“Kill the Boer, kill the farmer!” South African hate speech re-evaluated within a poststructuralist perspective

Abstract

In this contribution, I reconsider Julius Malema’s infamous chant “Kill the Boer, kill the farmer!” within a poststructuralist perspective rather than from a mere legal angle. Malema has escaped judicial censor(ship) for his offensive – to minorities, that is – remarks in the past. Malema’s defence is that his remarks are not aimed at individuals or even groups, but are rather directed at an ideology (white supremacy) and amount to a cultural expression in the context of black people’s struggle against apartheid and historical white oppression. My investigatory framework is French poststructuralism, namely Jacques Derrida’s and Jacques Lacan’s work on the displaced signifier in new, unforeseen contexts, which has not been used before to address hate speech in South Africa. I conclude that since it is impossible for the author of a text such as Malema’s struggle utterances to conclusively foresee how his text will be received in new, unforeseen contexts, it has the potential to amount to hate speech (even if such actions were not intended).