Propaganda: The lie of the “white genocide” is an attempt by its
proponents to hold Africa’s development hostage to colonial fear and
oligarchic panic.
The renewed circulation of the “white genocide” lie demands more than routine rebuttal.
It serves a political and commercial purpose. It slanders South Africa, insults Africa and advances a strategic project that seeks to keep the continent trapped in the old colonial position: supplier of raw materials, labour, ports, minerals, data, markets and geopolitical leverage, while others claim the wealth, patents, platforms and prestige.
The lie belongs inside a longer history of organised extraction. Jan van Riebeeck’s 1652 expedition to the Cape of Good Hope arrived through the financial and commercial logic of the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, the Dutch East India Company.
The VOC came to Africa as a corporation with ships, soldiers, accounting books and imperial ambition. It financed a refreshment station to supply vessels travelling to the East Indies. That logistical foothold grew into land seizure, dispossession, forced labour and the racial order that later hardened into the architecture of modern South Africa.
Today the old ships have become satellites, digital platforms, sanctions systems, ratings agencies, donor networks, think tanks and media machines.
The old refreshment station has become a strategic corridor for minerals, ports, data and geopolitical influence. The old civilising mission has become human-rights vocabulary, investor confidence, digital safety, counter-terror regulation and racial panic sold as concern for minorities.
South Africa irritates the unipolar programme because Africa’s role in the industrial revolutions sits at the centre of the modern world. Africa has never stood outside modernity. It supplied much of the hidden foundation on which Western modernity built itself.
The continent gave resources, labour, land, routes, energy and human sacrifice while colonial powers denied it equity, recognition and industrial sovereignty.
The First Industrial Revolution, roughly from 1760 to 1840, centred on mechanised agriculture, textile manufacturing, iron production, steam power and factory systems.
The West narrates this period as a triumph of invention. That story omits the colonial world that fed it. Africa supplied enslaved labour, land, minerals and the wider imperial economy that made European industrial accumulation possible. Machines transformed production in Europe while colonial violence blocked equivalent industrial development across Africa.
The Second Industrial Revolution, from the late nineteenth century into the early 20th century, deepened this pattern. Electricity, steel, oil, gas, chemicals, mass production, assembly lines and standardised distribution reshaped the industrial world.
South Africa’s diamonds, discovered in 1867 and gold, discovered in 1886, became part of the financial muscle behind European expansion.
Southern Africa’s minerals underwrote banking, empire and industrial confidence. Across the continent, rubber, copper, agricultural goods and human labour fuelled factories, railways, electrical systems and military capacity elsewhere.
The cost fell on African bodies and African land. Mining compounds, migrant labour systems, hut taxes, pass laws, forced removals and colonial policing created the human machinery of extraction.
Western industrial life improved while African communities paid with broken land, broken families, coerced labour and blocked development. The West called its own transformation progress and called Africa’s plunder collateral.
The Third Industrial Revolution, beginning around 1969, brought automation, electronics, computing and telecommunications. Once again Africa supplied the material base. Uranium, coal, iron, strategic minerals, ports, shipping routes and geopolitical position remained central.
The Cape of Good Hope retained its logistical value. Richards Bay became a major mineral export artery. African resources powered industrial systems while African countries faced debt traps, structural adjustment, sanctions, coups, proxy wars and development models designed elsewhere.
The fourth industrial revolution (4IR) now opens a dangerous new contest. Technology can no longer remain sealed inside the old imperial centres. Knowledge travels at speed. Skills move across borders. Production chains shift. China has broken many Western monopolies in electric vehicles, solar technology, batteries, robotics, telecommunications and industrial scaling.
Russia retains scientific, military, nuclear and energy capacity that Western power cannot wish away. Africa holds the minerals, youth, land, energy potential, data future and markets that will shape the next stage of global development.
The unipolar order understands this. It also understands that South Africa carries technical and moral weight. South Africa sits at the junction of strategic minerals, BRICS cooperation, nuclear debate, logistics, finance, African diplomacy, legal contestation and anti-colonial memory.
It has taken positions on Palestine, global justice and multipolarity that irritate the old masters. It has refused full obedience. That refusal explains much of the pressure now directed at it.
In the digital era, data has become the new oil. Those who command data command behaviour, markets, political imagination and public memory. Child safety and counter-terror language now help corporations and governments enter private digital life while restricting what ordinary people can see, say and organise.
Global oligarchs own platforms, satellites, payment systems, cloud infrastructure, media networks and artificial intelligence tools. They use these systems to engineer public opinion and culture.
The “white genocide” narrative works inside this wider machinery. It racialises South Africa’s internal contradictions for foreign consumption. It turns a country struggling with the unresolved consequences of colonialism and apartheid into a supposed persecutor of whites. It erases land theft, labour exploitation, racial capitalism and the real suffering of the African majority. It invites external intervention and commercial leverage through racial fear.
The technology economy gives the propaganda greater urgency. The industries driving 4IR now face fierce competition from the East, particularly China. Electric vehicles, solar panels, batteries, robotics, telecommunications, artificial intelligence and space-based communication systems no longer belong to a single Western corporate imagination.
China has gained major ground in electric vehicles, solar technology, batteries and industrial robotics and it continues to train technical talent at a scale the West cannot easily match.
The West has tried to slow China by limiting access to advanced microchips. That tactic has failed to stop China’s development path. Western hegemony now confronts the reality it spent centuries preventing: serious competition on technology, production, infrastructure and price. The old order cannot rely on monopoly forever and it cannot compete honestly while carrying the weight of its own parasitic habits.
The old method returns when open competition fails. Deny rivals access to raw materials. Block their markets. Capture African policy. Demonise governments that seek sovereign partnerships. Turn development choices into security threats.
Use racial fear to split potential alliances. Present Black majority rule as danger. Present Western-backed capital as civilisation. Present Russia, China and independent African states as threats to global order.
The “white genocide” lie therefore performs a strategic function. It does not need truth to operate. It only needs circulation, repetition and emotional force. It gives foreign actors a moral excuse to interfere in South Africa’s domestic debates.
It gives corporate power a racial language through which to oppose transformation. It gives anti-African forces a victim script while they defend inherited privilege, mineral control, land ownership and geopolitical obedience.
This propaganda also recruits ordinary white fear into elite commercial interests. Western oligarchs show no loyalty to ordinary white workers, pensioners, farmers or citizens. They use racial anxiety as political fuel while their own systems impoverish the same populations they claim to defend. Western governments redirect public resources, military budgets, diplomatic energy and national security systems towards the interests of a tiny corporate class.
Ordinary people in the West face debt, surveillance, deindustrialisation, housing crises, declining services and political manipulation while their rulers spend fortunes protecting corporate empires abroad.
The betrayal has become global. The elite shows loyalty to no race, nation, religion, law or ecology. It uses each when useful and discards each when profit requires it. It speaks of democracy while funding destabilisation. It speaks of rights while arming destruction. It speaks of safety while building surveillance systems. It speaks of development while blocking sovereign industrialisation across the Global South.
South Africa’s moral and technical high ground irritates the unipolar programme because it exposes the fraud. A country with South Africa’s history, mineral base, legal voice, scientific capacity, BRICS role and anti-colonial memory has every right to pursue industrial sovereignty, technological cooperation and strategic partnerships beyond Western permission.
Africa has already paid for three industrial revolutions without equity. It cannot enter the fourth as a quarry, a data mine, a cheap labour pool and a moral punching bag.
The task now requires clarity. South Africa must reject the “white genocide” lie as propaganda. It must also expose the commercial and geopolitical interests behind it. Africa’s development cannot remain hostage to colonial fear, oligarchic panic or corporate rivalry.
The continent must claim its resources, data, minerals, knowledge systems, ports, labour and industrial future as sovereign assets. The fourth industrial revolution will repeat the violence of the first three unless Africa refuses the old role assigned to it.
That refusal begins with naming the lie, naming the interests behind it and refusing to apologise for sovereign development. South Africa’s cooperation with Russia, China and the broader multipolar world threatens the unipolar programme because it offers Africa choices.
Those choices carry the possibility of industrial dignity. That possibility terrifies those who built their wealth on Africa’s exclusion.
Moeketsi Mokotong is a manufacturer with specific focus on fabrics and corporate regalia. He also serves as the treasurer general for the National Industrial Chamber.