Last week I watched two men lie to each other on television and call it diplomacy One an extrovert. One an introvert. Both masters of the half-truth, that peculiar political art form where you speak enough truth to avoid being called a liar whilst with holding enough to avoid being called honest.

In the Oval Office last week I watched two masters of spin cycle their syllables—Trump’s genocide spins hot, Ramaphosa’s transformation tumbles cold. Both agitators in this linguistic laundromat, scrubbing blood from etymology until only the ghost of meaning remains. The protest chant—“Kill the farmer, kill the Boer”—emerges from their rhetorical rinse cycle sanitised: Trump frames it as literal murder, Ramaphosa as metaphor for systemic dismantling.

I feel hollowed out by their words and their spectacle. Empty.

Not the good good empty that comes from intermittent fasting—the emptiness that comes after watching grown men play children's games with other people's lives. The deep burn that comes from realising that as an Afrikaner the pain of my people have been used to advance some hidden agenda of the most powerful leader in the Western world.

Trump waves footage of Congolese corpses and calls them white farmers. He insists, even after being corrected. Ramaphosa invokes the spirit of Mandela, that great teller of hard truths, even as the rainbow nation unravels thread by thread under his watch—defending land acquisition without compensation whilst 2.5 million hectares of state land gather bureaucratic dust. Neither is lying, exactly. Neither is telling the truth, exactly.

Two half-truths do not make one whole truth.They make one whole mess.

Here two world leaders of semantic bleaching performed their practiced political dance—language stripped bare, suspended between competing narratives until meaning seeped lifeless onto the floor. Both Trump and Ramaphosa washing words until they emerged colourless, powerless, severed from the weight of actual dying: people die not from words but from what words bleach away—the concrete realities of stolen land, emptied granaries, bullet-riddled backs.

Trump flicks through the photographs like a dealer shuffling cards—murdered, murdered, horrible. His fingers move quickly across images of violence, some not even from South Africa, some lifted from other continents, other conflicts. Who cares? Don't let facts get in the way of a good story. This is language as performance art, truth as raw material to be processed through the bleaching cycles of political theater.

Julius Malema sings "Kill the Boer" and the Constitutional Court says it's political metaphor, not hate speech. As an Afrikaner, I can tell you it doesn't feel metaphorical when you hear thousands of people call for blood to flow - “Brrrrrr pop pop. Shoot to kill!” The nuance is lost in the moment.

But Ramaphosa's measured deflections reveal equal mastery of the washing cycle. When pressed about "Kill the farmer, kill the Boer," he retreats behind semantic sanitisation: These words don't mean what they say. “Boer" means the system, not the man. In the Oval Office, "Boer" becomes a political weapon, a way to mobilise white fear and black anger simultaneously. The same word, bleached and re-stained, bleached and re-stained, until even the word doesn't know what it means anymore. The same syllables, laundered through different machines, emerge carrying opposite souls.

But I also know too that Malema's anger comes from somewhere real—from 73% of private farmland still being white-owned, from his grandmother dying landless, from promises broken faster than they were made.

But then Amanda Platt’s report show “kill the farmer, kill the boer” arriving unwashed at her door before she is attacked on her farm—still carrying their original stains, still reeking of literal intent. Suddenly the laundry instructions matter. Was this the "metaphorical resistance" setting or the "actual murder preparation" cycle? The washing machine doesn't discriminate; it just follows whatever program gets selected.

The beauty of industrial-grade semantic bleaching is its versatility. The same words can serve as both liberation poetry and documented murder soundtrack, depending entirely on which cycle you choose. It's like those miracle stain removers that promise to work on everything—blood, grass, wine, meaning—until you realize they work by removing the fabric itself.

The court says Malema is right.
But the fear of Afrikaners is also real.
Both can be true.

Welcome to South Africa, where contradictions don't cancel out—they compound.

Genocide—the word hung in the air between them like smoke from an extinguished candle. What should burn the tongue, what should make the throat close with its weight of ash and bone, becomes instead a currency they trade across their chairs.

Trump grasps it like a club, blunt and brutal, yet somehow blind. For him, the word bleaches white, drains of all meaning when it describes Gaza's rubble, when it whispers through Ukrainian villages. Those deaths become statistics, collateral damage, the unfortunate mathematics of geopolitics. But here, in this oval room, speaking of South African farms, the genocide suddenly is stained in red, becomes heavy with accusation. His selective vision bleaches genocide from the places where his interests require blindness.

Ramaphosa weighs the word like a sacrament he will not take. Genocide—he can taste its bitter truth when it blooms in Gaza's dust, can feel its weight when he leads South Africa's righteous charge against Israel in international courts, can offer sanctuary to Hamas with the clean conscience of moral clarity.

But here, in his own soil, among his own dying, the word turns to ash in his mouth.

There is a kind of semantic astigmatism in this: the eye that sees clearly across oceans goes blind at the garden gate. Palestinian children become martyrs worthy of international intervention. South African farmers become statistics requiring refugee status. The same moral vision that sharpens to laser precision for distant suffering blurs conveniently for local blood.

Genocide becomes a word with a passport—welcome in some countries, deported from others. The president who can parse systematic extermination with legal precision suddenly develops semantic amnesia when the killers and the killed share his citizenship.

This is not politics. This is the bleaching of the soul itself—where empathy becomes a foreign policy tool, where moral consistency dissolves in the acid bath of convenience. Where the word that should burn equally in every mouth becomes cool and manageable when it threatens the wrong narrative. This is true for Trump and Ramaphosa.

What truly breaks my heart—and it does crack like over-starched linen—is watching fellow believers queue up at this linguistic laundromat, each clutching their ideological stains, desperate for the cleaning solution that will make their chosen narratives spotless.

Some conservative Christians queue forms around Trump's deluxe "White Genocide" package—extra hot water, industrial-strength victimhood detergent, pre-wash with selective video and photos. They eagerly accept his fabricated burial sites as authentic evidence, applauding the transformation of 57 tragic annual murders (and perhaps thousands more over the last 10 years) into systematic extermination as if Jesus himself were operating the machinery. These brothers and sisters, whitewash his withdrawal of over $400 million of life saving USAID as stopping corruption, while accepting his cryptocurrency enrichment schemes from South African corruption as somehow morally different, and dismissing his quip about welcoming a jet from South Africa as harmless banter rather than kleptocracy on display. His desire to relocate Palestinians gets the "New Riviera" treatment—extra rinse cycle until forced displacement emerges as humanitarian urban planning. Meanwhile, 13,000 Palestinian children lie buried under deliberately targeted rubble.

On the other hand, some progressive Christians line up at Ramaphosa's "Historical Justice" wash cycle, where inconvenient truths about Afrikaner farmers' genuine suffering get the "Apartheid Legacy" treatment—gentle cycle, no acknowledgment, extra fabric softener until documented torture patterns dissolve into statistical noise. They refuse to admit that “"Kill the farmer, kill the boer", is hate speech to the farmer who hears it before she dies (even if the supreme court disagrees), that the "brrrrrrrr, pop, pop" gun sounds aren't playful theatre but chilling soundtrack to race hatred. These brothers and sisters struggle to acknowledge that Africans can harbour the same racial hatred as their Afrikaner counterparts—as if racism were genetically impossible for the previously oppressed. Meanwhile, Hamas' explicit genocidal charter gets the parallel "Resistance Poetry" treatment—gentle cycle, no bleach, extra fabric softener until it emerges as anti-semitic hates speech.

Both sides singing the same hymn: "Whiter than snow, yes, whiter than snow, now wash me and I shall be whiter than snow." Except they're not seeking cleansing from sin—they're seeking cleansing from inconvenient truth.

Yet while we bleach language in their spin cycles, the earth refuses sanitation.

Farmers—black and white—flee not metaphorical persecution but actual bullets, while their terror gets processed through media machines that prioritise narrative over nuance. Black children in countries across South Africa still fill their stomachs with water to dull the hunger pains. In Palestine people still starve while grain rots in storage facilities controlled by kleptocrats who speak eloquently of liberation.

The truth is that South Africa is simultaneously a miracle and a catastrophe. A country where former enemies live together in relative peace whilst arguing constantly about the terms of their coexistence.

In reality South Africa is not technically at war in South Africa, but it is also not technically at peace either. It is somewhere in between—that grey space where former enemies learn to live together whilst still arguing about who was right and who was wrong and who owes what to whom.

It's exhausting.
It's also miraculous.
Most countries that try this experiment blow up.

The truth is that America is simultaneously the hope of the world and its greatest disappointment. A country founded on magnificent ideals and constructed on magnificent hypocrisy.

The truth is that Christianity is simultaneously the answer to everything and the cause of half our problems. A faith that preaches love whilst its followers practice tribalism.

All of this can be true.
All of this is true.
Truth is bigger than our ability to contain it.

So, where does this leave us? Standing amidst the ruins of language, sifting through the debris of good intentions and calculated deceptions. We've become accustomed to the sterile hum of the political and media laundromats, where words enter stained and emerge devoid of meaning, bleached by the competing cycles of political and ideological agendas1. But what happens when the very tools we use to articulate our pain, our reality, become weapons of obfuscation? What then?

There's a peculiar terror in realising that language, the vessel of truth, can be hijacked, weaponised, and turned against the very souls it was meant to serve. We Christians, who claim to follow the Word made flesh, find ourselves lining up at competing dry-cleaning establishments, eager to scrub away uncomfortable realities.

But here is reality: words still matter. They pulse with a strange, persistent power, even when twisted and abused. They retain the capacity to wound, to heal, to ignite revolutions, and to whisper solace in the darkest night. The problem isn't language itself, but our relationship to it. We've forgotten how to listen, how to discern the echoes of truth amidst the cacophony of noise.

We crave easy answers, neatly packaged narratives that confirm our biases and soothe our anxieties. We want our words pre-approved, sanitised, and guaranteed to offend no one. But the truth, as Flannery O'Connor knew, is rarely polite. It's abrasive, unsettling, and often deeply offensive to our carefully constructed sensibilities. It demands a willingness to confront the uncomfortable, to embrace the paradoxical, and to risk being wrong.

So, what's the alternative?

How do we reclaim the power of words to reveal, to expose, to make real the pain that throbs beneath the surface of our carefully curated lives?

It begins, I suspect, with a brutal honesty. A willingness to name our own complicity in the linguistic charade. To acknowledge the ways in which we've twisted words to serve our own agendas, to protect our fragile egos, and to avoid the messy, inconvenient truths that threaten to unravel our carefully constructed worldviews and political tribes.

It requires a willingness to listen to those who speak from the margins, those whose voices have been silenced, erased, or drowned out by the dominant narratives. To amplify their stories, to bear witness to their pain, and to allow their experiences to challenge our assumptions and expand our understanding of reality.

It demands a relentless pursuit of truth, even when it leads us down uncertain and treacherous paths. To resist the temptation of easy answers, to embrace the ambiguity and uncertainty that are inherent in the human condition, and to trust that even in the midst of chaos and confusion, there is a still, small voice that can guide us toward the light.

This is not a call for linguistic purity, but for authenticity. Not for sanitised speech, but for words that are raw, visceral, and unflinchingly honest. Words that crackle with the energy of reality, not props but pointers to truth. Words that bear the weight of our sorrows and the lightness of our hopes.

Words that have the power to shatter our illusions and reveal the aching beauty of a world yearning to be made whole.

When the Word became flesh two thousand years ago, he dwelt among us, confronting those bleached the realities of the poor, marginalised in the name of God.

Jesus stopped the semantic bleaching of his time, and so should we.

This week I watched two men lie to each other on television and call it diplomacy.

Tonight I'll pray for them both.

Not because they deserve it—though they do, being human and therefore made in the image of God despite all evidence to the contrary. But because prayer is what you do when politics fails and hope feels foolish and truth seems impossible.

Prayer is the act of naming what is whilst believing in what could be.

Like a rooster in flight, my prayer and the words I will use will be ungainly.

Unlikely.

Perhaps unsuccessful,

perhaps not.