And the facts bear this view out: there has never been anything close to an attempted genocide of white South Africans.

Trump and his supporters often claim that white South African farmers are being murdered in their thousands – but statistics provided by AfriForum and the Transvaal Agricultural Union (both groups sympathetic to white farmers) show that about 60 farmers, across all races, are killed every year. This is a country that sees 19,000 murders annually.

Anecdotal evidence points to the same conclusion.

Grootes was one of “about five whites” in the audience the very first time Malema sang the song in public in 2010: “When he sang it, I didn’t notice. It wasn’t in English, and no one around me thought it was a huge event at the time … as a whitey, with an Afrikaans-sounding surname, I did not feel threatened, harassed, scared … I didn’t get the feeling that the people around me were being incited to shoot me.”

Both Malema and AfriForum – the Afrikaner rights group which recently sent a delegation to the Trump White House to seek his support against South African government policies – have used the song as a rallying point for their (diametrically opposed) agendas.

That puts the more moderate ANC in a difficult situation. “Ramaphosa wouldn’t sing the song himself,” said Simpson. “But he hasn’t denounced it either, and his silence means something.”