As PR impresarios go, Simon Roche must now rank alongside Edward Bernays in the pantheon. Roche is the spokesman for the Suidlanders, a tiny ethnonationalist South African political grouping which in 2017 brought various alt-Right e-celebs to South Africa, on the premise of showing them the slaughter of the white population.

A tour that included Lauren Southern and Katie Hopkins found its apogee yesterday at the White House, as the meme they seeded into the online culture became a global water-cooler moment when Donald Trump confronted South African counterpart Cyril Ramaphosa over the claims. For those of us who have followed the development of the concept of “white genocide”, it felt like watching the band from the bottom of your road play Wembley.

The first thing that should be said about the claim of “genocide” is that it doesn’t have much in the way of evidential basis. There were 19,696 murders in South Africa between April and December last year, and only 36 of these victims were linked to farming. Of those 36, only seven were farmers as opposed to farm employees. At scale, it is black South Africans who are more likely to be murdered.

In 2018, Johan Burger, a white Afrikaner former police detective, concluded a systematic review of farm murders for South Africa’s best-known think tank, the Institute for Security Studies. His conclusion was that there is no trend line, and no evidence of a conspiracy.

Yet the idea of “white genocide” fills a hole in the modern MAGA psyche. If it did not exist, it might be necessary to invent it. As shown by the decision to bring 59 Afrikaners as refugees to America, the Trumpists would like to claim that whites are the ones who face real persecution. In that sense, apart from being factually incorrect, they are once again onto something: they have diagnosed a swing in the dialectic.

South African politician Julius Malema continues to spout his “Kill The Boer” slogan. Meanwhile, through a policy called Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment, the ruling African National Congress continues to reserve employment and board seats for black citizens solely on the basis of race.

A couple of decades ago, the West paid this no heed. It was seen as necessary payback for apartheid; perhaps it was. But from today’s vantage point, the policy has beggared South Africa and become a license for cronyism. Why should it continue forever?

Elon Musk discussed this in his interview with Mishal Husain earlier this week. “I’m in this absurd situation where I was born in South Africa but cannot get a licence to operate Starlink because I’m not black,” he said. “Does that seem right to you?” The Tesla boss has a complex relationship with his homeland. On account of his unhappy boyhood, he now claims to be American. Yet, increasingly, South Africa is at the centre of his thoughts.

For Musk, “white genocide” has been the tip of a spear. Talking about the complexities of board-level affirmative action policies would have practically zero cut-through to an American audience. Showing them hundreds of grave markers, however, seems to work — even Trump struggled to understand that these were not actual graves, but instead symbolic markers from a protest.

In the aftermath of yesterday’s White House scenes, South Africans will rally around their insulted President. Ironically, Trump has probably done wonders for race relations in the short term. But in the longer term, the discourse will now be wound around debating the veracity of these claims. This is, to borrow from critical theory, inherently white-centring. “White rights” are on the menu, even if their exact meaning is still unclear. The world is watching, and South Africa is one of those places that comes to understand itself through a global lens.

It’s a curious reversal: 40 years ago, you might have had sports boycotts and rallies by the likes of Jeremy Corbyn and Peter Hain. Today, the country has become a very different kind of cause célèbre. Like those of the past, this campaign, once rolling, will have its own motive force.

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Gavin Haynes is a journalist and former editor-at-large at Vice.

@gavhaynes

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