As I watched a large group of self-proclaimed Afrikaners gather outside the US embassy in Pretoria to thank Donald Trump for using them as pawns in the geopolitics of white grievance, I knew I would have to tread carefully when it came time to write about them.
The trouble, you see, is that I have some experience of writing about small, unhappy groups of South Africans who want to enact policies that would plunge this country into violent chaos — usually Julius Malema and his Church of Latter-Day Fakes — and whenever I do I always get asked the same annoyed question by the same annoyed readers.
The question invariably boils down to this — given that the EFF represents less than 5% of eligible voters, why do I keep giving them oxygen? Why elevate a statistical rounding error to national importance?
So now you see my quandary. On the one hand, the gathering in Pretoria seems politically significant. And yet on the other I know my regular critics, being supremely rational and consistent, will know a crowd of 1,200 people represents 0.04% of a group that comprises 5% of the population; and any moment now they will be pouring onto my social media to scold me for giving so much oxygen to such a microscopically small and unrepresentative group.
Really. Any second now. Honestly. I’m not sure what’s taking them so long, but they’ll definitely be here. Right, guys? I mean, it’s the principle of the thing, surely? Ah well. Best just to crack on then.
Unlike some leading US conservatives, I can’t speak for all white South Africans, so I can’t tell you exactly what was in the minds of those who held up banners reading “Make SA Great Again”. All I can hope is that some of our better journalists do what their US counterparts have failed to do, and ask the placard-carriers which era, exactly, was great, just so we all know where, or in which century, we stand. I mean, when you stand outside a US embassy and ask the current administration to make SA great again, are you hoping to go back to the Zuma era? The Mbeki years? The Mandela moment?
Trump is far too busy trying to shake down Ukraine for half its mineral wealth and planning the hotels and casinos his son-in-law is going to build in Gaza once the ethnic cleansing is done...
No, I didn’t think so either. At least some of the other messaging was clearer, like the singing of the apartheid version of Die Stem, or the banner that begged the US to “recognise the white nation like Israel was recognised”, or the one that simply gave a deep, shuddering sigh, because pretending to live in the modern world with all its rights and democratic nonsense is exhausting, and cut right to the chase: “President Trump and Elon Musk, please help the farmers chase away the ANC. Take over SA. Please help us.”
On Friday US vice-president JD Vance used his formal visit with Germany’s leading neo-fascist party to claim that free speech is under threat in Europe, presumably because his hosts told him that that’s the plan once they get into power. Down here in SA though, free speech is clearly flourishing. Musk might want Malema branded a terrorist for singing “Kill the Boer”, but right now we are also a country in which an ethnic minority can own almost all the good land for many years, make it illegal for the majority to buy that land from it, expropriate yet more land without compensation, and then, once the consequences of this vast crime inevitably start unravelling about it, gather in Pretoria to ask the US to invade and annex a sovereign democracy — and the only things that get cancelled are a couple more News24 subscriptions because it’s gone so woke.
Alas, I fear most of the people who gathered in Pretoria are going to be disappointed: there will be no US carrier fleet arriving in Table Bay to reinstate apartheid at gunpoint, mostly because Trump is far too busy trying to shake down Ukraine for half its mineral wealth and planning the hotels and casinos his son-in-law is going to build in Gaza once the ethnic cleansing is done, or at least looking up quotes by famous tyrants like the one attributed to Napoleon that he posted at the weekend: “He who saves his country does not violate any law.”
Then again, given the current geopolitical zeitgeist — somewhere between a hot-dog-eating contest and a children’s cartoon in which the villains twirl their moustaches and the police snore at their desks — can you really blame the Pretoria faithful for asking?
From women’s health facilities and classrooms in the US to the wasteland of Gaza and eastern Ukraine, this is the age of the big grab; of unmasked, unabashed reaction, stating openly and without liberal conceits such as shame what it wants and what it will do to you if you resist. The old rules are melting away: it has taken an astonishingly few years for what Roosevelt called the “arsenal of democracy” to shrug off those burdens and embrace its new role as the loan shark of oligarchy, and what happens next is anyone’s guess.
But now I must leave you and go outside to look for all those people I was expecting, the ones who were worried about giving oxygen for small groups, because they’re really taking an awfully long time to arrive. Gosh, I hope everything is OK …
• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.
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