Africa in the Shadow of the Global Far-Right

Introduction

Donald Trump recently made headlines by accusing the South African government on his very own platform ‘Truth Social’ of ‘confiscating land, and treating certain classes of people VERY BADLY’. The South African government had passed a new Land Expropriation Act in early 2024, and Trump smelled something he could capitalize on. Elon Musk, his billionaire enforcer played a similar tune on his X-platform, where he pushed the far-right narrative of a white genocide happening in the country of his birth, whose prime victims were Afrikaner farmers. 

The prominent white supremacist Afrikaner group AfriForum felt heard, heralding Trump as their saviour, albeit few of them would eventually be willing to accept his offer to leave their still relatively privileged lives in South Africa to start a new life in Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) America. Trump’s acknowledgement of their plight was the product of years of ideological work around the notion of white genocide. Many far-right groups around the globe, including Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), have started to embrace this framing, and the category reverberates beyond the South African case, as, for instance, the manifesto of the Christchurch terrorist shows, who killed 49 people at a New Zealand mosque in 2019 (another example would be the Norway terrorist attacks by Anders Breivik or the 2022 Buffalo shooting in the US). It was not the first time that Trump’s eyes were on South African. Back in 2018, he tweeted that he had ‘asked Secretary of State @SecPompeo to closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large-scale killing of farmers’. This pronouncement was, basically, the retweet of a message of far-right anchor-man Tucker Carlson. The back-then Fox News personality hosted an AfriForum delegation which was on a US tour to forge alliances with conservatives around their plight. Led by Kallie Kriel and Ernst Roest, the group portrayed Afrikaners as victims of anti-white racism, land expropriation, and genocidal violence. Of course, Trump did not really care about white Afrikaners, but weaponized the case for his own ideological purposes: certainly, the loss of privilege and property, engineered through Black majority rule, might strike a nerve with his base around the globe.

While this snippet alone should prompt us to further explore the entanglements between the politics of the far-right and what goes on in Africa, the risk is that this conjuncture is read in too narrow terms from an African perspective. One could imagine a view from Africa that understands the rising political tensions and social polarization in Europe and North America, on which the rise of Trump’s MAGA Republicans, Germany’s AfD, or Meloni’s Fratelli d'Italia built, as internal issues of other countries; white men’s issues that they need to solve amongst themselves. Why fight another man’s war? Africans had done it earlier, by force, with no rewards or recognition. This, of course, might be contrasted with a position that flags the very transnational nature of the rise of the far-right, connecting countries as different as the US, Brazil, Germany, Hungary, Argentina, India, and South Africa (and other African countries), too. Another view might be that of a geopolitical strategist, who understands the rise of the far-right, particularly the revanchist second term of Donald Trump and his willingness to completely turn both domestic and international orders upside down, as marking the beginning of a new era African leaders need to reckon with. In this reconstituting world order, Africa needs to assert its place; it needs to rethink everything – from aid to trade, from global partnerships to domestic structural transformation. 

A third view, the one embraced here, adopts a different angle. This one scrutinizes the ideological foundations of the far-right; it excavates why Africa and elements of far-right thinking are not mutually exclusive; it probes why ‘Africa’ as both continent and category is far from irrelevant to the global far-right. I am not the first one to make this call (see here, here, and particularly the ‘World of the Right project’ here), but in the following, I would like to make four points currently absent in the emerging debate on Africa and the (global) far-right. (I will leave aside the obvious fact that ‘Africa’ also plays the role of a migration bogeyman mobilized to galvanise popular support against immigration, as parties such as Germany’s AfD or Italy’s Lega or Fratelli d’Italia have shown time and again). 

Africa’s Entanglement with the Global Far Right

The first, more uncomfortable aspect of the Africa-far-right entanglement is one of appeal. It needs to the emphasized that the global far-right is not a homogeneous block as, for instance, we can observe notable differences regarding what they want to do with the nation-state (reaching from destroying it to reinforcing it). Still, certain ingredients of the far-right ideological apparatus have developed a transversal power, and find support even among unlikely social groups (unlikely given the role white supremacy plays in far-right thought): the far-right’s distrust of globalization and liberal universalism, their openly patriarchal-authoritarian leaning and support for other types of rigid social hierarchies/inequalities, their stance on sexual reproductive rights and LGBTQ issues, their dissent for democratic institutions and independent bureaucracies, as well as certain far-right groups’ ideological pursuit of a world of relatively homogeneous nation-states organized around a dominant culture may resonate with political actors and populations on the continent and in other places in the Global South. The latter point, for instance, explains why one could easily discuss the Hindu-nationalist and anti-Muslim politics of Indian Prime Minister Modi as bearing a strong far-right imprint, as many of these movements ‘believe that social hierarchies are natural, even ordained by God (or gods)’. In a similar vein, militant and revanchist anti-LGBTQ stances unite politicians and activists in Brazil, Uganda, Kenya, and Ghana with far-right politics in the US. The crusading activities of evangelical churches are, without a doubt, the connective tissue between these distant geographies.

Furthermore, the libertarian strand that has come to define far-right politics in the US and elsewhere might also appeal to the continent’s youths and entrepreneurs socialized into a world where ‘Africapitalism’, start-ups, and business-people as wealth creators have become normalized as tropes. Take the example of the ‘radical right megastar’ Jordan Peterson and his YouTube conversation with Senegalese entrepreneur and Atlas Network member Magatte Wade. While one would think the former University of Toronto psychology professor only caters to some ‘white rationality now bros’ who celebrate him as a voice of sanity in a world struck by ‘wokeness’, the omniscient psychologist tackling everything from male depression to climate science seems to have gathered a sizeable following in Black and Brown circles around the globe. Peterson and Wade’s talk is very much united in their rants against ‘collectivism’ and ‘victimhood’, with both of them advancing a narrow definition of freedom – the freedom of capital. Accordingly, Africa’s problems are not rooted in a world organized around white supremacy, unfair trade relations, or other post-colonial dependencies. Rather, the historical legacies of socialist planning, a stifling bureaucracy, and public mismanagement constraining Africans as naturally born entrepreneurs are to be blamed – a claim that thinkers such as Olumayowa Okediran or the late Ghanaian economist George Ayittey had made before. On the other end of the libertarian spectrum, we find characters such as social media personality Andrew Tate, the man who prides himself in misogyny and shameless displays of wealth. With his alpha-male performativity, Tate reaches a fair number of young men in Africa and elsewhere in the Global South. But young African men don’t have to reach beyond the continent to get their dose of Tate. Kenya’s Eric Amunga (and probably many others) now serve as an alternative closer to home. Libertarianism has engaged in further twists, and it remains to be seen how the ‘dark enlightenment’ version of it now very much shaping the actions of ‘tech bros’ in or close to the US government, plays out in other geographies. 

The second aspect of the Africa-far-right entanglement is one of nostalgic-utopian desire. It is laden with anti-Black racism and sentiments and thus symbolizes the more open white supremacist face of the far-right hopefully most people on the continent would have a problem with. Already, during Trump’s first term, Rhodesia became the new Valhalla of some white supremacists, who did not withhold that for them, struggles in MAGA America and the country now known as Zimbabwe were connected (‘Make Zimbabwe Rhodesia Again’). As an ethno-nationalist state founded on the rule of ‘rational’, heterosexual, white men, it seems to have captured the imagination of some on the far-right as a past utopia to strive for. In these circles, the racist Rhodesian government of Ian Smith is not only celebrated for the minority-rule state it established (9 percent of the population dictated what the rest does), but also because it is perceived to have excelled in autarky and resilience after it broke with Britain when it declared unilateral independence in 1965. As shown in the beginning, South Africa has also captured the attention of the far-right and is the only African country where a sizable white-settler minority with far-right leanings exists. Independent Zimbabwe and contemporary South Africa are the inversions of what far-right white supremacists want. Land struggles in Zimbabwe certainly triggered more traditional reflexes among conservatives and the far-right as one key pillar of white supremacy in settler colonial contexts– private property rights – was attacked by Mugabe. The case of South Africa rather triggers contemporary far-right sentiments as its Black Economic Empowerment Policies can be effectively reframed as the ultimate DEI case. Thus, South Africa connects more directly to current ideological struggles around wokeness in the US and Europe. At this stage, it can only be speculated why apartheid Rhodesia trumps apartheid South Africa in the nostalgic utopian imaginary of certain far-right groups. One reason might be that, because its story is less well-known, its symbols can be used in public without being immediately recognizable and thus give its bearer an “insider status”. Another reason might be the nature of the Smith regime: it aligns very well with prepperist conceptions of the ‘last white man standing’, as the Rhodesian government not only fought Black liberation movements in and beyond its territory; it also defied the orders of the former colonial motherland, Great Britain, who had been ‘desperate to keep the Commonwealth together (…) and was forced to make concessions to African members as these demanded a hard stance on Rhodesia’s apartheid regime. In the eyes of white supremacists familiar with the case, the political manoeuvres of the country that actually produced Rhodes are viewed as nothing but weakness. 

The third aspect of the Africa-far-right entanglement is an aspect I would call the ‘false-friend syndrome’ – a version of the well-known “the enemy of my enemy is my friend problem”. Sahel states like Mali and Burkina Faso have seen military coups carried by strong popular sentiments against Françafrique, with Russia filling the void as a purportedly friendly and anti-colonial geopolitical actor. Some may prematurely celebrate these alliances as a break away from Euro-Atlantic coloniality – a desire that needs to be taken seriously, but might quickly run into a new dead end. Some time ago, decolonial theorist Walter Mignolo made headlines as he wrote the endorsement for the book India, that Is Bharat, by Saj Deepak (later retracted). Deepak has been a key ideological source for Modi’s Hindutva (Hindu nationalism), but his engagement with de/coloniality must have sent out tempting signals. Aleksandr Dugin, the Russian politician and philosopher whose ideological thinking on great and culturally independent civilizations is an important intellectual inspiration for the far-right, has recently embraced Modi for his war on the colonial mind-set and against ‘Western controlled narratives’. Equally, Ramón Grosfoguel has been criticized in radical feminist circles for side-lining the deeply patriarchal nature of the Iranian regime, most recently symbolized in the brutal killing of Mahsa Amini at the hands of the Iranian morality police, in his support of Iran as an anti-imperialist force. I am deeply inclined to decolonial thought myself, and both thinkers have produced important work, but I find these alliances quite problematic. They can only work seamlessly if one does not adopt a truly intersectional approach across the thinking-praxis spectrum (an important push back that feminist critics, from Latin America and elsewhere, have repeatedly launched against male theorists of de/coloniality). 

Now back to Africa. Russia has been a central force in BRICS, aiming for an alternative world order ‘in solidarity with the African demands to complete the process of decolonization’, as Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov put it some time ago. Over the past years, Russia has mastered the game of destabilizing Western countries’ political systems through the cyber warfare of fake-news spreading troll armies. As part of this, Russia has been key in aiding the rise and consolidation of the far-right in a variety of settings. President Putin has been supportive of the strongman politics that has come to characterize the rise of the far-right, particularly in the US – a support that has spawned an open and deeply revanchist form of white supremacy. In Germany, hundreds of ‘in the past everything was better’ Facebook sites have popped up over the last years. These platforms prey on the racist and nativist attitudes of parts of the German population, and usually imagine a white homogeneous, ‘colourless’ past that observers would cognitively contrast with a present marked by demographic diversity and immigration – the destructive effects of ‘globalism’. The sentiments stirred by these websites clearly benefit far-right and decidedly anti-Black parties such as the AfD, which has made great strides in reviving ethnic understandings of Germany that other parties have embraced, too.

If we consider Putin’s ideology very much driven by the ethno-nationalist thinking of Aleksandr Dugin, then Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could be read as an implementation of the latter’s ideas. Dugin has been arguing for many years for pushing back against the forces of Western liberalism and building a greater Eurasian civilization that is impenetrable to the globalism of NATO and Western liberalism. As already flagged earlier, this objective now extends to the African continent, where the France-friendly regimes in West Africa have been toppled through Russia-supported military coups, and the mercenary Wagner group fights wars across the continent for a range of African regimes. But how much of a friend is Russia? First, its support for outrightly racist and white supremacist forces in Europe and North America suggests that Africans should not trust them too much. Russia’s own ambitions of empire-making cast further doubt on the benevolence of its actions, whose fallout has already done great harm to Africans – be it as victims of a Ukraine War-induced food price crisis or as victims of the atrocities of the Wagner group that has been fighting wars in places as diverse as Mali, Sudan, Central African Republic, and Mozambique. The group itself is known to have far-right connections. And their atrocities bear the imprint of deeply racialized forms of ultra-violence inflicted upon Africans. The name Wagner should ring the alarm in the very first place: Founder Dmitry Utkin was an admirer of Hitler’s favourite composer, and his music makes the soundtrack for war, conquest, and totalitarian desires.

Finally, we have to reckon with the years of anti-Black violence in Russia. Few African leaders have acknowledged this problem, but these developments cast doubt on whether Black life is really cherished by Russian authorities. As the Moscow Times, an English-speaking Russian newspaper treated as a “foreign agent” since 2024, put it: ‘This image of Moscow as a friend of Africa clashes with the persistent issue of racism inside Russia, where pervasive everyday discrimination is often punctuated by extreme acts of violence such as Ndjelassili’s murder.’ (Ndejlassili was an African migrant in Russia who had been recently murdered). I spare you a fourth point, but one could at least ask why Tucker Carlson, a prominent voice against Black Lives Matter and an attacker of land redistribution efforts in South Africa, can equally style himself as a friend of Putin. Love for Black lives can’t be the bonding tissue.

For sure, the global far-right is not one homogenous block, as we can observe in the European context, where different parties seem to be split between a 

‘Westernist and Atlanticist extreme right, which is based on white supremacism and the West's indispensability to place itself at the helm of the world order, whose army is identified with NATO, on the other hand, an anti-American, Eurasianst, pro-Russian extreme right and that sees in the end of the American unipolar order an opportunity’. 

But one must see that anti-Blackness and deeply patriarchal views on power, gender, and politics are connecting tissues between these spheres.

The last aspect of the Africa-far-right entanglement I would like to mention is one of resource desires. While Russia, via the Wagner group, also follow these desires, the resource scramble for rare earths as part of the geopolitical AI race between the US and China deserves particular attention. While Trump’s first term was marked by some softened version of the ‘America First’ doctrine, his recent claims on the Panama Canal, the Gulf of Mexico, Greenland, and Canada suggest a more expansionist strategy in line with the original Monroe Doctrine. In order to secure access to infrastructures and rare resources that are key in geo-economics and geopolitical race with China, Trump is willing to violently carve out a greater America in which no other power should meddle. As Silicon Valley tech bros now have a direct link to the US government, most prominently embodied in the persons of Elon Musk and Peter Thiel asset J.D. Vance, and with Trump recently launching a new AI initiative (“Stargate”), one could expect that the new Trump administration might use more robust means to access the African riches needed to fuel a US-led AI revolution. After all, ‘[t]hese minerals don’t originate in Silicon Valley tech companies; they are extracted from holes dug in the earth, often by vulnerable workers in challenging conditions.’ Africa holds 30% of the minerals critical to future electronics and AI development, and Silicon Valley companies themselves have entered the scramble in more direct ways. Also, it is likely to be no coincidence that Rwanda felt empowered to use its proxy M23 to literally annex parts of the rare-earth rich Eastern DR Congo as it happened at a time when far-right forces in the US and Israel openly discussed about annexing other peoples’ territory.

So, what is to be done? 

The fight for a new world order has not only been a historically important objective of key political actors in Africa and elsewhere in the Global South; it also remains unfinished. As Euro-Atlantic hegemony is dissolving, African thinkers, social movements, and political leaders must chart a way forward that is deeply informed by an intersectional analysis of power, knowledge, and capital that understands the genesis of white supremacy, how it can come along in many forms (and colours), and what eventually impedes the quest for more relational, equal, inclusive, sustainable, and less violent and harmful modes of economy-, society- and environment-making. At a time when the global far-right seems to be overly successful in world-breaking and world-building, progressive forces on the continent need to imagine global futures that escape the spectres of coloniality, white supremacy, and toxic patriarchy. The ideas are there (see here, here, here, and here); we just need to embrace them. 

Professor Stefan Ouma is Chair of Economic Geography at the Department of Geography at the University of Bayreuth, Germany, where he also is the co-director of the Institute of African Studies and a PI in the Cluster of Excellence “Africa Multiple”. His scholarship has focussed on the political economy and ecology of global agri-food commodity chains, and the financialization of land and agriculture. More recently, he has delved into research on intersectional inequalities and associated ideologies, particularly how these transpire in the world of the tech-economy. He is currently a co-speaker in the BMBF-funded Racism Research Network (WinRa) and is a former member of the editorial collective of Antipode.