South Africa’s new ambassador to Washington has a personal reason to challenge Donald Trump’s assertion that there is a genocide against white Afrikaners – he is “a born Afrikaner” himself. “Is he talking about us?”, Roelf Meyer remembers thinking, when he first heard President Trump say it. His response to the US president’s claim is blunt. The notion of a mass attack on the white Afrikaner minority in South Africa does not exist, he told the BBC, adding that his identity gave him the legitimacy to say so.
Meyer was one of the chief mediators to end white-minority rule known as apartheid in South Africa in the 1990s. He was appointed ambassador to the US in April, after diplomatic relations between the US and South Africa plummeted. In an interview with the BBC, Meyer said the facts about violence in South Africa had been misrepresented and he never got a clear answer about where this “misdirection of information” was coming from. Last year, Trump accused South Africa of white genocide in a meeting with President Cyril Ramaphosa at the White House and launched a US refugee pathway for Afrikaners.
Since last year, nearly 13,000 refugees were admitted to the United States and all but three were South African. Among them was Lielie, the name she uses publicly, who moved with her family to Texas from South Africa, where they had lived on her stepfather’s farm, growing macadamia nuts and bananas. Despite walls around the house, an electric fence, and eight bull terriers, she said she felt “fear the whole time” and that on three occasions she saw people entering her property. “Nothing was stolen, we weren’t harmed, but there are friends of my husband, people that lived around us, they were brutally attacked,” she said.
She said since moving to the US under the Trump administration’s refugee pathway her life had changed, she felt safer walking around, and “my kids can actually play outside”. The Trump administration is planning to admit up to 17,500 additional white Afrikaners as refugees over the next 12 months, according to a notice sent to Congress on Tuesday. In a statement to the BBC, a White House spokeswoman said: “President Trump has provided a lifeline for Afrikaners, who are being raped, maimed, killed and driven off their property across South Africa. “While the South African government and many in the media have brushed off the horrific lived experiences of this community, the Trump administration continues to process applications for refugee status because the president has a humanitarian heart.” SJ Du Venage, who lives on South Africa’s west coast, has been trying to move to the US under the new scheme.
Du Venage is a council member of the Freedom Front Plus, a right-wing Afrikaner party, and argues that there is a “political drive towards killing white people, and killing the farmers on the farms”. “There’s absolutely an agenda to wipe us out here,” he says. Race policies or Israel – what’s really driving Trump’s fury with South Africa? Is there a genocide of white South Africans as Trump claims?
Do Afrikaners want to take Trump up on his South African refugee offer? An Afrikaner lobby group is holding a vigil on Saturday with thousands of white crosses on Washington’s National Mall to commemorate what it says are victims of “farm attacks”. Claims of genocide against white South Africans have been discredited by every political party in the country, including by those representing Afrikaners. “I’m an Afrikaner from South Africa myself,” Ambassador Meyer said, “and I can say that I’ve never experienced something of that kind.” Meyer said he would like to have a conversation with Trump about the reality of the situation, saying that as a “born Afrikaner”, he has the “legitimacy” to speak about the subject.
The ambassador helped negotiate an end to apartheid on behalf of the National Party, which was responsible for it, with now-president Cyril Ramaphosa also a key negotiator for the African National Congress party. He said the “trust” between the two men was one reason President Ramaphosa appointed him to help mend US-South Africa relations, as well as “the fact he also saw the value of me being an Afrikaner”. “But I’m not here to represent the Afrikaner only,” Meyer says. Last week, the Trump administration announced visa restrictions for those South Africans who it said were responsible for “race-based discrimination” against white people.
It also warned of further punitive actions if South African leaders did not address the issue. Police data shows the majority of victims of crime in South Africa, including on farms, are black. Farm violence, often motivated by robberies, is an issue but represents a smaller number of homicides in the country. While no politician disputes that crime is a problem in South Africa, many experts say this does not qualify as “persecution”.
Larry Bartlett, the former director of the US Refugee Assistance Programme, said it could even be “unlawful” to appropriate a programme defined in law for people who “really have no chance to go home”. He said white people who were unlikely to qualify as refugee in law were taking scarce opportunities meant for those fleeing war or ethnic cleansing. The programme has its critics among Afrikaners in South Africa too. “Why single out the white Afrikaner to say this group qualifies to flee to the US?
This country suffers gender-based violence. Why not single out women?” Rudi Swanepoel, a pastor from Johannesburg told the BBC. Swanepoel thinks it is not persecution but a “loss of privilege” that is causing some Afrikaners to feel aggrieved. “To use the metaphor of a cake, 30, 40 years ago the white people of South Africa controlled the cake,” he says.
“Since democracy came, the obvious reality was we had to now start sharing that cake and those privileges.” Alongside “rural safety”, the Trump administration has raised other concerns about South Africa, including targets for companies to increase non-white employment and a law allowing the state, in exceptional circumstances, to expropriate land without compensation. These are aimed at redressing historic racial inequality. Meyer wants Trump’s executive order against South Africa, which underpins the refugee pathway, revoked. He said South Africa had never prevented people from leaving and had addressed all the US concerns, stressing that the land expropriation law is awaiting a court judgement.
“South Africa has challenges with the prevention of crime and with the combatting of crime,” he said. But he added: “It’s a problem all around. It’s not rural. It’s not farm attacks only.
If you look at the total picture, the huge levels of crime in the black townships of South Africa are the biggest concern, proportionally, far more than anything else.” He said he would encourage the US to help South Africa with resources on combatting crime, including by providing equipment to speed up reaction times. Meyer also has a message for Afrikaners protesting against “farm attacks” by laying white crosses in Washington. “It doesn’t help us to raise a voice outside, if we are not committed to doing something inside the country,” he says.
