Mbeki defends the struggle chant “Kill The Boer, Kill The Farmer.”

By Lehlohonolo Lehana.

Former President of South Africa and African National Congress (ANC) Thabo Mbeki has defended the struggle and liberation chant “Kill The Boer, Kill The Farmer.

Mbeki’s comments follow remarks by US President Donald Trump, who recently called for Julius Malema’s arrest during a meeting with President Cyril Ramaphosa at the White House.

The chant emerged during the 1980s, as opposition to more than three decades of apartheid rule spilled onto the streets of South Africa’s townships. 

Boer is the Afrikaans word for farmer, and on one level, it simply means farmer, of any race. But since the 19th century (when Britain fought two wars against the Boers) it has also meant “Afrikaans person”.

Mbeki said the chant, used during the liberation struggle, was never intended to be taken literally and remains misunderstood by critics.

“It’s unchanged. I mean, that thing is a chant. It was a chant during the days of struggle,” Mbeki said in an interview with SABC.

“Chants of that kind in our tradition, in the African tradition, you don’t take them literally.”

To illustrate the cultural context, Mbeki referred to his testimony before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), where he sang a traditional chant, “Ngeke ngiye kwaZulu, kwa feli umama (“I won’t go to Zululand because my mother died there”).

“You sing, you say, but you don’t mean that literally,” Mbeki explained. “It’s a chant, and it’s meant to motivate people.”

Regarding the controversial line “Kill the Boer, kill the farmer,” Mbeki said the African National Congress (ANC) never endorsed violence against civilians.

“There’s no MK (uMkhonto we Sizwe) soldier who was ever instructed to go and kill a farmer just because they are Boer,” he said. 

Mbeki said nobody anywhere in South Africa had a right to call for the killing of any South African, whatever the race, ethnic origin, gender or health condition of the intended victim.

Meanwhile Malema was addressing community members of Ward 16 in Koppies ahead of their bi-elections which will take place on the 28th of May 2025.

Malema criticised Ramaphosa for cowardice for not defending South Africa during the high-level meeting.

“You’ve got a cowardly president. He left here, and he won’t be bullied. When he arrived there, he was shaking.

Trump said to him, ‘When you say farmers, you mean white people.’ He kept quiet.”

Malema first sang Dubul’ ibhunu in 2010, while still ANCYL leader but it has since become something of an EFF calling card. His latest rendition – the one Musk is currently objecting to – came at a rally on Friday commemorating the Sharpeville Massacre on March 21, 1960, in which at least 91 Black people were shot dead by apartheid policemen.

More recently, however, the tide has turned in his favour, with the Johannesburg High Court finding in 2022 that AfriForum, which has challenged the right to sing the song, had failed to prove that Malema was inciting harm against “white South Africans of Afrikaner descent” by singing it.

This view was confirmed by the Supreme Court of Appeals in 2024 which ruled that “reasonably well-informed person would appreciate that when Malema sang Dubula ibhunu … he was not actually calling for farmers, or white South Africans of Afrikaans descent to be shot, nor was he romanticising the violence exacted against them in farm attacks.”

“They would understand that he was using an historic struggle song, with the performance gestures that go with it, as a provocative means of advancing his party’s political agenda,” the court said.

The song is one of several political hotcakes – others include the Expropriation Without Compensation Act, and the policy of Black Economic Empowerment – that are inflaming Trump’s MAGA movement. Trump had spoken about the “large-scale killing of farmers” in South Africa in 2018, too.

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