South Africa’s Highest Court Denies Bid to Have ‘Kill the Boer’ Declared Hate Speech

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.’

White South Africans supporting U.S. President Donald Trump and South African and U.S. tech billionaire Elon Musk gather in front of the U.S. Embassy in Pretoria, South Africa, on Feb. 15, 2025. Marco Longari/AFP via Getty Images

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,” the order from the Constitutional Court stated.

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,” AfriForum CEO Kallie Kriel said 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. 

“When the slogan particularly is chanted at high-profile events by a high-profile politician, there tends to be an increase, especially in the murders on the farms,” Roets told The Epoch Times on March 28.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s senior adviser Elon Musk, who emigrated from South Africa, posted on social media platform X on March 22 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.

Willie Aucamp, national spokesperson of the Democratic Alliance, the second-largest party in South Africa’s parliament, said that it is “deeply troubling and unacceptable” that some political figures in the country continue to sing the song, according to News24, an English-language South African news website.

“The song ‘Kill the Boer, Kill the Farmer’ goes beyond mere words. It incites violence, stokes hatred, and deepens divisions within our society,” Aucamp said.

“We should be working towards unity and healing, and songs like this only serve to deepen the rifts that still exist in our country.

“Farmers play an essential role in feeding the nation, and to see their work and lives targeted by such harmful rhetoric is an affront to the values of respect and dignity we should uphold.”

The Trump administration has stopped funding to South Africa over what it said was the country’s government’s seizing of land from white farmers.

In February, the White House said that South Africa has enacted “government policies designed to dismantle equal opportunity in employment, education, and business, and hateful rhetoric and government actions fueling disproportionate violence against racially disfavored landowners.”

“South Africa has taken aggressive positions towards the United States and its allies,” the Trump administration stated, noting that the country accused Israel, instead of terrorist group Hamas, of genocide in the International Court of Justice, and reinvigorated “its relations with Iran to develop commercial, military, and nuclear arrangements.”

The United States will “promote the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation,” the White House stated.

Roets, through his Pioneer Initiative, has argued that South Africa should be broken into multiple smaller sovereign states.

“The only way forward is for these nations, such as the Afrikaner people, and others ... to have self-governance so that we’re not subjected to this kind of situation that we are in at the moment,” Roets told The Epoch Times.

Ryan Morgan, Jan Jekielek, and The Associated Press contributed to this report.