AfriForum’s reported plan to take anti-apartheid Struggle activists to court for acts of terror is more than a legal exercise, it is a worrying act of historical revisionism.
It comes as South Africa continues to fail in pursuing justice for apartheid-era crimes. Decades after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) recommended prosecutions, cases like the Cradock Four and Steve Biko’s death remain unresolved. Successive post-1994 government administrations have shown little appetite to hold perpetrators accountable, while the National Prosecuting Authority has repeatedly stalled despite court pressure to act.
That failure has created fertile ground for groups such as AfriForum, which present themselves as defenders of minority rights but often advance narratives sympathetic to the apartheid order. By turning to the courts to target anti-apartheid activists, AfriForum seeks to blur the moral clarity that defined the liberation struggle, recasting perpetrators as victims and freedom fighters as aggressors.
This development exposes a deeper weakness in the democratic state. South Africa has yet to enact laws that criminalise racist acts or outlaw apartheid denialism, as other societies have done to protect the integrity of historical truth. In the absence of such legislation, right-wing revisionists feel emboldened to challenge the moral foundations of the post-apartheid order.
Germany outlawed Holocaust denial. Rwanda criminalised genocide denial which left thousands of the Tutsi people dead. The penalties for both can resut in a jail sentence.
South Africa, by contrast, allows those who benefited from apartheid to distort its history in the name of “reconciliation” or “minority rights.”
AfriForum’s legal offensive must therefore be seen not as a genuine pursuit of justice, but as part of a growing attempt to normalise apartheid nostalgia.
The ANC-led government of national unity's silence in the face of this challenge would amount to complicity. A democracy that forgets why it was born risks losing the very soul that made it worth fighting for.