The Ahmed Kathrada Foundation (AKF) has noted the latest attempt by professional grievance‑peddler, Willem Petzer, to cause panic and fear with an intellectually bankrupt smear campaign. His so‑called “exposé” about the AKF is nothing more than an online grift, designed to incite fear and extract donations from a base fed on a diet of manufactured panic.
The timing of this disinformation, just days before Anti‑Racism Week 2026 (14–21 March), is as transparent as it is desperate. By recycling and distorting, seven-year-old video and framing it as a current “genocidal” threat, Petzer seeks to manufacture a crisis that serves as a distraction from real social progress. This is the hallmark of a bad-faith actor who is using disinformation to sabotage necessary conversations about social cohesion in favour of click-driven outrage.
In his video, Petzer claims that the AKF has been “mandated” to indoctrinate South African schoolchildren through anti‑racism classes and that the organisation promotes killing white people as a solution to racism. Every part of these statements is false. The Foundation is an independent civil society body, not an arm of the state, and its school programmes are voluntary, run with the consent of individual schools, and not funded by the government. Turning that into a horror story about compulsory brainwashing is pure fear‑mongering aimed at parents who are already anxious about their kids’ future.
The grift also relies on “MAGA-lite” script that is as unoriginal as it is foreign to our context. He attempts to revive 1950s “Red Scare” rhetoric by attacking Ahmed Kathrada’s history, reaching back over 60 years to claim Kathy was arrested with “many tons of explosives.” It is a testament to the Foundation’s integrity that Petzer has to dig through six decades of history to find a “threat,” because he cannot find a single shred of actual violence or a call-to violence in the Foundation’s 21st-century record.
Petzer’s central “gotcha” rests on a deliberately edited snippet of remarks by Daniel Friedman during a 2019 panel on right‑wing racism, held as part of Anti‑Racism Week. The full discussion, which is publicly available, is clearly about analysing the global rise of far‑right racism after the Christchurch Mosque attack, not plotting some genocidal campaign against white South Africans. Petzer strips that context, repackages satire as literal intent, and then markets it as proof of a plot.
We reject this politics of division. There is overwhelming evidence that racism continues to harm learners in South African schools, which is precisely why a sustained, principled anti‑racism effort is needed.
Anti‑Racism Week exists to keep racism on the national agenda and to encourage constructive, humane conversations about how to build a non‑racial, constitutional democracy. That work is the opposite of the hatred and violence that Petzer tries to project onto the Foundation.
Thus, we encourage not only schools, but also workplaces, places of worship, community organisations, and public institutions to actively participate in Anti‑Racism Week by hosting discussions, workshops, and campaigns that affirm our shared humanity. South Africa cannot afford imported culture‑war theatrics designed to turn neighbours into enemies; we choose a society that confronts racism honestly and rejects those who profit from stoking division and fear.
WATCH THE FULL, UNEDITED CLIP HERE
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Issued by the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation
For media inquiries, please contact:
Anele Gcwabe
Communications Manager
Ahmed Kathrada Foundation
083-278-8832
anele@kathradafoundation.org
