This article was first published by Daily Friend on 10 September 2026
For more than a year I have been saying this on X (Twitter), and I will say it again here: “white genocide” as a narrative device is a product of the left and the press.
The “white genocide” claim in South Africa is not one made by AfriForum, the Solidarity Movement, Lex Libertas, or any other serious conservative or Afrikaner organisation of note.
It is, instead, a story told by leftist journalists, radical activists, and eager academics, in both South Africa and to some degree in the United States. These groups have spent years pinning the white genocide slop on people who have gone out of their way not to use it and to make the fact abundantly clear. These journalists and activists then spend the next day “debunking” the narrative that they are themselves keeping in popular circulation.
It is a myth of a myth. And, unfortunately, it works. Every time they say, “AfriForum is peddling white genocide”, they make it harder for AfriForum to talk about the things they are in fact talking about.
Afri-kaders
Dawie Jacobs, who is relatively prominent among the lefty “Afrikaners vir Suid-Afrika” ecosystem, wrote an opinion piece in Rapport this week, but it is only the latest turn of the same crank.
Writing about the White Cross Project that Lex Libertas will take to Washington DC later this month, Jacobs does not bother to describe the project as it describes itself. He writes that, “Their campaign of fear is built on the lie of a white genocide.”
That sentence reveals the underhanded method: Invent the claim, assign it to someone else, and attack the strawman. Zero engagement with what Lex Libertas is actually saying, of course.
The White Cross Project is a vigil of some 3,000 white crosses on the National Mall in Washington, DC, on 26 September, in memory of people murdered in farm attacks in South Africa. Lex Libertas has published a list of the names that will go on those crosses: more than two thousand farm murder victims. It is not a list of only white victims – why would anyone think that it would only include them? It obviously includes the farm murder dead who were not white.
The crosses, naturally, are white because memorial crosses are white. To suppose that the colour of the timber is a dog-whistle reveals more about the supposer than the supposee.
Jacobs knows that none of this is part of the campaign of revealing a white genocide.
The people taking the crosses to America are, he writes, slandering South Africa’s image overseas. It is a form of “treason”, he says. He asks whether the endgame is to resettle all white South Africans in the United States, something no “white organisation” (the notion is insulting) has even implied. Jacobs wants to know what the campaign costs, and who funds it, and whether the money would not be better spent on the poor at home. He even ties the project to “the current 80-year-old President [Donald Trump] whose rule is presently shaky”, confirming my earlier take that the personality of Trump is looming large for the South African elite’s psychosis.
What Jacobs seemingly refuses to do is actually quote Lex Libertas on what they say they are doing: drawing attention to farm murders, political incitement, race-based law, and the position of minority communities, and trying to move that attention towards practical remedies. That would require him to argue with the merits, so it is much easier to leave it at “the myth of white genocide”.
This is not sloppiness – it is exactly the point.
I am proud to feature as a speaker at Lex Libertas’ conference that will precede the vigil, and to feature in the Lex Libertas documentary that is being screened, “Crossed Out: Confronting Persecution in South Africa”.
Lex Libertas and others have been blunt about something that is on the statute book and in the mouths of officeholders: South Africa maintains laws, policies, and a political rhetoric that treat people differently by race, and that fall (by design, if not effect) especially on members of minority racial communities. The political, legislative, and judicial sponsors of those measures do not even hide it: they just give it a beneficent spin of “redress”.
Whatever one thinks of that euphemistic justification, the practice is racial persecution. Persecution is, obviously, not extermination.
Humiliation
The humiliation, for much of the South African press and for the activist left, is that they have spent the better part of three decades treating this racial engineering as an ostensibly obvious moral achievement.
Now that celebrated record is being read aloud abroad without the local gatekeepers being asked for their sanitised spins. And so, they have concluded, the record must be replaced with a strawman: “white genocide”. Something that they can knock down in public so that they need not discuss the severely worsened Employment Equity Act, racialised water licencing, expropriation without compensation, racial cadre deployment, or a criminal justice system that imprisons Penny Sparrow but lets “Kill the Boer” slide.
Donald Trump, regrettably, handed them the pretext – but they relish it.
He has, in error, used the word “genocide” about South Africa once or twice. But he has not put it into the operative language of policy: Executive Order 14204 speaks of race-based discrimination, expropriation, and violence against “racially disfavored” landowners. The later refugee programme speaks of incitement of racially motivated violence. This is factual.
Neither instrument reads as if Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s Africa desk believes an extermination campaign is underway. The United States Congress has not been asked to legislate against a South African genocide.
The left’s narrative
But none of this has stopped the local press from treating “white genocide” as the official American line, and as the secret heart of every Afrikaner civil society campaign.
It is not and never was.
Through Kallie Kriel and others, AfriForum has repeatedly stressed that they do not claim a genocide. Dr Ernst Roets of Lex Libertas has said the same for years, including when he was still at AfriForum. I wrote in these pages in April last year that AfriForum was right to reject the narrative.
Here is a guarantee written in stone: if you have come across the phrase “white genocide” this week, the source is a leftist activist, journalist, or professor. It is not the Solidarity Movement or Lex Libertas. Take that to the bank.
The people who will stand the white crosses in Washington DC in two weeks are not asking the world to believe that there is an extermination, but to look at a list of the dead, at the laws that still sort South Africans by race, and at a political culture that has excused and justified both. If that is “treason” against the South African brand, then the brand was already a fraud.
