The Word from Johannesburg

Outside is Johannesburg. The CCMA is on Fox Street. The City Library is a few blocks away. It had sunk into such disrepair as a result of neglect and corruption that it was closed in 2020. Last month, after a campaign to demand its restoration and reopening, public access was granted to the ground floor. A little further away is the Art Gallery, which has also been left to fall into serious disrepair — its roof is leaking, the walls water-damaged, mud and rubbish littering the building. It’s unclear how much of its collection has already been damaged beyond repair.

Albert Street is closer, just one block away. In August 2023, 76 people crowded into a building at 52 Albert Street and living in wretchedly unsafe conditions lost their lives in a fire. Their lives were taken by what Ruthie Wilson Gilmore calls ‘organised abandonment’. The shack settlements on the toxic post-industrial waste lands on Johannesburg’s periphery endure the same abandonment. In some of the townships, abandonment is experienced viscerally, as the ubiquitous smell of burning plastic, as piles of uncollected smouldering refuse dot the sides of the long-broken streets.

It’s not all dispiriting. The city’s jazz scene is fabulous. Beyond downtown, the parks, their paths strewn with lumps of white quartz, are verdant after all the rain. There are vibrant universities, a jumble of restaurants and clubs, and a humming urban energy. The streets in the old suburbs, first fortified in the 1980s, are breathtaking in October when the jacarandas flower. In July, when the aloes are in full bloom, their burnt orange blazing against the dry brown grass, there is a different kind of beauty.

Beyond these suburbs, middle-class life is often lived in a post-urban hellscape of hastily constructed, relentlessly ugly gated communities and strip malls. It’s a vast and wholly privatised architectural and social clusterfuck sprawling halfway to Pretoria. These days, these streets where the middle classes live are also broken. Potholes have become ditches, sometimes sinkholes. The regular blackouts that became routine back in 2008 have eased, but in recent years water has also become unreliable. It’s not unusual to go for well over a week, or sometimes two, without water.

Many roads no longer have working street lights. Traffic lights are often faulty. Middle-class families have long paid for private health care, education and security. Now, with the massive escalation in costs of municipal services and rates, many are in financial distress. This often hits Black families, who are far more likely to have to care for struggling relatives, particularly hard.

Since the years of Jacob Zuma’s presidency, Johannesburg has been governed by people with little sense of the public good. There has been opportunism, crass posturing and straightforward looting of public wealth. The city is in evident, rapid decay. Everyone suffers. Many people feel grief, anger or resignation. But those who suffer the most are living in places like 52 Albert Street, or on the city’s outskirts, such as the dense Good Hope shack settlement to the east. It’s bordered on all three sides by the toxic remains of the city’s industrial past: a mine dump, a rusting scrap yard and a busy road.

Across South Africa, the people who suffer the most from an economy mired in years of stagnation and austerity are overwhelmingly Black. More than 70 percent of Black South Africans are classified as poor, while the rate for white people is just over four percent. Unemployment for Black people is at a little under 40 percent, while less than eight percent of white people are without work. The average white household earns around five or six times more than the average Black household. White people, around seven percent of the population, own around 70 percent of commercial farmland. The average white person is richer today than under apartheid.

Along with the crisis of structural unemployment and impoverishment, accompanied by endemic hunger, South Africa is also a terrifyingly violent country. Nobody is entirely safe, in the cities or in the country, but the people most at risk are, by far, and always, impoverished Black people. When the white right — now hugely emboldened by the enthusiastic support of Donald Trump and Elon Musk — claims that white people are being specifically targeted, they are either lying or wilfully refusing to test their racial paranoia against reality.

The Costs of Domination

Apartheid South Africa was a herrenvolk democracy, albeit with clear limits, for whites. In the 1980s, it was often said that the system gave whites living standards equivalent to Canada, while Blacks lived at the standard of Gabon. It was never only about the material benefits given to whites at the expense of Black oppression; white people also drew what W.E.B. Du Bois famously called the psychological ‘wages of whiteness’, the perverse psychic comforts and pleasures of being taken as special, as superior to others.

But the system also carried costs for white people. As Aimé Césaire wrote, colonialism always works to ‘decivilise the coloniser’, to ‘brutalise him in the true sense of the word’. In apartheid South Africa, many works of music, film and literature were banned. It was a society riven with homophobia and sexism, reproduced through a sadistic school system that demanded conformity. It required military conscription to repress the struggle at home and continue the war in Angola. Some of the whites who crossed the lines drawn were removed from public life, suffered censorship, and were arrested, tortured, jailed or killed.

The democracy that followed apartheid offered far more freedom to whites than under the old system. White people enjoyed full political freedom, including equality for women and gay people, for the first time. They were fully included in the democratic gains, such as the establishment of the CCMA. No white person has been conscripted to fight a war, denied the right to love or marry who they wish or prevented from freely speaking according to their conscience.

There are no white political prisoners. No white person has been killed by the police or assassinated as a result of their political convictions or actions. When white people have been assassinated — or survived assassination attempts — by the political mafias that first metastasised across the state and business during the Zuma years, it was never because they were white. Far more Black people suffered the same fate.

The people who are in practice excluded from full access to the freedoms guaranteed in law are impoverished Black people. This is not just a matter of neglect. There is active repression. The police and other forces of the state kill people on protests, strikes and during evictions, while assassins tied to local elites often kill political activists.

It is true that Julius Malema of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) periodically makes threatening, rhetorically violent statements about white people. Now that Musk has taken to sharing them on X, Malema will probably escalate this rhetoric. He was never a very popular populist; his party is fracturing and its support, always limited, is in rapid decline.

It is inevitable that some white people will find this alarming. But the people who are subject to open and relentless hostility by the politicians and media at the centre of public life are migrants from Asia and elsewhere in Africa. South Africa has become an overwhelmingly xenophobic society, one in which the constant expression of xenophobia is tied to state and mob violence against migrants.

Any genuine concern with reckless rhetoric should start here, but the white right has no interest in that. Its demand is not that discourse in South Africa conform to democratic norms — it wants white people to be treated as special, that they should be given unique consideration even when their injuries are imagined and their paranoia irrational, and that, to borrow another phrase from du Bois, whiteness must continue to mean ‘the ownership of the earth forever and ever’.

White Liberal Paranoia

In the post-apartheid years, the leading intellectuals of white opinion — often connected to the Democratic Alliance, the white-dominated liberal party, and warmly received in the white media — were more commonly based in corporate and Western-funded NGOs and think tanks than in universities. They condemned open claims to white superiority as backward and immoral. Most were English-speaking and continued the old English habit of pretending that such views had always been the domain of Afrikaners.

Speaking with serene self-confidence, they asserted the absolute moral superiority of liberalism over both Afrikaner and African nationalism — and, of course, socialism. This sense of superiority was often expressed as an alignment with Western values and Western democracy, and at times extended to a direct assertion of the superiority of Western civilisation.

The insistence that white supremacy is confined to the past when influential white people assert their right to set the standards of public authority in the name of the superiority of the West is a well-worn sleight of hand. Speaking at the first Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris in 1956, Frantz Fanon observed that racism ‘that aspires to be rational’ can move from being ‘phenotypically determined’ and be ‘transformed into cul­tural racism. The object of racism is no longer the individual man but a certain form of existing’, a claim on the superiority of ‘Occidental values’.

Backed by white capital and Western governments and donors, white liberalism proved highly effective in claiming for itself a privileged status as a democratic actor. The conflation of ‘civil society’ with NGOs — and the presumption that NGOs enjoyed greater democratic legitimacy than elected governments — was particularly useful, as were repeated assertions of the white media’s radiant virtue.

From the outset, the white liberal establishment’s contempt for African aspirations for political autonomy was undisguised. When President Thabo Mbeki stood alongside Haiti’s Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Port-au-Prince on New Year’s Day 2004 to mark the bicentenary of the Haitian Revolution, he was widely pilloried by white liberal opinion. When Mbeki later welcomed Aristide to South Africa following the US-backed coup at the end of February, the attacks escalated into frenzy. Mbeki’s acts of solidarity were gleefully presented as corrupt, deluded and authoritarian by white people with absolute confidence in their superior moral acuity.

When South Africa adopted what it termed a ‘non-aligned’ stance in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022 and then initiated proceedings against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in late 2023, white liberal opinion was often hysterical in tone. Strident demands were issued for South Africa to uncritically ally with the West as a moral — as well as a strategic — necessity.

Ray Hartley and Greg Mills of the influential Brenthurst Foundation, which includes Richard Myers, the former Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, on its board, wrote that South Africa’s ‘action at the International Court of Justice has exposed the African National Congress … The ruling party is clearly no friend of liberal values.’ James Myburgh, editor of the liberal Politicsweb, declared that ‘South Africa resurrected Hitlerism at The Hague’, while Nicholas Woode-Smith, a rising young star in South African liberal circles, said that the ICJ case made South Africa ‘a laughing stock among the nations that matter in the world.’

White liberalism demands it be recognised as perfect reasoning, but had no qualms in airing unsubstantiated, hysterical claims during this period. It was repeatedly claimed that Iran had bribed the ANC to take Israel to the ICJ. Principled critique of the West’s appeasement of genocide was denounced as a Russian or Chinese conspiracy. This kind of liberalism won a strong presence in the South African public sphere, gaining the ear of Western governments and helping to negatively shift perceptions of South Africa in a global liberal milieu.

In February 2024, the US-South Africa Bilateral Relations Review Act was introduced with bipartisan support in the House of Representatives. It called for the President to determine whether South Africa’s foreign policy positions were undermining US national security or foreign policy interests; as Congressman John James put it, the justification was that ‘South Africa has been building ties to countries and actors that undermine America’s national security and threaten our way of life.’ The paranoia and outrage of white liberals in South Africa had made its way to Washington.

The White Bubble

But the white right with its roots in Afrikaner nationalism — a once Nazi-aligned project — is a quite different beast. As South Africa moved toward democracy in the early 1990s, there was open — and, at times, armed — resistance from the Afrikaner right. That project failed, and most Afrikaners moved on, but parts of the old far-right regrouped.

In 2001 a white mining union that had fought to confine Black workers to the lowest-paid, most exploitative positions rebranded itself as Solidarity. Under the leadership of Flip Buys, a member of the hardline pro-apartheid Konserwatiewe Party during the regime’s dying years, Solidarity was transformed into a base for something larger. Today, it runs schools, training colleges, a private prosecution service, media projects and even a university, providing services as part of a political project to carve a white enclave, protect white privileges, and build a system parallel to the rest of South Africa.

This specifically Afrikaner-driven form of white right politics has not sought to become hegemonic in the public sphere or civil society at home, or to build relations with liberal elites in the West. The ‘classical liberals’ were at home with the Friedrich-Naumann-Stiftung für die Freiheit (The Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom), the National Endowment for Democracy, or at the ‘On the Rocks and Off the Record’ monthly meeting for editors held at the US Consulate in Cape Town. Solidarity’s ‘civil rights’ wing, AfriForum, aligned itself on a very different axis and cultivated ties with the global hard-right, including the MAGA movement. Their message is that white South Africans are an oppressed minority, under attack from a far-left Black government through political violence, land reform and affirmative action. The wholly paranoid hallucination of a ‘white genocide’ has been a key point of connection with the white right in the US and Europe.

A significant breakthrough for the Afrikaner right came in May 2018, when AfriForum’s deputy CEO Ernst Roets was interviewed by Tucker Carlson. Trump responded with a tweet declaring that his administration would investigate ‘land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large-scale killing of farmers’. There had been no state-backed or organised rural land seizures. There were and are ongoing self-organised urban land occupations, but they aren’t tolerated, let alone supported, by the government and are frequently met with brutal violence by the state. White farmers were at risk of violence, but for the simple reason that everyone in South Africa is, in varying degrees, at risk of violence.

With Trump’s return to power, AfriForum’s strategy has paid off spectacularly. In February 2025, Trump signed an executive order titled Addressing Egregious Actions of the Republic of South Africa, which suspended aid and proposed prioritising refugee status for white Afrikaners, citing ‘rights violations’ and claims that South Africa was ‘undermining United States foreign policy.’ Days later, when PEPFAR funding — supporting HIV programmes, refugee centres, and research — was slashed, South Africa was hit hard.

On 6 February, Marco Rubio announced he wouldn’t attend the G20 foreign ministers’ meeting in Johannesburg, condemning South Africa’s commitment to ‘solidarity, equality, and sustainability’ as ‘DEI and climate change’. On 14 March, Rubio declared South Africa’s ambassador Ebrahim Rasool persona non grata, describing him as a ‘race-baiting politician who hates America and President Donald Trump.’

On 2 April, when Trump announced sweeping tariffs on imports from countries across the world, South Africa was hit hard again — this time with a punitive 31 percent tariff. The following day, two pieces of legislation were introduced in the House of Representatives: the reintroduction of the US-South Africa Bilateral Relations Review Act and the so-called ‘Afrikaner Act’.

This time, the Bilateral Relations Review bill was more aggressive, including provisions for targeted sanctions against ANC officials — something some white liberals in South Africa had been openly calling for — and offering refugee status to ‘Residents of South Africa who are members of the Caucasian minority group and have suffered persecution, or have a well-founded fear of persecution.’

Revanchism

Trump has never hidden his racism. Descending from his Trump Towers golden escalator to launch his presidential campaign in 2015, he made it clear that his political project would rest on the dehumanisation of migrants from the Global South, beginning with the declaration that Mexican migrants were ‘rapists’ and ‘drug dealers’. In a January 2018 Oval Office meeting, Trump asked. ‘Why do we need more Haitians? Take them out,’ and then ‘Why do we want all these people from Africa here? They’re shithole countries.’ He concluded that ‘We should have more people from places like Norway.’

During a White House meeting in May, he referred to migrants as ‘animals’ — language he would repeat even more aggressively in the lead-up to the next election, saying that migrants were ‘not human’, and eventually declaring that migrants were ‘poisoning the blood of our country.’

Two weeks into his second term of office, on 7 February 2025 — just days after launching mass deportations of American residents from Latin America and the Caribbean — Trump announced that Afrikaners should be welcomed to the United States as refugees. The racist double standard at play could not be more explicit or crude: Haitians must be forced out the backdoor as Afrikaners are embraced at the front.

The white South Africans who have welcomed this, be they Afrikaner nationalists or English-speaking liberals, are straight-up participants in the open racial revanchism constructing a newly shameless white international. They are not asking for protection for a threatened minority. They are demanding that a still privileged minority has its privileged status formally confirmed, that whiteness be sanctified and its paranoia indulged.

If they were decent people, they would aspire to be nothing more or less than people among other people. They would be working with all other South Africans to build a just and peaceful society for all, a society in which everyone was safe and able to flourish. They are not decent people, and their very white lies are having very serious consequences.