TIES THAT BIND: The pipeline between US white supremacists and the SA right

In February 2012, a small group of white supremacists climbed off a charter bus in Washington and set off towards the US Capitol. All but one were men, wearing neat shirts and ties. The Anti-Defamation League reported that they had been given instructions in advance on how to dress – no Ku Klux Klan robes, no Nazi uniforms, all racist tattoos to be covered – because they were posing for the day as civil rights activists.

At the Capitol, they unfurled a banner reading “STOP WHITE GENOCIDE IN SOUTH AFRICA”.

Standing between two men holding the banner was the group’s only woman, about 70 years old and wearing what Americans might have taken as a somewhat severe-looking khaki shirt. In reality it was a uniform stripped of its original insignia, which consisted of three interlocking red number 7s radiating from a central point: the symbol of the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB). She always wore it on occasions like this.

The woman’s name was Monica Huggett, and she was a long way from her birthplace of Kempton Park. Her story, virtually unknown these days in South Africa but painstakingly reconstructed last year by US journalist Molly Conger for the podcast Weird Little Guys, is so extraordinary that it reads at times like political satire.

Some 14 years before Ernst Roets’s Lex Libertas would set up a farm murder protest in almost exactly the same spot, Huggett had mobilised small-scale demonstrations at this and 12 other sites across the US under the umbrella of a campaign called the South Africa Project.

Since the 1970s, Huggett had been working to build relations between white nationalists in South Africa and the US: a network that evidence suggests current farm murder activists are still tapping into.

The woman who linked the KKK and the AWB

Huggett, the daughter of a past Kempton Park mayor, first appears in the historical record in 1980 as part of the Wit Kommando, a tiny pro-apartheid terrorist group whose targets included think-tanks and university academics associated with promoting racial integration.

When its members were arrested, police found an arsenal including plastic explosives, hand grenades, landmines, rifles, pistols, a machine gun and thousands of rounds of ammunition. Huggett turned state witness, and in her testimony explicitly stated her transnational affiliations.

Huggett told the court that she was a member of both the Wit Kommando and the US Ku Klux Klan, and had obtained bomb-­making literature from her Klan contacts. “I was opposed to racial integration,” Huggett told the court. “And I still am.”

By 1980, in other words, the exchange between the US and South African white right was already more than ideological admiration, with information and practical material moving across the Atlantic.

After her 1980 arrest, podcaster Conger noted that Huggett disappeared from records until more than a decade later. Daily Maverick could also find no trace of her activities during this period. But she resurfaced in the 1990s, while South Africa approached majority rule, as a loyal soldier of Eugene Terre’blanche’s AWB: highly un­usual for a woman in the intensely patriarchal world of organised white extremism. Afrikaner nationalist writer Adriaan Snyman would later describe her as the only woman to have served prison time for her involvement in the AWB.

Huggett placed advertisements in European fascist magazines to recruit mercenaries to assist the AWB in violent resistance to the transition to democracy. On their arrival in South Africa, Huggett collected the men from the airport and housed them at her home until they were given their AWB assignments.

But in March 1994, the operation began coming apart after a shootout with police in which German mercenary Thomas Kunz was killed. Huggett was caught red-handed with a stockpile of weapons. The amount of time she spent in prison, if any, is unclear – but shortly after South Africa’s first black president entered office, Huggett took off for the US.

Despite the geographical distance between Kempton Park and Louisiana, where she settled, her ideological journey appears to have involved remarkably little culture shock. Huggett found love with Jim Stone, a former staff member of erstwhile Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke, and quickly established herself as an indispensable member of the thriving Louisiana white supremacist scene.

By 2011, Huggett was addressing the ­Aryan Nations World Congress on the alleged “white genocide” in South Africa in her AWB uniform. The next year she helped launch the South Africa Project, which tried to draw national attention to the plight of white South Africans.

The Anti-Defamation League reported at the time that participants represented all five major strands of organised US white supremacy, including neo-Nazis, racist skinheads, traditional white supremacists, Christian Identity adherents and racist prison gangs.

Despite the perils Huggett apparently believed white South Africans faced, she returned to live in Kempton Park after the death of her American husband in 2012.

There she ran a charity called the Living Waters Foundation, notorious for providing assistance and food parcels only to whites. The foundation’s last Facebook post was in 2021, but there are hints that Huggett, who would now be in her mid-80s, is still alive: Conger found online comments seemingly posted by Huggett as late as 2025. An email from Daily Maverick to Huggett this week requesting an interview went unanswered.

Her standing on the extreme right has endured. In 2018, the leader of far-right local group the Suidlanders, Simon Roche, was asked on a US neo-Nazi podcast who people should support in South Africa if they did not trust his own organisation.

He recommended Huggett, describing her as a “very distinguished, decent lady who has fought for white nationalism”. Then he added: “She’s probably a bit too right-wing for me.”

Why South Africa matters to the white right

There was a good reason Huggett chose to focus her US campaign targeting South Africa on crime. Research shows that one of the most enduring themes in US white supremacist propaganda for centuries has been the idea that whites are disproportionately the victims of murder by black people, that these attacks are always motivated only by racial hatred, and that the media conspires to conceal the real scale of the crisis.

Lex Libertas’s online database of farm murder victims, though carefully including some black names in records for recent years, has US echoes: US white supremacist website New Nation, described by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2018 as “the first website devoted entirely to the issue of black-on-white crime”, records often misleading accounts of every US criminal case featuring black suspects and white victims. In 2017, the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens erected what it called a “memorial wall” to white victims of black criminals whose deaths had supposedly gone “unnoticed by the national media”.

Just one problem for white supremacists: the available US crime data does not remotely establish an epidemic of black-on-white homicide as plausible, with FBI and Department of Justice figures showing that more than 80% of white murder victims are killed by whites.

Enter South Africa, where members of one particular demographic subset – white farmers – are indeed crime victims, often at the hands of black perpetrators, to an extent that provides some argumentative meat if given a sufficiently selective framing.

The plight of Afrikaans farmers crops up reliably in far-right propaganda internationally as a cautionary tale of what happens in a country when white population numbers fall below a critical threshold.

Daily Maverick’s research shows that Norwegian neo-Nazi Anders Breivik, who killed 77 people in his 2011 attacks, referenced South Africa at least 44 times in his manifesto for this reason, lamenting “the diabolical way blacks are persecuting whites and massacring the Boers”.

Rise of respectable white nationalists

In 2018, US white supremacist group Identity Evropa staged a farm murder demonstration outside South Africa’s embassy in Washington with obvious similarities to the Lex Libertas event eight years later, when 3,000 white crosses were displayed in the city.

Identity Evropa members draped a “Kill the farmer, kill the Boer” banner on the Nelson Mandela statue, posed as dead bodies and placed 50 white crosses decorated with South African flags on the lawn.

Identity Evropa was by that stage one of the most notorious groups in the US, having helped organise the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville and having been credited with popularising the slogan “You will not replace us”.

In 2019, the group’s leader, Patrick Casey, tried to rebrand Identity Evropa as the more neutral-sounding American Identity Movement, giving explicit instructions to members that they needed to launder their image to gain access to politicians and media.

This is a trend among white nationalist groups observed since at least 2016, when the Anti-Defamation League described the rise of “clean-cut, besuited” neo-Nazis. The goal, wrote the league, is to “bring white supremacist ideology into mainstream conservatism – to make an ideology of hatred more acceptable to ‘normies’, the alt-right’s term for non-extremist white people”.

If accused of being racist, this new breed of white nationalists is more likely to sue than to agree. Belgian far-right leader Tom van Grieken initiated legal action against another Belgian politician in 2024 in response to being accused of racism – a tactic that brings to mind AfriForum and Roets’s habit of laying complaints against any media outlet that suggests they endorse the myth of “white genocide”. Van Grieken was one of the main speakers at Lex Libertas’s February 2026 Pretoria conference.

The wording on the Lex Libertas website is so conspicuously bland that it is almost impossible to tell what, if anything, the group stands for: it refers repeatedly to building “a viable political dispensation for the communities of South Africa” with almost no elaboration.

Yet the website’s wording elsewhere contains subtle dog-whistles possibly aimed at a very particular audience. In the FAQ section, the question “What is Lex Libertas’ view of the past?” is impossible to interpret in a South African context as referring to anything other than apartheid. “Lex Libertas views the past as a source of wisdom, not a destination,” the site records.

Roets’s slip is showing elsewhere in the company he and his associates keep. In March 2025, he and Orania CEO Joost Strydom gave a lengthy interview in New York to Cyan Quinn of the White Papers Policy Institute, another innocuous-sounding outfit that, in reality, is a white nationalist group seized with the question of how to prevent white “replacement”.

This year, Roets travelled to CPAC Hungary, a gathering of global far-right leaders he has attended annually for the past few years. There he would have listened to the likes of Dutch provocateur Eva Vlaardingerbroek, who reportedly claimed at the conference that Europe, too, was experiencing “genocide” of the white population and called for ethnic cleansing of European countries.

Roets’s public language is notably more careful than Vlaardingerbroek’s. But the political ecosystem in which Lex Libertas is choosing to operate is not difficult to identify.

Nor is South Africa a newcomer to it. The links between this country’s white right and its US counterparts stretch back decades, with Monica Huggett a human conduit for this transnational exchange.

But the traffic also runs the other way. In 1987, Leo Brent Bozell III, then president of the National Conservative Political Action Committee, wrote that his organisation was “proud to become a member” of the Coalition Against ANC Terrorism, established to oppose then US Secretary of State George Shultz meeting ANC president Oliver Tambo. Almost 40 years later, Bozell is the US ambassador to South Africa.

If Huggett carried the grievances of South Africa’s white right into the US, Bozell offers an extraordinary example of the connection running in reverse. DM

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