Following his involvement in a failed coup attempt in Benin in December 2025, the activist Kemi Seba has been taken into custody in South Africa. The circumstances surrounding his apprehension are coming to light, revealing a startling contradiction. While Seba has spent years branding himself as a champion for Black communities, he was arrested in the company of a white supremacist terrorist whose ideology is fundamentally hostile to those very same people.
The unlikely partnership between Kemi Seba and François van der Merwe
The events of Wednesday, April 15, offer a striking look at the shifting influence networks within southern Africa. South African authorities detained Kemi Seba, a primary figure in radical decolonial pan-Africanism, alongside 26-year-old François van der Merwe. The latter is the leader of the “Bittereinders” (“Those Who Fight to the End”), a fringe group founded in 2021 that claims to protect the Afrikaner minority against what they describe as “anti-white discrimination.” This movement, which is under surveillance by the State Security Agency (SSA), is reported to have hundreds of armed supporters.
The Russian connection: the Society of the Double-Headed Eagle
The bridge between the Black militant and the white supremacist is an entity known as the Society of the Double-Headed Eagle, or the Tsargrad network. This organization is directed by Konstantin Malofeev, an ultra-conservative Russian oligarch. Malofeev has been under American and European sanctions since 2014 for his financial support of Russian separatists in Ukraine and has been the target of U.S. federal investigations since 2022 for bypassing those sanctions.
François van der Merwe traveled to Moscow in September at the invitation of Malofeev. Since that visit, he has received significant support from Russian state media. Despite being arrested twice—once in December 2023 for a brawl and again in January 2024 for public order offenses while on parole—the young Afrikaner was portrayed as a “political prisoner” by Kremlin-backed media. Support demonstrations were even staged in Moscow, within view of the Kremlin itself.
Contradictions in the decolonial movement
In this complex geopolitical game, Kemi Seba appears to have been utilized as a strategic pawn. The activist, who established his career by attacking “Western supremacism,” is now tied to a group whose core mission is the preservation of racial privileges established during the Apartheid era. By associating with the Bittereinders, Seba is not just engaging with political extremists; he is aligning with a faction that perceives South Africa’s Black majority as a threat.
Perhaps most importantly, the Bittereinders are officially classified as a terrorist organization within South Africa. There are concerns that the Beninese activist may have actively supported their operations on South African soil. As a result, the legal repercussions facing Kemi Seba are expected to be far more grave than the initial media coverage suggested.
