Who Is the South African Radical in the Oval Office Video Singing ‘Kill the Farmer'?

Epoch Times

22-05-2025

JOHANNESBURG—Julius Malema doesn't need to put much effort into stirring controversy.
He leads a party, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), whose policies include seizing all forms of 'white-owned wealth,' including mines, land, and banks, for 'redistribution to poor black people.'
Malema has threatened that white South Africans could be slaughtered in a 'revolution' by poor black citizens taking revenge for decades of white minority rule under apartheid, an official policy that ended in 1994.
On Wednesday, Malema's image and words stirred trouble again as they were beamed into the lives of millions around the world from the Oval Office, as U.S. President Donald Trump hosted South African President Cyril Ramaphosa.
During the meeting, when Ramaphosa tried to counter Trump's claim that there's a 'genocide of white farmers' in South Africa, the U.S. leader told aides to dim the lights and roll the tape.
Some of the South African delegation shifted uncomfortably in their seats as Malema appeared onscreen bellowing the words, 'Kill the Farmer,' the title of a song he often sings along with thousands of supporters at anti-government political rallies.
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'Shoot to kill!' Malema yelled.
Another scene showed rows of white crosses at a memorial to slain white farmers in South Africa, where, currently, more than 70 people are murdered daily.
The roots of Malema's song lie in 1980s South Africa, when black protestors chanted the Zulu words 'Dubula ibhunu,' or 'Kill the Boer,' to represent resistance to the nationalist Afrikaner government that was oppressing them.
Malema has been tried twice in a court of law for assaulting white people, but was acquitted on both occasions.
Malema told The Epoch Times he 'proudly started causing trouble' when he was a toddler, when he says he threw his first stone at a police vehicle in Seshego, his home township in the country's north, in the late 1980s. 'Later, I graduated to petrol bombs,' he said.
He has been found guilty of hate speech on several occasions for inciting violence against whites, with each conviction overturned on appeal.
In 2020, after a white man allegedly assaulted a black man near a school in Cape Town, Malema instructed supporters at the scene to track down and 'attend to' the white man, according to the FW de Klerk Foundation.
He told them, 'Never be scared to kill,' as 'a revolution demands that at some point there must be killing, because the killing is part of a revolutionary act.'
EFF members, clad in their customary red overalls and berets to represent their communist ethos, displayed placards that read 'Honeymoon is over for white people in South Africa' and 'A revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate.'
On another occasion, Malema said he's 'not calling for the slaughtering of whites, at least for now.'
When questioned about why he won't stop singing his infamous song, Malema responded that it's a symbol of his 'opposition to the [African National Congress's (ANC's)] capitalism' and his 'opposition to the white people that still control the South African economy.'
Malema said his 'ultimate hero' is Zimbabwe's former President Robert Mugabe, who in the early 2000s sent his 'war veterans' to confiscate white-owned farms, with scores of white farmers murdered.
Ramaphosa's spokesperson, Vincent Magwenya, told The Epoch Times that the South African government had 'no intention' of driving white farmers from their land.
'Zimbabwe, which is just across the border, has shown us that if we have no white farmers here, it would be suicide. Many of the white farmers are our biggest food producers,' he said. 'They must be protected, and the government is dedicated to improving their security and the safety and security of all South Africans, regardless of race.'
The ANC, which received 40 percent of the votes in an election last year, shares power with the Democratic Alliance (DA), which got just over 20 percent.
After Trump's assistants played the footage of Malema singing his 'Kill the Boer [Farmer]' song, Ramaphosa and his entourage told Trump that the EFF is a small party and its views don't represent government policy.
But professor Adam Habib, director of the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, who's studied the EFF since it was formed in 2013, told The Epoch Times it has a 'powerful voice' in South Africa.
'EFF support is much smaller than the ANC and the DA, but they pull a consistent 10 percent of the vote come election time,' he said. 'The EFF has been popular since its inception and its members are always elected to parliament.'
Malema established the EFF after he was kicked out of the ANC in 2012 for bringing the party into disrepute. He had branded then-President Jacob Zuma a 'dictator.'
'Malema knows a thing or two about dictators because all his heroes, like Robert Mugabe and [former Libyan military ruler] Muammar Gaddafi, were dictators,' said Habib. 'The EFF is a racist, violent cancer in South Africa and the sooner we see the back of them, the better.'