In a remarkable Oval Office exchange on Wednesday, US President Donald Trump publicly pressed South African President Cyril Ramaphosa over the treatment of South Africa’s white ethnic minority, further amplifying false claims that the country is presiding over a genocide.
The Trump administration has taken up the fate of South Africa’s white farmers as a special cause: The White House meeting comes the week after an initial group of white South Africans arrived in the US, designated by Trump as refugees fleeing racial discrimination.
Trump has criticised a law that would permit the seizure and redistribution of land to address racial inequalities rooted in the legacy of apartheid. South Africa says it has not seized any land under the law and Trump’s claim that white South Africans face genocide has no factual basis. Amid Trump’s moves, US-South Africa relations are deteriorating.
Here’s what you need to know about the situation for white farmers in South Africa.
Afrikaners are descendants of primarily Dutch and other Northern European settlers who began to settle in South Africa in the 17th century. After South Africa gained self-governance from the British at the turn of the 20th century, white South Africans assumed governing power in a brutal system of racial separation known as apartheid, in which non-white South Africans were forcibly relocated from their homes and segregated from white South Africans.
Vast inequities persist more than three decades after apartheid rule ended in 1994 and longtime political prisoner Nelson Mandela was elected the country’s first black president. White South Africans make up less than 10% of the population but own about three-quarters of the country’s individually owned farms and agricultural land, according to a South African government land audit. Research by the South Africa Human Rights Commission also found they hold almost all the country’s wealth.
Afrikaners make up just more than half of South Africa’s white population; most of the rest are English-speaking descendants of British settlers. Trump’s executive order issued in early February, however, only specifies refugee status for Afrikaners who are “escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination”.
Since the ANC took power in 1994, it has been a goal of the South African government to rectify the inequities of land ownership caused by decades-long policies that forcibly removed black people from their homes.
In 1913, three years after the country gained self-governance from Britain, a law called the Natives Land Act limited African land ownership to 7% overall. It also prevented black South Africans from purchasing land and forced many to leave their homes for less developed and less desirable areas.
In the decades after apartheid rule officially began in 1948, the government started a policy of “separate development”, in which land was consolidated according to racial categories, leading to further displacement of black people from their homes, according to Nancy Jacobs, a professor of South African history at Brown University.
“Well over a million people were forcibly removed and lost their land and were picked up and sent to areas more thoroughly segregated,” she said.
By the time the apartheid system was dismantled, black South Africans held about 13% of the land. The new government decided to redistribute land on a “willing buyer, willing seller” basis — meaning the government would have to pay owners for the land it claimed for redistribution. That process was slow and largely unsuccessful, according to Jacobs.
When Ramaphosa assumed the presidency in 2018, he supported the policy of expropriation without compensation, as long as the practice wouldn’t threaten the economy or food security. After lengthy debates surrounding the law and its constitutionality, he signed the practice into law in January.
The law specifies limited conditions under which land can be seized without compensation, such as when it is not being farmed or used or is abandoned, and it requires a judge’s review before seizure. No land has yet been taken under the law, South Africa says.
But the move inflamed tensions with South Africa’s white, largely Afrikaner farmers and caught the attention of the international right-wing, especially online. An apartheid-era call-and-response song Kill the Boer — a term for Afrikaners — which far-left party leader Julius Malema chanted at political rallies, has drawn particular ire.
In 2023, after Malema led the chant at a huge rally in Johannesburg, billionaire Trump adviser Elon Musk, who was born in South Africa, said Malema and his followers were “openly pushing for genocide of white people in South Africa”.
Trump repeated that sentiment, that white South Africans face “genocide”, when announcing he was admitting Afrikaners as refugees. South African government officials say that allegation lacks any evidence.
Well before South Africa passed its expropriation law, Trump condemned the alleged treatment of white South Africans amid the government’s push for land reform, as the issue gained prominence among US conservatives.
In his first term, he directed his secretary of state Mike Pompeo to “closely study” land and farm seizures and the “killing of farmers” in South Africa, after a Fox News broadcast in which Tucker Carlson falsely stated South Africa had begun seizing land from white farmers without compensation. The South African government swiftly rejected Trump’s claims, pledging to “speed up the pace of land reform in a careful and inclusive manner that does not divide our nation”.
At the same time, a movement to push Trump to allow Afrikaners into the US to flee violence had also started: An online petition called “Genocide of whites in South Africa” gathered 23,000 signatures in 2018.
Far-right movements in North America, Europe and Australia pointed to the treatment of white farmers in South Africa as examples of anti-white discrimination, claiming they are being targeted and killed at disproportionate rates and are at risk of having their land seized by South Africa’s government.
But the data indicates otherwise: Of the nearly 7,000 people killed in the country late last year, 12 were killed in farm attacks and only one of them was a farmer, according to official statistics reported by the BBC. Agence France-Presse reported in March online disinformation often distorts the data on the frequency of farm attacks. South Africa’s government has condemned killings and attacks against farmers but says the problem should be understood in the context of violent crime across the society. Ramaphosa has pointed out most victims of violent crime are black and poor.
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