How US Culture Shapes South Africa: Insights from Kirk's Demagoguery

Rebecca Davis’s article in the Daily Maverick (“Charlie Kirk may have fans in SA — but his views are inconsequential here,” September 14, 2025) insists that South Africa is somehow insulated from US cultural wars. She argues that our struggles are too concrete, too visceral, too far removed from the ideological battlegrounds of abortion, gender, or “wokeness” that animate the American right and left. This argument is evasive and self-serving. It diverts attention from the ways in which US culture already saturates South Africa, and from the role that her own publication plays in importing it.

South Africa already lives inside the American cultural framework. Evangelical Christianity has reshaped our religious and social terrain with doctrines lifted straight from the US. Prosperity gospel, the subjugation of women, anti-abortion rhetoric, and hostility toward LGBTQ+ communities are articulated in South African pulpits every week. These positions did not emerge organically.

They are disseminated through networks financed and ideologically supported by American churches, missionary organisations, and conservative think tanks. The very ideas that Charlie Kirk spread across US campuses and podcasts find echoes here, preached every Sunday from South African pulpits. His assassination at a Utah campus event reverberated across the globe, producing symbolic gestures even in Orania and AfriForum Youth’s wreath-laying at the US embassy. Davis mocks these gestures as absurd, yet they demonstrate that American ideological conflicts already hold symbolic weight here.

The same pattern is evident in the sphere of liberal discourse. Donor-funded media and civil society platforms recycle the ideological vocabulary of Washington and Brussels. Where Open Society Foundations live, the lexicon of American liberalism becomes naturalised. Gates Foundation investments extend beyond health into social ideation, shaping the frameworks through which issues are discussed.

The National Endowment for Democracy, alongside USAID, has spent decades funding civil society in South Africa, each with explicit mandates to export American political culture. Even when the Trump administration cut USAID programmes, the machinery of ideological export continued through other channels. These funders are active architects of ideological colonisation. They decide what language circulates, which frameworks become legitimate, and which political positions are treated as “extreme” or “reasonable.”

The Daily Maverick is part of this ecosystem. Its reliance on European and American donor networks positions it firmly inside the Washington consensus. The article Davis has written reads less like a reflection on Charlie Kirk and more like a shield raised against this accusation. By mocking Orania and AfriForum for honouring Kirk, she casts the influence of US right-wing politics as fringe and ridiculous. What she avoids is any recognition that the Daily Maverick itself is steeped in the opposite pole of the same American war. Its pages reproduce the categories of US liberal media: woke versus conservative, moderate versus extremist, populist versus democratic. These binaries have no African origin. They are imported and enforced by donor capital.

Davis attempts to reinforce her case with internet statistics, emphasising that only 40% of South Africans use social media. The argument misleads. Influence is not determined by how many people are online. Influence is determined by who sets the framework of debate. Elites in NGOs, universities, and media spaces adopt the American lexicon because they are paid to. Once adopted, it frames how the entire country is spoken about. This is how hegemony works. A minority, backed by donor money, defines what counts as common sense.

The saturation goes beyond NGOs and print media. Netflix commissions South African filmmakers to make content presented as “local storytelling” while embedding American ideological agendas about gender, race, and liberal democracy. US foreign policy dominates nightly news bulletins, with South African audiences fed a steady diet of Washington’s framing of global geopolitics. The SABC, once tasked with public interest broadcasting, now echoes the same hegemonic talking points as Daily Maverick — aligning with Western foreign policy positions on Russia, Palestine, and global security while silencing divergent perspectives. Davis’s claim that culture wars are irrelevant collapses under the weight of this cultural infrastructure.

She also draws a false line between South Africa’s “real wars” — pit toilets, witch killings, child pregnancies — and what she dismisses as American inventions. This mirrors apartheid-era rhetoric, when liberation politics was dismissed as irrelevant compared to “real” poverty. Such framing delegitimises ideological struggle by placing it in opposition to material deprivation, as though the two do not coexist. Yet ideological imports continue to shape how material struggles are interpreted and acted upon. Evangelical sermons and donor-funded NGOs already frame South African issues in imported American categories. The very terms of Davis’s article — “woke,” “culture wars,” “conservatives” and “extremists” — testify to that saturation.

On one side, AfriForum and Orania echo the US right and repeat Charlie Kirk’s rhetoric almost word for word. On the other, the Daily Maverick and its donor networks echo the US liberal establishment. Both are reproductions of American ideological conflicts, both entrenched in South African discourse, both used to corral public debate into foreign categories. Both imports are dangerous, particularly to Black epistemology, sovereignty and security.

The US right aims to entrench hierarchy, erase Black history, and preserve racial and patriarchal order through religious dogma. The US liberal model, while presented in progressive language, aims to neutralise radical Black thought, confining it within donor-approved categories that blunt revolutionary potential. Together, they function as complementary strategies of containment — one overtly repressive, the other deceptively inclusive — each ensuring that genuine African frameworks of liberation remain subordinated.

So let me reiterate, because this cannot be overstated: Davis’s piece functions less as an argument about Charlie Kirk than as a manoeuvre to absolve Daily Maverick from its entanglement in a wider machinery of US cultural domination. Kirk is only the symbol that exposes the extent of the saturation. The real issue is how donor-funded media, evangelical networks, US foreign policy, and cultural industries embed Washington’s worldview into South African life, while insisting all the while that these culture wars do not matter here.

* Gillian Schutte is a South African writer, filmmaker, poet, and uncompromising social justice activist. Founder of Media for Justice and co-owner of handHeld Films, she is recognised for hard-hitting documentaries and incisive opinion pieces that dismantle whiteness, neoliberal capitalism, and imperial power.

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.