A South African equality Court has found Julius Malema, leader of the far-left Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), guilty of hate speech on Wednesday, August 27, over racially charged remarks he made in 2022.
At a political rally, Malema declared that no white man could overpower him and suggested that killing was an inevitable part of revolution. His comments sparked controversy and were deemed a direct incitement to violence.
This is not Malema’s first brush with hate speech charges. He was previously convicted for singing an apartheid-era struggle song with the lyrics “shoot the boer,” a phrase targeting South Africa’s minority Afrikaner farmers. That conviction was later overturned, but the repetition of inflammatory rhetoric has kept him at the centre of national debates about race, land ownership, and political expression.
Malema’s prominence extends beyond South Africa’s borders. In 2018, he featured in a video shown by then-U.S. President Donald Trump during a meeting with President Cyril Ramaphosa. The video was used to push unsubstantiated claims that the South African government was sanctioning attacks on white farmers to seize land. His latest conviction once again places him under scrutiny, intensifying concerns about race relations and political radicalism in the country.