The Equality Court case of Julius Malema has put the issue of the term "boer" on the front burner of our South Africa debate. Derek Hanekom is right that we should debate this slogan and it's use. I want to cite a number of incidents and issues that can shed light, rather than heat, on this discussion.
The translation of "farmer" into Afrikaans is "boer". A farming enterprise is a "boerdery". A farmers' association is a "boerevereniging". In Zulu, the Afrikaans language is "isiBhunu" and Afrikaners are "amaBhunu". In kiSwahili "kaBuru" is the term for Afrikaners. Many farmed in Kenya and what was then Tanganyika, before independence. Boer can be purely descriptive as one would use the descriptions Scot, Xhosa, Malay or Tutsi.
Overlaying these clinical dictionary words there is an emotional and ethnic baggage. It is important that one understands not only that but the context in which the words are used. Afrikaners have been described as "the white tribe of Africa" and that is not far from the truth. One hundred and twelve years ago and Anglo-Boer War, which shattered Southern Africa, commenced. Afrikaners are certainly not typical colonialists despite what the few remaining Marxists may believe.
When the then President Nelson Mandela visited Richmond in KZN in the 1990s at the time of the violence there, he spoke in Zulu about the National Party "apartheid" government as "ihulumeni yamaBhunu". That was descriptive rather than pejorative. He, and most people, recognise that "apartheid" was driven by Afrikaners or "amaBhunu". Insofar as the struggle was against apartheid, it was against the "amaBhunu".
In 2009 a coloured female voter from Dysselsdorp near Oudtshoorn in the Western Cape, when asked on SABC TV, who she would vote for in the coming General Election (she had previously voted for the ANC) said, "This time I guess I will have to vote for the "boere" ", by which she meant the DA.
South Africans widely, carelessly and mostly without malice, apply ethnic and racial tags to one another, but that recognition of diversity and group identity, does not imply a desire to discriminate or to despise, but it can easily change into that, so we need to be sensitive and vigilant.