‘IMAGINE THERE ARE NO WHITES‘

In March 2016, a young white academic and colleague of mine, Terblanche Delport, sparked outrage at a Johannesburg conference at the University of the Witwatersrand. As part of an imagined demise of structures of white privilege, Delport called on white people in South Africa ‘to commit suicide as an ethical act’. Or, as was reported by the PRAAG (Pro-Afrikaans Action Group) website, ‘A lecturer in philosophy yesterday said at a radical anti-white, anti-Afrikaner conference at the University of the Witwatersrand that “whites should die”.’ Here is perhaps the most controversial part of his written paper:

Provocative as Delport's statements were, it seems clear from reading this extract that his primary target was white privilege, that is, white culture within South Africa as a structure of domination – what many critics today refer to as ‘whiteness’ (Ahmed 2007; Ngo 2017; Yancy 2012). Delport was, of course, not alone in offering such a speculative picturing of white demise, as the titles of two recent books – Ferial Haffajee's What If There Were No Whites in South Africa? (2015) and Nicky Falkof 's The End of Whiteness (2016) – make clear. Nonetheless, as quickly became apparent, his remarks touched a nerve. SA-News.com announced that Delport had ‘publicly called for the genocide of White South Africans’ and lamented how unfortunate it was that he had ‘not been accused of hate speech’.