Ongezellig

Yes, Coco’s parents WERE killed by Africans, actually.
Firstly I would like to address the ‘but Massa said’ argument- It feels very blatantly obvious to me that ‘they were struck by lightning’ is no more than a placeholder for something that would have been explored further had the show not been cancelled. This is because first of all it’s on the same tier of ridiculous as ‘They were suddenly crushed by a falling grand piano’- and I would argue that a sudden, painless death would not quite be as traumatic as it is otherwise presented. It is also worth mentioning that this was the second placeholder after the car crash, and it would be very bizarre for him to swap one sudden meaningless death for another sudden meaningless death, unless both were just different placeholders. Therefore using this as the definitive, ultimate answer is just liberal cope.
My second argument is the surrounding context from the show. Coco is a South African, who comes from a family of farmers. There is only one blatantly obvious reason therefore as to why Coco might have been an orphan. Someone may make the argument that perhaps Massa is some kind of liberal, who only realised that this might be a controversial subject after he’d already planned everything else, and thus was backed into a corner- BUT- this is obviously not the case. Massa is clearly very knowledgeable in history and geopolitics, and absolutely would have realised where that was going- and besides, the chance of him randomly stumbling into something like that, despite him having clearly done his homework on South Africa beforehand and being willing to handle dark topics elsewhere feels minimal. Coco’s backstory is the right wing equivalent of somebody writing a story in which there was a jewish orphan from Germany in the 1930s whose parents ‘mysteriously’ died before they left.
In short, it’s glaringly obvious that Coco’s parents were killed by Africans, given the surrounding context of the show, and that ‘struck by lightning’ was an obvious placeholder, just to give some explanation which could have been changed so that a dark topic could have been further explored in a future we didn’t get to see.