Until the early 1990s, South Africa’s whites-only government used a militaristic dictatorship to enforce Apartheid, a colonial system of racial segregation with European settlers at the top.
The racist, authoritarian Afrikaaner government eventually ceded power and allowed open elections after decades of resistance by black protest movements as well as an international divestment and sanctions movement.
Since the end of the apartheid era, neo-Nazis and white supremacists in South Africa as well as North America have clamored about a ‘white genocide’ in South Africa in which they claimed black Africans were carrying out mass murder with the goal of exterminating white people.
Recent controversy over land reform in South Africa, along with some armed robbery incidents at isolated rural farms, have been seized upon by peddlers of ‘white genocide’ as the latest proof that descendants of occupying Afrikaaner settlers should be treated as an endangered minority.
Violent white supremacists often identify with long-collapsed racist governments in Africa. Dylann Roof, who killed nine people at a black South Carolina church in 2015, sported the apartheid-era flags of Rhodesia and South Africa on his Facebook photo.
South African racist groups have spent the last year courting support from the North American far-right, an effort which seems to have paid off as their messaging has now spread from Fox News directly to the President of the United States.
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