The Real Genocide: South Africa's Betrayal of Its African Majority

IOL News

01-07-2025

Gillian Schutte explores how the Genocide Convention's principles apply to the systemic oppression of South Africa's African majority, revealing a slow genocide that challenges our understanding of justice and equality.
Image: IOL
In 1948, in the aftermath of the Second World War and the Holocaust, the Genocide Convention was adopted to prohibit not only the mass killing of populations, but also their systematic destruction through prolonged deprivation. Article II(c) of the Convention defines genocide to include the 'deliberate infliction on the group of conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.'
This clause was intended to capture structural mechanisms of annihilation that may not involve overt violence, but which nonetheless result in the steady elimination of a people. In 2025, the conditions under which the African majority indigenous to South Africa are forced to live closely resemble those anticipated by the drafters of that clause.
Against this legal and historical framework, the claim by some Afrikaner groups that they are victims of genocide is not only absurd, but deeply cynical. The real slow genocide is unfolding daily, and not against the privileged white farmers but against the African majority, whose conditions of life have been deliberately structured to remain unliveable.
More than three decades after the end of apartheid, South Africa remains one of the most unequal societies in the world. According to the World Bank (2022), the top 10% of the population controls more than 85% of household wealth. Oxford University's 2024 Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) reports that over 25 million South Africans continue to live in severe multidimensional poverty. The overwhelming majority of this population is the African. The MPI captures deprivations across education, health, housing, water, sanitation, and nutrition. These are measurable exclusions from the basic elements of life.
Racial inequality remains deeply entrenched. A 2023 report by Statistics South Africa found that 64.2% of African majority households lived below the upper-bound poverty line, compared to 1.2% of white households. The African majority is overrepresented across all categories of deprivation. Seventy-five percent of unemployed individuals are from this majority. Eighty-seven percent of people living in informal settlements are from the African majority. More than 70% of households relying on woefully inadequate social grants for survival fall within this group.
The slow genociding of the Black and poor in South Africa is no longer explained by the legacy of apartheid alone. It is the result of a post-apartheid order that institutionalised inequality through policy, economic restructuring, and elite consensus. What was promised as transformation became management. Redistribution was replaced with fiscal discipline. Land reform was stalled through bureaucratic impasse. Economic ownership remained virtually unchanged.
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The country's political transition was paralleled by an economic settlement aligned to global neoliberal frameworks. From the early 1990s, the new government came under pressure from international financial institutions and Western governments, particularly the United States, to commit to market-friendly reforms. This included the liberalisation of trade and capital flows, a focus on inflation targeting, and the privatisation of public services. These policies were formalised in the Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) strategy in 1996. The result was the absorption of the new state into a global system that privileged investor confidence over social redress.
In this context, poverty among the African majority became institutionalised through structural austerity. Basic services remain underfunded. According to the Auditor-General's 2023 report, only 41 of 257 municipalities received clean audits. Many are unable to provide clean water, maintain sewage systems, or ensure waste collection. Public health facilities are under-resourced. Hospitals in rural areas operate without functioning equipment, while clinics in informal settlements routinely face medicine shortages. Schools in poor communities often lack electricity, running water, and qualified teachers. In 2022, over 4,500 schools were still using pit latrines.
Far from being abstract deficits, these are measurable forms of neglect that directly affect life expectancy and health outcomes. In 2023, the average life expectancy for the Black and poor was 64 years, compared to 77 for white South Africans. The mortality rate for children under five in the poorest quintile is three times higher than in the wealthiest. Malnutrition among children under five has increased over the last five years, particularly in provinces with high unemployment and food insecurity.
The psychological impact is equally devastating. A study published in The Lancet (2023) found that suicide rates among youth from the Indigenous African majority in South Africa have risen steadily since 2018, with poverty, hopelessness, and unemployment identified as key drivers. Gender-based violence, substance abuse, and intra-community violence are all symptoms of sustained structural abandonment. These conditions reflect a strategy of economic apartheid underpinned by political inertia.
The mechanisms of this containment are enforced through monopoly capital and state complicity. A handful of corporations continue to dominate key sectors of the economy. These firms remain largely white- or foreign-owned, and their profits are often transferred offshore. The state acts less as regulator and more as facilitator, offering tax incentives and infrastructure support while communities living near mining zones or agricultural estates remain without clean water or basic services and are exposed to unregulated blasting and life threatening pollution.
Economic policy is crafted in consultation with business interests. Social policy, by contrast, is treated as a liability.
These dynamics are legitimised through the language of governance and reform, but they function as instruments of slow elimination. The majority is governed at a distance, spoken for in summits, referenced in policy statements, yet never materially prioritised. When they protest, they are met with violence. When they vote, they are promised inclusion. When they die, they are listed in aggregate.
The Government of National Unity (GNU) formed in 2024 represents a continuation of this deprivation strategy. It maintains the neoliberal model. It is an alliance of economic custodianship. Austerity remains intact. Redistribution is avoided. The poor are once again promised delivery through institutional harmony, while the economy continues to serve the elite. This is political convergence around the status quo.
The slow genociding of the Indigenous African majority in South Africa conforms to the logic identified by the Genocide Convention. The state and its economic partners have constructed conditions of life that are not survivable over time. The infrastructure of social reproduction -health, education, housing, employment - has been systematically undermined. The result is premature death on a mass scale, disintegration of communities, and intergenerational trauma. The Convention's clause on conditions of life does not require mass graves. It requires evidence of structural processes that lead to physical destruction. That evidence is abundant.
What distinguishes South Africa's case is the normalisation of this destruction through the language of democracy. The state performs concern. It hosts dialogues. It commissions reports. But the material conditions do not shift. The poor are slowly erased through inaction, underdevelopment, and neglect that is both chronic and targeted.