13-05-2025
‘Genocide' or ‘white victimhood'? Why Afrikaners are the only refugees welcome in Trump's America
Credit: Reuters
Even by the standards of the past four months, it was an extraordinary moment, as what are apparently the first refugees to be allowed into the United States since Donald Trump issued a blanket ban landed this week at Dulles Airport near Washington, DC.
They were not from Ukraine, Afghanistan, Sudan or any of the world's other active war zones. They were from South Africa. And they were all white Afrikaners.
Race has little to do with refugee status. But the incident has thrust into the spotlight not only the increasingly bitter relationship between Pretoria and Washington, but also Donald Trump's own contentious focus on what has been called 'white victimhood'.
In America, the news has been predictably divisive. The White House trumpeted the arrival of the 59 as a triumph, claiming they were victims of 'racial discrimination', and hinted that they were escaping a 'genocide'. An under-secretary of state was dispatched to welcome them.
But the Episcopal Church, which has long been given US government grants to resettle refugees in America, responded by saying it would refuse to do so in this case, citing its 'steadfast commitment to racial justice and reconciliation'.
Bishop Sean Rowe said it was 'painful to watch one group of refugees, selected in a highly unusual manner, receive preferential treatment over many others who have been waiting in refugee camps or dangerous conditions for years'.
In South Africa, the news was met with a mixture of outrage, glee and bemusement.
Chrispin Phiri, a foreign ministry spokesman, insisted that 'these are not refugees' yet added: 'We are not going to stand in their way.'
Kallie Kriel, the CEO of AfriForum, an influential Afrikaner pressure group which has previously called for white people to stay in South Africa, said the flight was a 'direct result of the [African National Congress] ANC-led government's targeting of Afrikaners through discriminatory racial legislation'.
Other South Africans – including Afrikaners – have rolled their eyes at the entire episode.
'This is about Trump's America. It really isn't about us,' said Max du Preez, a prominent Afrikaner journalist. 'There's an awful lot wrong in South Africa, but the persecution of white Afrikaners is not one of them.'
The fury of the American Episcopalians is rooted in concern at a double standard – one it clearly believes is rooted in race.
In the fiscal year from October 2023 to September 2024, America resettled 100,034 refugees, the highest number admitted in a single year since 1994. Yet on his first day in office, Donald Trump signed an executive order banning refugees entry 'until such time as the further entry into the United States of refugees aligns with the interests of the United States'. That includes applicants from war zones.
A little over two weeks later, he signed another, ordering the government to promote and prioritise 'the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation'.
The order, which also froze all aid and other funding to South Africa and accused its government of supporting Hamas and Iran, grants a small group of white people the only exception to an otherwise global ban on refugees.
By then, Washington's relationship with South Africa had been deteriorating for some time. In December 2023, the ANC-led government in Pretoria brought a case of genocide against Israel at the International Court of Justice in the Hague.
But the immediate trigger was a new South African law allowing the state to seize land without compensation, provided it was in the 'public interest'.
The bill, signed into law by South African president Cyril Ramaphosa in January, allows for expropriation without compensation only when it is 'just and equitable and in the public interest' – such as when the property is unused.
It does not mention race. But land ownership is a hugely contentious issue in South Africa, where three-quarters of farmland is owned by white people, who make up just 7 per cent of the population.
Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, announced he would snub a G20 meeting in Johannesburg the following month, stating: 'South Africa is doing very bad things. Expropriating private property.'
Shortly afterwards Mr Rubio expelled Ebrahim Rasool, South Africa's ambassador to Washington, on the grounds of being 'a race-baiting politician who hates America.'
Mr Rasool had said that the Maga movement is a response to a 'supremacist instinct' and demographic trends that suggest whites will become a minority in the United States for the first time by the mid 2040s.
Meanwhile Elon Musk, Mr Trump's South-African born 'first buddy', accused his homeland of 'racist ownership laws' which equate to 'genocide' against white farmers.
Trump repeated that wording on Monday, saying 'white farmers' were being targeted specifically.
Credit: Reuters
'It's a genocide that's taking place... and farmers are being killed. They happen to be white. But whether they're white or black makes no difference to me. But white farmers are being brutally killed and their land is being confiscated in South Africa,' he said.
If Afrikaner nationalists have been making the rounds of Maga-affiliated media in recent weeks, describing a South Africa on the brink of collapse and a community facing deep levels of persecution, the South African government certainly sees Mr Musk as the driving force behind Donald Trump's policy making.
When Mr Trump first signed the executive order, for example, Mr Ramaphosa reached out to Elon Musk's father Errol, who still lives in South Africa, to see if he could arrange a phone call with the tycoon. Errol Musk later told The Telegraph the two spoke for several minutes.
Ramaphosa himself has rejected the allegations of 'genocide' levelled by the US administration.
'A refugee is someone who has to leave their country out of fear of political persecution, religious persecution, or economic persecution,' the South African leader said of those arriving in the US. 'And they don't fit that bill.'
The notion of 'white genocide' has gained traction in certain sections of the white, and particularly rural, Afrikaner community over the past ten years.
'It has emerged on the back of very, violent crimes of murder, torture and other things that have happened to the Afrikaner community, and very specifically to rural Afrikaner farmers,' says Marius Oosthuizen, a Pretoria-based consultant.
'There's a faction of the Afrikaners who feel very threatened, very embattled, both because of insecurity and crime and the threat of land expropriation.'
There is plenty of debate about whether that is justified.
Figures collated by South African police show that in 2024, 44 murders were recorded on farms and smaller plots of agricultural land. While the country does not release crime statistics broken down by race, eight of those killed were farmers.
Mr Du Preez points out that everyone in South Africa (where around 20,000 murders are committed annually) suffers from insecurity, and that living in black or coloured townships is statistically vastly more dangerous than being a white farmer, however.
The farm murders are a genuine problem, he says, but are a matter of common criminality. 'Study after study failed to find any kind of political motivation,' he says. There is no comparison to Robert Mugabe's evictions of white farmers from Zimbabwe in the 2000s, either in intent, scale, or effect, he points out.
There are clear tensions nonetheless, and there has long been frustration in South Africa over the sluggish pace of land reform in the decades since the end of apartheid. While redistribution of land ownership has always been part of the post-apartheid project, it has always previously involved compensating those who give up their property.
But AfriForm, a Right-wing pressure group, explicitly links the new property law to the refugees who landed in Dulles, saying it 'permits expropriation without compensation, and also places Afrikaners and other landowners in the government's crossfire'.
No land is understood to have yet been seized under the act. Defenders of the legislation say it is less likely to be used against farmers than for taking control of derelict and abandoned buildings and sites in city centres.
But the law passed earlier this year does mirror the populist rhetoric of Julius Malema, a former ANC firebrand who now leads a populist rival to the ANC called the Economic Freedom Fighters. He has long demanded expropriation without compensation.
'When they did this, they did it through a constitutional review process, and so the ANC will argue that they are doing it within the ambit of the law, that it's not aimed at white South Africans. But if you look at the fundamentals, it's really about the ability of government to expropriate white-owned land,' says Dr Oosthuizen.
Combine that with Mr Malema's salty rhetoric, including adoption of a song with the line 'kill the Boer,' and many rural Afrikaners feel genuinely threatened, he adds.
So while the 59 who arrived in Dulles airport on Monday afternoon are the first to take advantage of the refugee exemption, more may be on the way.
In March, the South African Chamber of Commerce in the United States said it had handed the US embassy in Pretoria the details of nearly 70,000 South Africans who contacted it for more information about the refugee scheme. Demand was huge, it reported
'It just spread like wildfire. I had 7,500 emails in my mailbox. Over 2500 texts, WhatsApps and messages. Basically our mail server crashed,' Neil Diamond, the head of the chamber, told television channel Newzroom Afrika at the time.
How many will really leave?
Those who really believe in 'white genocide', want to leave the country or establish a separate state 'are the crazies of our society,' says Mr Du Preez. 'They're tiny even among conservative Afrikaners,' said.
There is a reason Afrikaners named themselves after the continent, he points out. They regard themselves as indigenous, and on the whole intend to stay.
More important than the number of refugees, say some, is the message they send.
Stephen Grootes, a South African radio host, argues in the liberal newspaper Daily Maverick, that Mr Trump simply 'needs to prove to his own constituency that white people are 'victims'.'
Mr Oosthuizen agrees. The refugee flights, he suggests, may play to a domestic political audience in America: 'In America's own political discourse there is a racial element – black lives matter, family values, and the battle for preservation of white America. That definitely motivates some of the Republican base.'
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