Following his alleged involvement in a failed coup in Benin in late 2025, the activist Kemi Seba has been taken into custody by South African authorities. As details regarding his apprehension emerge, the most startling revelation involves the company he kept. Seba, who has long presented himself as a champion for Black communities, was arrested alongside a white supremacist whose ideology is fundamentally hostile to those very same people.
An unexpected partnership on South African soil
The circumstances of the arrest on Wednesday, April 15, provide a revealing look at the shifting influence networks in southern Africa. South African police detained Seba, a prominent figure in radical decolonial pan-Africanism, alongside 26-year-old François van der Merwe. Van der Merwe is the leader of the “Bittereinders” (Those Who Fight to the End), a fringe faction that has claimed to defend the Afrikaner minority against what they call “anti-white discrimination” since 2021.
This movement is currently under the watchful eye of the State Security Agency (SSA), which estimates the group has several hundred armed supporters ready to act.
The Russian connection: the Society of the Double-Headed Eagle
The bridge connecting the Black militant to the white supremacist is an entity known as the “Society of the Double-Headed Eagle,” also referred to as the Tsargrad network. This organization is directed by the ultra-conservative Russian oligarch Konstantin Malofeev. 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 a New York prosecutor’s probe for sanctions violations since 2022.
François van der Merwe visited Moscow last September following an invitation from Malofeev. Since that trip, he has received significant coverage from Russian state media. Despite being arrested twice recently—once in December 2023 for a brawl and again in January 2024 for public order offenses—Kremlin-backed outlets have portrayed the young Afrikaner as a “political prisoner,” even staging a support rally for him near the Kremlin.
Pan-Africanism or political pawn?
In this complex geopolitical landscape, Kemi Seba appears to have transitioned from a leader to a pawn. The man who built his reputation on the struggle against “Western supremacism” is now tied to a group whose core mission is the preservation of racial privileges rooted in the Apartheid era.
By aligning himself with the Bittereinders, Seba is no longer just engaging with political outliers; he is partnering with a movement that views the Black majority of South Africa as its primary adversary. Most significantly, because the Bittereinders are classified as a terrorist organization in South Africa, Seba may be accused of facilitating their operations. Consequently, the legal challenges facing the Beninese activist are likely much more severe than early reports suggested.
