Latest news with #Serfontein
Canada Standard
6 days ago
- Business
- Canada Standard
Did South Africa's White 'refugees' sell a lie to the US
A second group of White South Africans arrived in the US last week as part of a refugee programme put in place by the Trump administration, which alleges that members of the White Afrikaner minority are being racially persecuted. South Africa's crime statistics, however, tell a different story. There are roughly 26,000 people murdered each year inSouth 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 PresidentDonald Trumphas 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 Africas 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. Watch moreIn South Africa, some White farmers seek Trump's support over expropriation law 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 Africas 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 inagricultureand 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, Serfonteins right-hand man, helps run the Sernick Emerging Farmers Programme, which aims to empower Black cattle farmers through training, mentorship, and market access. We dont 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. Pretoriuss 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 didnt want to help us anymore. He condemns what he calls South Africas racist Expropriation Act, but he says the banks expropriate the most. Read moreS. African ambassador 'no longer welcome' in the US, Rubio says 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, Im jobless. Im 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 rulingAfrican National Congressparty (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 senatorTed Cruzand conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation. Kriel and Roets argued that crime disproportionately targeted White people, despite national crime statistics proving otherwise. Read moreTrump showed Ramaphosa a photo from DRC as proof of White genocide in South Africa Fox Newsand 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. Watch moreGrowing crime rate in South Africa bolster private security sector 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. Read moreDeclare gender violence in a national disaster, campaigners say 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 Africas 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 its across the board. Originally published on France24
France 24
7 days ago
- Business
- France 24
Did South Africa's White 'refugees' sell a lie to the US?
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.'
Daily Maverick
11-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Maverick
The shimmering innards – writer Antjie Krog's ‘last' genre-busting masterpiece
This literary/historical puzzle is a tender and rare glimpse into matriarchal entanglement. Poet and celebrated author Antjie Krog has just published a majestic 'autobiographical novel', Die Binnerym van Bloed (Blood's Inner Rhyme – Penguin), traversing the lifelong writing bond with her mother, Dot Serfontein. Serfontein, also a celebrated editor, journalist, essayist, writer of popular short stories and prose, daughter of a Free State cattle farmer and formidable mother of five, including Krog, died at the age of 91 on 4 November 2016. For what she has claimed is her last book, Krog returns to her childhood landscape, not only to capture two significant chapters in well-lived, waning lives, but to excavate a deeper source of epigenetic fear, terror and anxiety always close by. This is a 'genre-busting' journey, a stripped-bare search for the origin of her own as well as Afrikaner neurosis, which runs like an exposed nerve through generations. The matriarch Documenting both her own and her mother's physical decline, their shared grappling with mortality, their talent for bending and shaping new ideas and language, this literary/historical puzzle is a tender and rare glimpse into matriarchal entanglement. It is a telling so intimate and hilarious, so detailed and filled with self-reflection and insight that it democratises their story, rendering it universal. We will all, one day if we live long enough, have to exist in and around the knowledge and acceptance of the failing, dying physical self and the death of a loved one, a cherished mother. But this is no pity party. While she may be a literary rock star travelling the globe to deliver lectures, dealing with real life as it unfurls – hotels, airports, men who hunt with bows and arrows – the body offers no special privileges. There is the retelling of an encounter with bedbugs in a hotel in Canada, a bladder infection, the discovery of a stubborn tick nestling in her bellybutton and a detached front tooth crown minutes before delivering an important talk. The cherry on top is a serious, self-inflicted and painful knee injury gained in a blind 'fight or flight' response out strolling in a forest. Between the sweeping and hilarious letter exchanges, during visits to her mother, Krog notes Serfontein's daily vital signs as written up in shorthand by the 24-hour nurse who looks after the aged matriarch in a retirement home. Here Serfontein is reduced to her liquid and food intake, her moods, bowel movements and which sores, cuts or bruises need tending. Now that we're on bowel movements, Krog's description of attempting to cope with a violent bout of diarrhoea while out on another walk, necessitating one of the most epic and side-splitting hunts for relief in the bushes and the subsequent clean-up, is priceless and so unexpected. But who has not found themselves trapped in a moment when we are no longer in control as our bodies attempt to violently expel a toxin from all available orifices. The silence following the war Images of potential catastrophe and armageddon are never far in the text and exchanges between the two literary giants, and in some instances the author is caught in the eye of the storm. Serfontein's range of writing centred on the working-class Afrikaner and their struggles. Rural tales set in tough landscapes of farms, church, politics and survival. As a girl Serfontein walked barefoot, raised her children, worked on her writing, built a career, built two stone houses alongside workers and farmed with her beloved Appaloosa horses. As Krog debates with her mother the grounding of her writing, she begins to probe an issue which has been silenced since the Boer War – the rape of young Afrikaner girls and women by British soldiers as well as those who fought on their side, including the commandeered black indigenous soldiers. This unspoken trauma is gradually prised open in all its horror. This as well as the effects of postwar traumatic stress on male family members who had survived and had felt enlivened by the war but were now back home, often a ruin. That their girlfriends, their wives, their mothers and their daughters had been raped and brutally sexually assaulted was not an issue women felt should be added to the emotional tinder box. And so it was that women kept their silence, wrapped in shame, carrying a huge burden. A description of how a brown baby born after a rape is smothered to death is devastating. In the book Krog explains to her mother that she is in search of the root of the anxiety and sense of foreboding shared by many Afrikaners who have carried these traumas, triumphs, perceived victories and deep wounds through generations. The author's relationship also with her own brothers and sister, her husband, her children, her culture, her religion, her language, the land in this pastoral milieu is cosmic and existential in its reach. Everything must come to an end. Even the selling of the farm where the remains of Krog's father, politician Willem Krog, are buried in the family graveyard. On a return visit after selling the farm to the government the new, allotted black owner asks the family why they would part with their land. Krog's brothers Vyver, Kootjie and Willem and her sister Jeannette have their own lives, their own farms, their own destinies. The farm, Middenspruit outside Kroonstad as well as the Free State landscape, occupies the inner contours of Serfontein and Krog's memories. Their final communication about love, life, loss and most importantly writing serves as a beautiful broken telegraph between generations of Afrikaners and their place in the country of their birth, South Africa. If you are able to read it in its original Afrikaans do so, but the English translation is nourishing. DM
