Did South Africa's White 'refugees' sell a lie to the US?

France 24

03-06-2025

There are roughly 26,000 people murdered each year in South Africa. About 0.1 percent of those murders are farm attacks, which mostly claim the lives of Black people, according to national police statistics.
Despite these statistics, US President Donald Trump has accused South Africa of allowing a 'White genocide', claiming that Afrikaners, the descendants of Dutch settlers, are being racially persecuted. Trump also condemned a law that allowed the government to take abandoned or unused land without compensation in rare cases.
Months of heightened tensions between Washington and Pretoria peaked when the US launched a refugee programme for 49 White South Africans to flee their home country in pursuit of the American dream. But did the so-called Amerikaners sell the US a lie?
Nick Serfontein runs a commercial farm in the Free State which employs over 600 people and generates €75 million in revenue per year. He told FRANCE 24 that the people who left for the US 'are not real farmers'.
'They are opportunists,' Serfontein said.
A country with deep divides
South Africa is the most unequal country in the world, according to the World Bank. Much of that inequality comes from land dispossession that occurred during the colonial era and Apartheid. The 1913 Natives Land Act allowed Black people to only own land in 7 percent of South Africa's territory, the other 93 percent designated for Whites. The subsequent Group Areas Act during Apartheid uprooted millions of Black people and forced them to live in dense areas called townships, where many still reside today.
Serfontein has played an active role in helping the government redistribute some rural land to the Black population, while ensuring it is done in a legal and fair way. This process is referred to as Land Reform and aims to redress some of the inequalities created during South Africa's racist past.
Trump cited South Africa's expropriation law as a reason to boycott the G20 hosted by South Africa.
'How could we be expected to go to South Africa for the very important G20 meeting when land confiscation and genocide are the primary topics of conversation?' he wrote on X. 'They are taking the land of white farmers, and then killing them and their families.'
In reality, no private property has been expropriated without compensation in South Africa as of May, 2025. The law would only allow for such expropriation in cases where land is abandoned or unused.
Serfontein is not worried about expropriation without compensation. He says the real issue is making sure that emerging Black farmers are properly trained in agriculture and have access to resources.
'Train the people, give them mentoring, and give them monitoring,' he said.
Despite some progress with land reform since the fall of Apartheid, White people own over 70 percent of farmland while only representing about 8 percent of the population.
Patrick Sekwatlakwatla, Serfontein's right-hand man, helps run the Sernick Emerging Farmers Programme, which aims to empower Black cattle farmers through training, mentorship, and market access.
'We don't want land grabs, we want to work together to produce food for our nation,' he said.
An 'opportunity' for some
A few hundred kilometres away in the town of Senekal, Theunis Pretorius tells a different tale.
'Very sadly, because of wrong partnerships and decisions, I lost everything,' he said.
Pretorius's family has been farming in the Free State for four generations. He used to own seven farms. But after his father passed away, consecutive droughts and bad business decisions led to the downfall of his inherited agricultural business. He says the biggest challenge was getting finance to keep afloat.
'We started again, but the banks didn't want to help us anymore.'
He condemns what he calls South Africa's 'racist' Expropriation Act, but he says 'the banks expropriate the most'.
Pretorius said Donald Trump has offered a 'fantastic opportunity' to South African farmers.
'If my wife goes with me, I will go,' he said. 'Because at the moment, I'm jobless.'
'I'm a big visionary like President Donald trump. I love this man, the way he does business, the way he makes deals, the way he prevents wars.'
The role of YouTubers and lobbyists
One Saturday morning, Pretorius swapped his farmer's hat for a Trump camo cap and headed to the US embassy in Pretoria. He was joined by about one thousand other Trump-supporting Afrikaners, who gathered around a bright red pick-up truck and clapped as Willem Petzer, a YouTuber who believes there is a White genocide taking place, made a speech.
'With the support of the West, we can make South Africa great again,' Petzer said.
The speech concentrated on farm attacks being proof of racial persecution of White South Africans and condemned the ruling African National Congress party (ANC) for its complicity.
The "White genocide" narrative stems from rightwing influencers like Petzer and lobbying groups in South Africa.
YouTubers like Petzer are not the first to propagate the false narrative that White people are being racially persecuted. AfriForum is a civil rights organisation that promotes Afrikaner interests. Representatives of the group Kallie Kriel and Ernst Roets toured the US in 2018 to lobby rightwing politicians such as senator Ted Cruz and conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation. Kriel and Roets argued that crime disproportionately targeted White people, despite national crime statistics proving otherwise.
Fox News and journalist Tucker Carlson picked up the "White genocide" narrative during the trip. It also led to rightwing YouTubers like Lauren Southern from Canada to make documentaries propagating the idea that White people were racially persecuted. When farm attacks again made international news in 2025, Carlson interviewed Roets during another trip to the US, where AfriForum again lobbied conservative media, politicians and think tanks.
Some farm attacks have had racial elements involved, like graffiti or racist language used during incidents. But the reality is that farm attacks kill far more Black people than White. In the first quarter of 2025, more than 80% of the victims of farm murders were African.
'The history of farm murders in the country has always been distorted and reported in an unbalanced way; the truth is that farm murders have always included African people in more numbers,' Police Minister Senzo Mchunu said when announcing the statistics.
The same disparity is evident across the country, with the highest levels of violence felt in Black and coloured townships. Four out of five of the police stations with the highest murder rates in 2024 were in townships in Cape Town. The fifth was in Inanda, a Black township in KwaZulu-Natal. Issues like gender-based violence and gang-related killings in these areas far outshine farm murders on a national scale, but have not been discussed by the Trump administration.
The fact that farm attacks occur is true. So is the fact that they are brutal. What is not true is that White people are being disproportionately targeted in violent crime due to their race, according to South Africa's national policing statistics. South Africa is consistently in the top 10 countries in the world with the highest murder rates, with the vast majority of victims being Black. Billionaire businessman Johann Rupert said when he met Trump, 'We have too many deaths, but it's across the board.'