Russians & Afrikaners Are Kindred Peoples

Andrew Korybko 

This was highlighted like never before after the USSR’s dissolution

South Africa’s Afrikaner minority, and especially the farmers among them (Boers), are back in the news after Trump’s feisty meeting with President Cyril Ramaphosa at the White House on Wednesday where they argued over whether this group is being persecuted by members of the Black majority. Trump showed Ramaphosa footage of Julius Malema, President of the Economic Freedom Fighters and member of the National Assembly, chanting “kill the Boer” and shared news reports about them then being killed.

This generated a global debate about whether Malema’s chant incites violence or is just a metaphorical slogan from the Apartheid era for dismantling that system and its alleged remnants afterwards. Members of the “Non-Russian Pro-Russian” (NRPR) segment of the Alt-Media Community (AMC) are divided, but those who defend Malema should know that Russians and Afrikaners are kindred peoples with similar historical experiences, which was highlighted like never before after the USSR’s dissolution.

Just like the Afrikaners settled outside the Dutch’s ancestral Western European homeland in what’s now South Africa, so too did Russians settle outside their ancestral Eastern European homeland that now comprises the vast majority of today’s Russian Federation. And just like some of the non-Afrikaner locals expressed fierce resentment against them after Apartheid, so too did some of the non-Russian locals do the same after the USSR’s dissolution, especially in the Baltics, Central Asia, and the North Caucasus.

Ethnic Russians are still (“legally”) discriminated in the first to this day, are at times made to feel uncomfortable in the second, and were earlier murdered in the third, with Chechnya being the epicenter of these crimes decades ago. They also began to suffer all of this in post-Maidan Ukraine, though that modern-day country’s territory is considered by Russians to be one of the cradles of their civilization, so it’s not comparable to the Dutch-originating Afrikaners’ ties to South Africa like the other places are.

What’s comparable is that some of these locals perceive Russians as having been favored by the Imperial and Soviet governments just like the Apartheid one favored Afrikaners and believe that this legacy led to economic and political asymmetries between their communities. Moreover, the rhetoric spewed against Russians by some of these same locals isn’t always as explicit as Malema’s “kill the Boers” chant but still shares “decolonization” rhetoric, which is weaponized by the West as explained here and proven here.

Many of the AMC’s Malema-supporting NRPRs support “social justice” legislation against the Afrikaners on “decolonization” grounds to address the aforementioned asymmetries attributed to their settlement of what’s now South Africa. That’s their right, but many of them don’t support the same – let alone anti-Russian equivalents of Malema’s “kill the Boer” chant – against Russians even though their settlement of some lands, including inside today’s Russian Federation, occurred much later than the Afrikaners’.

They’re either unaware that Russians and Afrikaners are kindred peoples with similar historical experiences, especially after the USSR’s dissolution, or they ignore this for reasons of “political convenience”. Nevertheless, they should know that chanting “kill the Boer” in Russia would likely violate Article 282 from the Russian Criminal Code prohibiting the “Incitement of Hatred or Enmity, as Well as Abasement of Human Dignity”, so the Kremlin clearly feels differently about such rhetoric than they do. 

Andrew Korybko, Substack, May 23, 2025

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