The allegations of a “white genocide” towards Afrikaner farmers that emerged throughout the tense Oval Office meeting between the US president, Donald Trump, and South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, on Could 21 shocked many all over the world. But it surely was merely the most recent instance of what has been a long-running obsession for Trump, which has been evident since effectively earlier than he took workplace in January.
In early February, Trump issued an government order: “Addressing Egregious Actions of The Republic of South Africa”. The order included the allegation of “unjust racial discrimination” towards the white Afrikaner group and beneficial the institution of an Afrikaner refugee scheme. In his assembly with Ramaphosa, Trump doubled down on US hostility to the South African authorities. He repeatedly claimed – and produced purported proof of – so-called genocide towards Afrikaner farmers.
This degree of hostility in the direction of multi-racial, post-apartheid South Africa might appear to have come out of the blue. Some might imagine it was impressed by Trump’s shut relationship, on the time not less than, with South Africa-born enterprise chief Elon Musk – who could possibly be seen standing within the nook of the Oval Workplace watching the uncomfortable scene unfold. However the declare that white Afrikaners are victims of violent and vengeful black South Africans has a for much longer historical past.
It’s a historical past that goes again virtually 5 many years. It connects white supremacy in southern Africa and the apartheid authorities’s worldwide disinformation technique with the evangelical Christian proper in American politics. A few of the people and establishments that had been vocal advocates of white-minority rule towards the specter of black authorities in South Africa are the identical individuals who have the Trump administration’s ear in the present day.
Because the South African educational Nicky Falkof has observed, the declare of white victimhood is nothing new. She believes that “whole political agendas develop round the concept white individuals have to be protected as a result of they face distinctive threats”.
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Trump and South Africa: what is white victimhood, and how is it linked to white supremacy?
The apartheid years
The concept that white South Africans face an existential menace emerged within the violent closing decade of apartheid rule. It was a key narrative that the Nationwide Occasion authorities of president P.W. Botha preferred to present to the outside world.
In 2021, a former apartheid intelligence officer named Paul Erasmus revealed his autobiography detailing his work for Stratcom, the apartheid authorities’s worldwide covert communications and intelligence company. Erasmas detailed his work within the US and, specifically, Stratcom’s shut hyperlinks with Republican policymakers.
One of many major US conservative contacts was mentioned to be Dr Edwin Feulner, a founder and president of the Heritage Foundation. Erasmus wrote that Feulner, who was a international coverage advisor to Ronald Reagan within the Eighties, was “already effectively positioned to serve Stratcom the sort of high-level recommendation that we wanted to mood rising worldwide affection for the ANC as the primary ruling occasion of a democratic South Africa”.
The Dialog approached Dr Feulner via the Heritage Basis to hunt his feedback on particularly whether or not he had any previous affiliation with the apartheid-era authorities in South Africa and acquired no reply on the matter. However in 1986, throughout Feulner’s presidency of the Heritage Basis, it revealed a report presenting alleging “shut hyperlinks between the ANC [African National Congresss] and the communists and the best way wherein the communists exploit the ANC to control Western opinion”.
This historical past is vital to understanding Trump Oval Workplace assembly with the South African president. The Heritage Basis continues to have shut hyperlinks with Afrikaner nationalists. And it’s well-known that the inspiration is central to Trump’s governing technique, having revealed its Challenge 2025 on which a lot of this administration’s coverage is based.
The South African media outlet, the Every day Maverick, has investigated links between the self-defined Afrikaner minority rights motion, Afriforum, the Heritage Basis and the Republican Occasion. Since Trump was first inaugurated in 2017, Afriforum representatives – together with CEO Kallie Kriel and his deputy Dr Ernst Roets – have made a number of visits to Washington, most not too long ago in February 2025, to talk with senior representatives of the Trump administration and representatives of the Heritage Basis. For a while, Afriforum has claimed there’s a white genocide towards Afrikaner farmers.
When requested straight about its relationship with Afriforum, a Heritage Basis spokesperson denied any notably shut hyperlinks between the 2 organisations, saying: “We meet with a whole lot of people and teams yearly.” He pointed to the Heritage Basis’s latest spherical desk and harassed the foundations’s “well-documented and long-running effort to work with leaders from throughout Africa”.
Trump started to tweet about the killing of farmers in South Africa in 2018 and may be very against South Africa’s not too long ago handed Expropriation Act. This act permits for the expropriation of land without compensation, however solely whether it is “simply and equitable and within the public curiosity” to take action.
In Could 2024, the Heritage Basis referred to as for the cancellation of US aid to South Africa. It accused the ANC authorities of supporting Hamas and never aligning “with American values”.
Non secular hyperlinks
America’s evangelical Christian group was a powerful supporter of the apartheid regime in South Africa. It is a key constituency of Trump’s electoral base. The historian Augusta Dell’Omo has documented the South African authorities lobbying of US televangelists corresponding to Pat Robertson – an outspoken supporter of apartheid South Africa. As Dell’Omo argues, Christian evangelicals weren’t simply vexed by threats to apartheid in South Africa. They had been drawing a “direct hyperlink between the causes of Black grievances within the US and South Africa and a world menace to conservative and non secular values”.
There is not only an historic – but additionally an ideological – hyperlink between Trump’s attitudes to farm killings and land expropriation in South Africa and his vehement opposition to range, equality and inclusion (DEI) programmes within the US. This white grievance politics continues to contemplate South Africa as an emblem of the overthrow of white privilege and the dysfunction that multiculturalism and black-led authorities ostensibly creates.
As educational Nicky Falkof has argued in The Conversation: “The structure of white supremacy will depend on the concept white individuals are extraordinary victims. That is the driving notion beneath the nice alternative principle, a far-right conspiracy principle claiming that Jews and non-white foreigners are plotting to ‘change’ whites.”
Trump’s accusations towards the present authorities in South Africa have their roots within the murky worldwide disinformation campaigns of apartheid’s closing years and the keen cooperation of key actors on the correct of US politics and society. That white-supremacist politics from the previous would proceed to have forex in in the present day’s White Home is stunning. It needs to be opposed by all who help a democratic, multiracial and affluent South Africa.