The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
14 Apr 2025
Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down with South African filmmaker, author, and activist Dr. Ernst Roets. They discuss the genetic and cultural hyper-diversity of Africa, the early settlement patterns of South Africa, the origin story of the Boers, how forgotten history breeds rhyming conflicts in the present, and the complex needle that must be threaded for shared prosperity. Dr. Ernst Roets is an Afrikaner activist, author and filmmaker from South Africa. He serves as Executive Director of the newly established Pioneer Initiative, which seeks to promote a more sustainable political dispensation for South Africa, based on the principles of decentralization and self-governance. Dr Roets is the leading expert on the topic of farm murders in South Africa. His book, Kill the Boer: Government Complicity in South Africa's Brutal Farm Murders is an international bestseller on Amazon. He is also the producer of several documentary films. He regularly appears in the media - both in South Africa and the international media - about issues relating to South Africa and he regularly speaks at international conferences, including CPAC and NatCon. He is a leading advocate for the protection of free speech and property rights in South Africa, and for farm murders to be regarded as a priority crime. This episode was filmed on March, 14th, 2025. | Links | For Dr. Ernst Roets: On X https://x.com/ernstroets?lang=en On YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@ErnstRoets Read “Kill the Boer: Government Complicity in South Africa's Brutal Farm Murders” https://a.co/d/cMWyuMH Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Full Episode
I mentioned this story about the vow that was made in 1838. And he went to negotiate with the Zulu king, King Dungan. They signed a treaty. The king said, we need to celebrate this, but leave your weapons outside. And so during the celebration, the Zulu king chanted, kill the wizards. And they slaughtered them. We need to retaliate. We need to attack back.
And so they had a command of about 300 to 400 people. They were completely surrounded by about 12,000. A man named Sadal Saliha, he was the religious leader. And he said, we need to make a vow to God. Some people say that's the origin story of our people.
Let's flip to the modern time. What was the relationship between the apartheid state per se and this notion of separate homelands?
The argument was that South Africa should be thought of as Europe. The single biggest problem in South Africa, it's the triangle of unemployment, poverty and inequality. Ironically, they've gotten to a point where they can only think about inequality.
It looks to me like the cost of innovation is inequality. Okay, now your book is entitled Kill the Boar. There's a reason for that. Hello, everybody. I've watched over a very long period of time the political and economic situation in South Africa both heat up and destabilize, and that's... taken somewhat of an accelerating turn in the last few years.
And because of that, I've become increasingly interested in delving more deeply into the history of South Africa to understand the context and then also the political situation on the ground in that country now. And I came across the work of Dr. Ernst Rutz, who wrote this book called Kill the Boer, this book, which was published in 2018. Now, he's also a filmmaker.
He made a film called Tainted Heroes, which is about the apartheid era. in 2016 and another one called Disrupted Land. And I hoped to talk to Dr. Roots about South Africa, about its history and about, well, about its current situation and about hopes and concerns for the future. And that's exactly what we did. And so...
The first thing I wanted to do was to delve a little bit into the history of the origin of South Africa, because there's a narrative in the West that the evil white Europeans came to a land dominated by black Africans and colonized it in their brutal and murderous fashion. And, well, any...
territorial dispute has its bloody edge, let's say, but the truth of the matter is that the settlement of South Africa is a hell of a lot more complex than that, and that the two primary racial groups that exist there today weren't the original inhabitants of the land, whether they're black or white, and so just knowing that is useful, and we spent the first
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