Tengo Jabavu: A Life Interrupted
Tengo Max Jabavu belonged to a generation born at the narrowing edge of South African
Across history, settler societies facing indigenous resistance or deep social change have often projected their deepest fears onto the people whose land and freedom they have seized. In southern Africa, this dynamic emerged vividly in the Frontier War era in the Eastern Cape and echoes today in the global right-wing myth of “white genocide” in South Africa. Both reflect a longstanding pattern: the paranoia of a settler minority imagining coordinated violence from Black communities — narratives that serve political ends more than reflect reality.
1. The Frontier Wars and the Culture of Fear
In the late 18th and 19th centuries, the Cape Colony’s frontier with amaXhosa and allied groups was a zone of dispossession, competition for land and cattle, and repeated conflict known as the Xhosa Wars (1779–1879). These wars involved a complex mix of African resistance to colonial encroachment and British/ Boer military incursions into Xhosa territories.
One of the most powerful voices shaping settler perceptions was Robert Godlonton (1794–1884) — printer, politician, and editor of the Grahamstown Journal, the most influential English-language newspaper in the Eastern Cape during the frontier era.
Godlonton’s press was central to the Eastern Cape separatist movement, a faction of the frontier settler elite that advocated for a separate colony with harsher policies against African polities and reduced franchise rights for Black people. His numerous publications and political interventions cast African resistance as existential threats — “irrup[tions]” of “Kafir hordes” — that justified militarised responses and settler expansion.
This rhetoric did more than report violence; it constructed a worldview where the frontier was not a negotiated space of contestation over land but an almost inevitable siege of European civilisation by savage forces “beyond the pale.” Imperial officers like Andries Stockenström, who argued for treaty diplomacy and recognition of Xhosa political structures, were vilified by frontier press elites precisely because they threatened this narrative of threat.
In short, Godlonton and his contemporaries did not merely chronicle frontier conflict — they helped manufacture a settler compulsive fear of coordinated Black violence, shaping colonial policy and settler identity around that fear.
2. The Modern Myth: “White Farmer Genocide” in South Africa
Fast-forward to today, and you see a strikingly similar pattern of exaggerated fear politics: the claim — especially in some global right-wing circles — that white South African farmers are victims of a coordinated genocide by Black South Africans.
This claim surged into international headlines in 2025 when U.S. President Donald Trump repeated allegations of “genocide” against white farmers to South African President Cyril Ramaphosa and linked them to land reform debates. Trump’s administration also offered refugee status to some white Afrikaners on this basis, despite extensive evidence undermining the premise.
Reliable statistics and expert analyses strongly contradict the idea of race-targeted genocide:
• Farm murders represent a tiny fraction of South Africa’s homicide problem. According to official data, farm-related murders make up less than 1% of all murders in South Africa — a country with one of the highest murder rates in the world.
• Most victims of violent crime nationwide are Black South Africans, especially young Black men in urban and township areas, because crime correlates more with class, poverty, and location than race.
• In the first quarter of 2025, out of six murders in rural farm contexts, five of the victims were Black Africans and only one was white.
• Courts in South Africa have explicitly dismissed the “white genocide” narrative as imagined and not grounded in factual evidence.
Even black farming communities and workers — who are often living and working on the same land — are frequently victims of the same violence, undermining any notion of racial targeting.
The “white farmer genocide” narrative is strongest in international right-wing and white nationalist circles, where it is often deployed as a culture war talking point or a justification for anti-immigration sentiment. Far from being a reflection of empirical risk, it functions as a political tool to stoke fear and mobilise support.
3. The Paranoia Paradigm: Then and Now
What links these two historical moments — Godlonton’s frontier press and the modern genocide myth — is a shared psychological and political mechanism:
• European settlers, having dispossessed amaXhosa, Sotho, Mpondo, and other African peoples of land and sovereignty, then imagined those same groups as coordinated existential threats to their survival.
• In the 19th century, frontier paranoia justified calls for harsher colonial policy and separatism. In the 21st, the idea of white genocide is used to resist land reform and support privileged emigration.
• Historically, African military resistance was localised and reactive to dispossession; today, violent crime in South Africa reflects socioeconomic inequality and state capacity issues, not a racially organised campaign. Statistically, most victims of violent crime are Black South Africans, and farm murders are a tiny percentage of total murders.
4. A Call for Honest Reckoning
Both historical and modern cases demonstrate how fear can be weaponised to shield privilege and obscure structural realities. Settler paranoia in the Eastern Cape helped entrench colonial domination. Today’s “white genocide” myth distracts from South Africa’s democratic challenges, inequality in land ownership, and a crime crisis that affects all communities — especially those with the least resources.
Understanding this lineage isn’t about dismissing legitimate concerns about safety. It’s about recognising when fear becomes a political project rather than an empirical assessment. Only by grounding discussion in facts, not fantasies, can societies confront real problems — colonial legacies, inequality, and insecurity — without reproducing outdated and damaging tropes.