Although it has become routine to encounter the talking points of the extreme right emanating from the Trump White House, the scene that emerged from the South African president Cyril Ramaphosa’s visit this week was still bracing. After some discussion about golf and other pleasantries, Donald Trump raised a subject that had until fairly recently been confined to the conspiratorial far right: the idea that white farmers in South Africa are the victims of a genocidal campaign of mass killing and displacement, with the support of Ramaphosa’s government. Despite Ramaphosa’s equable response to these accusations, for which there is no evidence whatsoever, Trump was patently unconvinced.
The meeting came after the arrival earlier this month in the US of 59 white South Africans, members of the Afrikaner minority that ruled the country during its decades of apartheid. They had been invited to come to the US as refugees – victims, according to the Trump administration, of a “genocide” being perpetrated against the country’s white farmers.
The granting of refugee status to Afrikaners is extraordinary in a number of ways, and lays bare many of the ideological dynamics within Trumpism, and within American politics more broadly. It came, firstly, in the aftermath of an executive order announcing the indefinite suspension of the US Refugee Admissions Program. No new asylum applications were to be processed, Trump decreed, and applicants who had already been accepted and were due to come to the US would have their travel cancelled. Refugees from war and famine and dire humanitarian crises, in places such as Sudan, Palestine and the Democratic Republic of Congo, did not, in the words of the executive order, “align with the interests of the United States”.
The Afrikaners, though, present a special case. And this is not, Trump insists, because they are white, and because their alleged persecutors are black. “Farmers are being killed,” he told reporters the day of the Afrikaners’ arrival in Washington. “They happen to be white. Whether they are white or black makes no difference to me.” But their being white, of course, makes all the difference in the world; it’s the point of the whole stunt, as both those who oppose it and those who welcome it clearly understand.
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It was the small Afrikaner minority who introduced the system of apartheid in 1948, and who maintained and enforced it with relentless brutality until it collapsed, after years of internal and international pressure, in the early 1990s. The reason these people, who believed that their position in South Africa was ordained by God, weren’t driven out of the country – or worse – after their regime fell was that the Mandela government wanted at all costs to avoid a civil war. And it wanted to prevent the persecution of the group who had until recently run the country in its own exclusive interests.
The hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission were designed to bring out into the open the horror and brutality of that regime, and were widely criticised for being too lenient on the human-rights abuses of the former oppressors. South Africa remains the most economically unequal nation in the world, and that inequality reflects the racial lines scored deep into the country during the centuries of colonial oppression and the decades of apartheid. Though South Africa’s whites account for just 7 per cent of its population, they own more than 70 per cent of its land.
The idea of ‘white genocide’ has for years now been a popular conspiracist talking point on the extreme right
Although the country has a notoriously high level of violent crime, only a small number of attacks and murders happen on farms. Of those an even smaller number of the victims are white, with no evidence that any of these crimes are part of a politically motivated campaign of persecution. South Africa does not break down its crime figures based on race, but according to the latest available figures, 6,953 people were murdered in the country between October and December last year. Of that number, only 12 were killed in farm attacks. One of the 12 was a farmer; five were farm dwellers, and four were farm labourers, statistically likely to have been black.
So why this sudden interest, on the part of the Trump administration in granting refugee status to the Afrikaners, so that they can flee a genocide that is not happening? Well, it’s not that sudden, for one thing. The idea of “white genocide” has for years now been a popular conspiracist talking point on the extreme right. Influential figures such as Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk (himself, of course, a member of at least two oppressed groups: white South Africans and billionaires) have spread the myth from their lofty platforms. Both men have, in their different ways, been profoundly influential within the Trumpist movement.
And as for Trump himself, his entire political career has been animated by – is in many ways premised on – the idea that white Americans are in danger of becoming a persecuted minority in their own country. The persecution of the Afrikaner farmers, illusory though it is, reflects this white American anxiety – which is itself, of course, less a real anxiety than a pretext for the revanchist dismantling of the woke agenda of Trump’s enemies. It’s shallow culture war, in other words, all the way down.
There is another dimension to this pathetic charade that is worth mentioning, and on which there has been very little commentary in the media. There are actual genocides happening in the world right now, and one of them is, very prominently, taking place with the financial, military and moral support of the US government. At the level of international relations, one of the most powerful voices of opposition to that genocide has been that of the South African government, which brought a case against Israel before the International Court of Justice, accusing it of committing a genocide in Gaza.
No small amount of South Africa’s moral authority as the prosecution in that case derived from its stature as a nation whose people had lived through generations of colonial oppression and violence, and from an understanding that the struggles of all oppressed people are intimately connected. “We know all too well,” as Mandela put it in 1997, “that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”
The Trump administration’s aim here is to discredit the South African government, by accusing it of the very crime for which it – the South African government – has attempted to bring Israel to account. The intention could hardly be more transparent; the motivation could hardly be more abject.
