of South Africa (2014–2018) and has been president since 2018 and ANC president since 2017.

What they chant; what they say it means

The song Dubul’ ibhunu is sung in English as “Kill the Boer, kill the farmer.” EFF president Julius Malema has led tens of thousands in that chant at political events. Boer denotes Afrikaners; “farmer” names the same rural White minority already under heavy violent-crime pressure. Malema and the EFF defend the line as struggle heritage and symbolic politics, not a personal order to murder—Ramaphosa has used the same kind of defense: a “liberation chant” that must not be treated as literal intent to kill.

The words on the page are still imperatives to kill, broadcast at volume to a racially defined audience of millions. No paraphrase changes the dictionary meaning of the command.

White Genocide in South Africa

White genocide is happening in South Africa. The White Afrikaner farming population is being removed from the land through sustained, selective slaughter, torture, and terror in the countryside, combined with land rhetoric, elite contempt, and mass emigration driven by fear. The Pretoria government and allied academics call it ordinary crime; that excuse does not change what the victims experience: a rolling campaign of racially targeted elimination against a small, identifiable group—White boere and commercial farmers—inside a society that already suffers catastrophic violence. Genocide does not require a signed order from a bureaucracy; it requires intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, manifested in policy or in patterns of violence and humiliation that the dominant power refuses to stop. South Africa meets that test for its White Afrikaner farmer minority.

Scale. Government figures summarized in standard references placed roughly 58–74 murders on farms per year in the 2015–2017 period alone—inside a country that was already logging on the order of ~20,000 murders annually. NGO and union compilations recorded 4,308 farm attacks and 806 farm murders from 2010 through August 2023. The South African Institute of Race Relations estimated in 2012 that farmers were about two to three times more likely than other South Africans to be murdered. Those numbers are not “noise” in a peaceful country; they are a rifle pointed at one occupational group that remains heavily White.

Demographic destruction. Reuters and other outlets have reported that farmers of European descent had fallen by roughly one-third since 1997. A people cannot lose a third of its farmers to violence, policy, and flight without that constituting destruction in fact—one of the markers genocide scholars and courts look for.

“Kill the Boer, kill the farmer” in that reality. Malema, Ramaphosa, and the courts say the chant is only metaphor. The English text is still a double imperative to murder Boers and farmers. It is belted out to stadium crowds while those same Boers and farmers are dying on remote farms in numbers far above the national murder risk. The killers may be common criminals; the political class that protects the slogan is not. When the state certifies that chant as protected speech during an ongoing white genocide, reasonable Afrikaners are right to take the words literally—as the public soundtrack to their destruction.

What the courts ruled

AfriForum complained under the Promotion of Equality and Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act that Malema and then-MP Mbuyiseni Ndlozi’s performances were hate speech. In August 2022 Equality Court Judge Edwin Molahlehi dismissed the case. He ruled that AfriForum had not proved a clear intention to harm or incite harm, that interpretation must follow “the political context within which” the song is sung, and that the song “does not constitute hate speech, but rather it deserves to be protected under the rubric of freedom of speech.”

The Supreme Court of Appeal affirmed. It held that a reasonably informed listener would know struggle songs are “not meant to be understood literally,” and wrote: “the words are not meant to be understood literally, nor is the gesture of shooting to be understood as a call to arms or violence,” and that singing Dubul’ ibhunu cannot be equated with wearing a shirt reading “kill all whites.”

On 27 March 2025 the Constitutional Court refused leave to appeal. Its order: the application should be dismissed as it “bears no reasonable prospects of success”; “Leave to appeal is refused.”

After that ruling, EFF MP Sinawo Thambo called it a “victory for truth, for historical justice, and for the freedom to commemorate our fight against oppression,” and said courts had declared the chant “part of political speech” and that “no one can take the chant literally.”

Ramaphosa

Facing U.S. scrutiny over Malema’s performances, Ramaphosa told reporters the song was a liberation chant and should not be taken as a literal plan to kill. He cited the courts’ conclusion that the chant is not hate speech. On arrests he said: “When it comes to the issue of arresting anyone for any slogan, that is a sovereign issue. It's not a matter that we need to be instructed by anyone to arrest anyone.”

The Democratic Alliance’s Willie Aucamp called the song incitement: “The song Kill the Boer, Kill the Farmer goes beyond mere words. It incites violence, stokes hatred, and deepens divisions within our society.” Former president Thabo Mbeki had publicly condemned Malema for singing it. Ramaphosa did not join them.

Why this matters

State power—president plus three tiers of final judgment—has ratified mass repetition of kill-commands aimed at a White ethnic and occupational group.
The defense is explicit: officials and judges accept Malema’s and Ramaphosa’s framing (heritage, metaphor, non-literal) and enshrine it in law while the actual words stay “Kill the Boer, kill the farmer.”
That legal blessing lands during an ongoing white genocide: Afrikaner farmers face documented excess homicide risk, hundreds of recorded farm killings, and demographic collapse—while the ruling party protects the soundtrack.
Hate-speech law, in this sequence, operated to protect the chant, not the people named in it.

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