Is there a genocide of white South Africans as Trump claims?

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Odoo, providing tools for businesses across industries into one fully integrated platform. Whatever your business needs, Odoo is committed to providing it. Learn more at odoo.com. 150 years ago, they were hunting us down to kill us and now they're hunting down immigrants to deport them. This is First America, the true story of how the United States came to be and how we got to this present moment. Listen to First America wherever you get your podcasts.

0:49There's an empty chair for Donald Trump at the G20 summit in Johannesburg this weekend. That's because for the first time in its history, the United States is essentially boycotting the big annual meeting of the world's largest economies. In recent months, the American government has had a dramatic falling out with South Africa, driven by President Trump's belief that white farmers in South Africa are being persecuted. But it's a genocide that's taking place that you people don't want to write about. Farmers are being killed. They happen to be white. But whether they're white or black makes no difference to me.

1:25South Africa's government says the claims of a white genocide are widely discredited. But still, Trump has embraced the allegations and begun opening the United States up as a safe haven for white Afrikaners that his administration now classifies as refugees. From the BBC, I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C. with Tristan Redman in London. And today on The Global Story, how the idea of a white genocide upended America's relationship with South Africa.

1:58To understand where Donald Trump's claims of a white genocide come from, we've been speaking to one of our BBC colleagues who lived in South Africa for more than a decade. His name is Andrew Harding, and he's reported extensively on race relations and disparities and what is actually happening on the ground in South Africa. But before we get to that interview, I think we ought to walk through how the relationship between the United States and South Africa broke down so badly to the point that we now see the United States boycotting the G20 there. So this idea that white people are being persecuted in South Africa isn't anything new to Trump.

2:38Well, now to a fascinating and significant story the media have all but ignored. South Africa is a diverse country, but the South African government would like to make it much less diverse. Back in 2018, in his first term, he watched on Fox News a segment about white killings in South Africa that was presented by Tucker Carlson, the well-known right-wing presenter. An embattled minority of farmers, mostly Afrikaans speaking, is being targeted in a wave of barbaric and horrifying murders. But instead of protecting them, the government just passed a law allowing it to seize their farms without any compensation.

3:14After that segment aired, Trump told his secretary of state to look into, quote, the large scale killing of farmers. That's right. But I would say that where this story really began to filter into the mainstream American public conversation was earlier this year in 2025 when Donald Trump returned to the White House. So it's January 2025. Trump's just been inaugurated. And around the same time, South Africa introduces a new land law, which we're going to get into in a little bit with Andrew Harding. But it seems to have set off a chain reaction in the U.S., particularly on the political right. And we saw President Trump very quickly take a number of policy moves directed at South Africa over criticism of what he deemed its massive human rights violations.

4:06South Africa is one of the latest countries President Donald Trump has targeted since taking office. In early February, it was on a Friday, I recall, he issued this executive order. With the executive order charging that the Expropriation Act signed into law by President Suri Ramaphosa was a shocking disregard for its citizens' rights. And it did two major things. President Trump is withholding aid from South Africa. Well, you plan to cut aid across other African nations, and why South Africa? No, it's only South Africa. Terrible things are happening in South Africa. One is that it cut off aid to South Africa.

4:41And the other is that it offered a refugee resettlement opportunity for Afrikaners from South Africa. He's directing the U.S. to help Afrikaners, the descendants of European settlers, relocate through refugee programs. Whom President Trump said were victims of unjust racial discrimination.

5:03And at this point, there are a lot of people in the US who are wondering where Trump's sudden fixation with South Africa comes from. And the answer is partly that they echo the views of Elon Musk, who at this point is still, if you remember, the head of the Department of Government Efficiency and is famously South African. And he's been tweeting and posting on social media about South Africa for some years. I mean, one example is that he wrote on Twitter on X in 2023. They are, quote, openly pushing for genocide of white people in South Africa. But around the same time in February, a court in South Africa directly responds to these allegations that Donald Trump and Elon Musk have been making.

5:48The court rules that claims of white genocide are, quote, not real. And yet over the last several months, we've seen the Trump administration continue to echo those claims. They've elevated the status of Afrikaners, these white Afrikaners, as refugees, so much so that if we fast forward to May of this year, we saw the U.S. government pay for a charter flight of 59 Afrikaners, who it deems as refugees, to come to the United States. And so it's in this atmosphere that a couple of weeks later, the South African president, Cyril Ramaphosa, arrives in Washington for a make or break meeting with Donald Trump.

6:29Thank you very much, everyone. It's a great honor to be with the president of South Africa, President Ramaphosa. I remember at the time that people thought that it was going to be polite and businesslike. It turned out to be anything but. He is a man who is certainly in some circles really respected, other circles a little bit less respected, like all of us in all fairness. Ramaphosa sits down in the Oval Office and Donald Trump springs a series of surprises on him. One of the first things he does is he asks for the lights to be dimmed. Excuse me, turn the lights down. Turn the lights down and just put this on.

7:11It's right behind you. And he plays a video to everyone who's in the Oval Office.

7:22The first bit, which was quite arresting, is an opposition figure from South Africa singing a song, Shoot the Boor. A boor is another word for an Afrikaner. Shoot the farmer. These are burial sites right here. Burial sites. Over a thousand. The video that Trump plays also shows rows of white crosses stretching off into the distance along a rural road. Each one of those white things you see is a cross. And there's approximately a thousand of them. They're all white farmers, the family of white farmers. Trump says that these are burial sites of over a thousand white farmers. However, it's since been fact-checked and these crosses were not graves at all.

8:09They were crosses that were put up as part of a memorial or a demonstration. Ramaphosa tries to respond in real time to the video. Let me clarify that because what you saw, the speeches that were being made, one, that is not government policy. But nonetheless, it's hard to escape the feeling that Ramaphosa has been ambushed. So they come out of that meeting and it looks like South African-U.S. relations have hit rock bottom. And if you fast forward to October of this year, the Trump administration says it's going to limit the number of refugees admitted to the United States to 7 ,500 over the next year.

8:50And in those very few admissions, it's going to give priority to white South Africans. That's right. And it was a huge shift from the previous year where you had a cap of over 100 ,000 refugees who would be allowed into the United States. And so because of an accumulation of everything we have seen with U.S. policy toward South Africa over the last several months, it was pretty clear that Donald Trump, he had made it clear that he was not planning on attending those G20 meetings in South Africa. The initial plan was that the United States would still have some representation, that the president was going to send his vice president, J.D.

9:28Vance, in his place. But then just the other week, we saw that there was an abrupt change in plans. Even J.D. Vance pulls out and Trump posts on Truth Social, it's a total disgrace that the G20 will be held in South Africa. Afrikaners are being killed and slaughtered and their land and farms are being illegally confiscated. And Trump went on to add that no U.S. government official will attend. Now, this all got a little murky in the last 24 hours and descended into a sort of war of words as we were heading into the studio to record. We have received notice from the United States about a change of mind about participating in the summit.

10:21The South African president told reporters that the United States wanted to re-engage on the G20. The White House called that development fake news and insisted that they are not planning to participate in G20 talks. The United States is not participating in official talks at the G20 in South Africa. I saw the South African president running his mouth a little bit against the United States and the president of the United States earlier today. And that language is not appreciated. And so that has us wondering what's really going on. You're in my earphones, definitely. And to find out, we have called up an expert in South Africa's recent history.

10:57Hi, so I'm Andrew Harding. I am a BBC correspondent, have been so for more than 30 years. I spent 14 years living and working in South Africa. Well, Edru, we wanted to have you on the show because we want to understand how bad are relations between South Africa and the United States? And what is really the crux of their disagreement? So the idea that has been circulating for many years is that white farmers are being targeted as victims of crime, not simply because there's a lot of crime in South Africa and they happen to be generally seen as richer people in a sea of poverty. No, the theory is that they're being targeted perhaps with some shadowy government support as part of a broader campaign essentially to get rid of white South Africans, specifically Afrikaners, who are a particular subsection, if you like, of the white population.

12:02Can you explain to us exactly who the Afrikaners are, please? So Afrikaners are descendants of Dutch settlers who arrived in Cape Town in the south of South Africa centuries ago. They have their own language, which is very similar to Dutch, but has evolved. It's actually a very popular language now these days, spoken by more people than just the white Afrikaans population. There are about four and a half million Afrikaners. They make up more than seven percent of the population. So they're a pretty significant minority. And they're spread across the country, but they also have a big role in the farming community in South Africa.

12:41Well, what we want to do today with you, please, Andrew, is to understand the context that's led to this tense moment between the United States and South Africa. And we want to start with the end of apartheid in 1994. Apartheid was the system of racial segregation that lasted for a very long time in South Africa and ended in 1994 with free and fair elections. One of the key issues that came out of the end of apartheid was land ownership and how it should be divided according to race. Can you briefly talk us through what that debate was? So during apartheid, black communities were divided and segregated into so-called homelands.

13:24These were often far from good farmland, far from urban centers. and they were basically almost imprisoned there. You needed passes to get out, in and out. They were used to some extent to enable this white minority to keep control of this black majority. And so when democracy came, of course, there was a big push for land reform. But the new democratic South African government was under huge pressures. and land reform was slow, and it was, as I think many people in the governing ANC now admit, badly carried out. But generally, there's not much really good land in South Africa. A lot of it's really quite dusty and rocky, but the really good South African land is still in the hands mostly of white farmers.

14:22And white farmers being just white farmers or white Afrikaners? It's a mixture, white and Afrikaner. And although there are black emerging farmers all over the country, they don't have the kind of numbers that they really should have by now, all these years later. And it's failed for all sorts of reasons. A lack of money, institutional failures, corruption, the policies that were put in place. There are no end of reasons why it hasn't been successful. But of course, it has left, to some extent, a degree of resentment and frustration, particularly in these areas where there are these seas in rural South Africa of black poverty, of inequality that is not getting better.

15:15And people see these farms, these islands of wealth, and there is resentment. Well, Andrew, I do recall hearing that there was a law passed in South Africa in January, and this seems to have been the catalyst for many of the actions we've seen since from the Trump administration. Can you walk us through what that land reform law was? What was it meant to do? What did it mean for white Afrikaners? So this is a law passed in January this year that allows for expropriation of land, seizure of land without compensation. The fear is that this could usher in a kind of uncontrolled land grab. Now, the government insists that's not the case, that the rule of law still exists, that this is a law that would only be used to take land that's perhaps not being used at a time when South Africa and the government feel huge pressure on them from an angry black underclass who feel they've been denied economic share of the economy for decades.

16:25and that the South African government could perhaps accelerate that by using this law to take land and give it to black people, black businesses, black individuals. There are heavy, strong critics within the coalition government of this law. People worry, particularly white parties allied to white interests, capital interests who are worried about where this is going. But it's not, I think it's too simplistic to say that this means South Africa is heading towards seizures of white-owned land on racial grounds and that this is the end of the rule of law and economic stability in South Africa. Andrew, this tension around land ownership seems to be the crux of the accusation around white genocide that you were referring to earlier, that that is a term we have begun to hear, certainly here in American political circles, but elsewhere.

17:26And that's what I wanted to ask you is, when did you first hear this term white genocide? I arrived in Johannesburg in 2009. Oh, interesting. But it's that many years ago that you first heard it pop up. It is that long, yes. It would crop up in court cases when, for instance, some nationalist black political parties like the economic freedom fighters would sing traditional anti-apartheid struggle songs, which would contain phrases like kill the farmer. Now, for white farmers, Afrikaans farmers, for some of them, this was deeply offensive, alarming. They would go to court. They would generally lose because the argument was, look, these are struggle songs.

18:14The phrases used, the language used was part of our battle against a racist white authoritarian regime. You know, you have to understand the historical context. But the phrase white genocide just started creeping in more and more. or Africana activists have pointed to the fact that there are a lot of murders in South Africa. There are a fair number of murders targeting farmers because, of course, they are relatively wealthy compared with most people in rural South Africa. So if you're a farmer, you're probably going to be white. You're probably going to be a target of robbery. And if you see things through a racial lens, you might think, well, as an Afrikaner, as a white, I am being targeted for my race.

19:05And then if you are fed these, frankly, conspiracy theories, because there's never been any proof to them that there is a government shadowy plot behind some of this violence, then you are more likely to buy into this idea. It's a myth of a white genocide. There is no white genocide happening in South Africa. The statistics do not bear it out. There is no deliberate policy that anyone has ever successfully shown. The fact is that South Africa is in rural terms quite a violent culture. There's a lot of crime. There's a lot of burglary. And when you talk to the police, they say, yes, we'd love to be out there guarding the farms, but we don't have the numbers.

19:47We have to direct our resources to where most of the murders and most of the crime is happening. And then how did you see this phrase, this claim of a white genocide spread outside of South Africa? Afrikaans farmers, or at least some of them, began to use this phrase more and more and got better on social media at pushing this narrative. What I think is interesting is that at about the time that some people in America started echoing this talk of a white genocide, I started hearing it in Russia. In 2019, for instance, I went actually on holiday to Moscow. And when I arrived there, Russian friends, people I knew there were all saying, oh, you poor thing.

20:38There's a white genocide. Are you not scared? And it turned out that Russian state media had been aggressively pushing this idea of a white genocide in exactly the same language as the MAGA movement was doing. What it struck me there in Russia was that this was an authoritarian government which saw an opportunity essentially to say to its population, it's scary out there. People who are brown or black are causing violence against white people in South Africa. It could happen to you here. That's why we're keeping you safe. That's why we're stopping immigration. We don't want foreigners coming here.

21:19And it was, I think, pretty clear to me that to some degree in philosophical, political, however you see it, there was an explicit link there between the thoughts of Vladimir Putin and the sort of ideas that we were hearing from Trump and his supporters. Well, how is this message spreading from South Africa internationally? So to Russia, as you mentioned, or to the United States, what is the actual process that's leading to the story spreading in this way? So it's a mixture of social media. And it's also the fact that there are now lots of videos of the aftermath of some of these Robberies, because robberies are often accompanied by acts of violence.

22:10And particularly, imagine in the context of a farm attack, the burglars, the attackers are after guns often. They're after cash. Those are often kept in safes. So there may be torture involved. People are tied up and forced to say where the safe is. What's the code? Where are the guns? and often as well there will be a racial element to the violence in that perhaps there is either accurately or not an idea that the white farmers mistreat their black farm workers who are often very poorly paid, who do difficult menial jobs and feel resentful at seeing these white-owned farms in their communities living an entirely separate life.

23:02And those videos, often very graphic, spread online. And when they're accompanied by messages that look, there's a white genocide, you can see how they can become quite powerful on social media.

23:25150 years ago, they were hunting us down to kill us. and now they're hunting down immigrants to deport them. This is First America, the true story of how the United States came to be and how we got to this present moment. Listen to First America wherever you get your podcasts.

23:56Well, Andrew, after that law was put forth in South Africa, I know here in Washington, D.C., I was covering the White House at the time. We saw a series of steps, policy decisions that the Trump administration made. In early February, President Trump issued this executive order halting aid to South Africa, but notably also one major thing he did, and I will say it didn't make a lot of headlines at the time, was that he called for allowing white Afrikaners to be admitted to the United States as refugees, to give them refugee status. Did that surprise you at the time? It seemed extraordinary, yes.

24:36I think to South Africans who actually with customary good humor, one of their first reactions was to kind of laugh it off. Another day in the life of an oppressed white South African. My husband brought me an iced coffee today because the most oppressive thing about this country is actually the sun. To make jokes and memes about what they felt was the absurdity of this. Somehow, you know, in relative terms, these are wealthy people in South Africa, farmers, and that somehow here they were, not unrelated presumably to the fact that they were white, being given a red carpet to the front of the queue to access America.

25:15We should say that this refugee scheme hasn't been supported by everyone in the Afrikaner community in South Africa. There are Afrikaners who've rejected the idea that they're being persecuted and have said, not in my name. There's a group of prominent writers and academics who've written an open letter on this, and they've reached out to American politicians. But there are others who say that they have been persecuted and they've sought refuge in the United States. And our colleague, Noamia Iqbal, spoke with one of the recent arrivals in the U.S. back in May. And we're going to play you a little bit of that tape.

25:53If you're white, you're wrong in South Africa. You're a land thief. You are a racist. I'm tired of being told, just because I'm white, I'm a thief. Just because I'm white, I'm wrong in this. I had nothing to do with apartheid. Nothing, nothing, nothing. I mean, there's a sense there you hear from him that he feels that he's being punished for the sins of his ancestors. Yes, and that is a thorny topic that I think will never go away in South Africa. The extent to which the slate was wiped clean in 1994. We're in a democracy now. Everyone should be treated equally. There should not be an advantage given to black businessmen, to black entrepreneurs.

26:35Everybody should have the same status. And those who say, no, actually, to undo the legacy of all those generations of apartheid, of people being taken away from their land, separated from families, the culture of violence that grew up then, that actually that is something that the country collectively has to acknowledge and keep acknowledging and working towards making South Africa less unequal. and to find ways to address the legacy, which is still clearly there. So Afrikaner refugees still seem to be a sticking point between the US and South Africa. This weekend, the US is going to boycott the G20 summit in South Africa because Donald Trump feels so strongly about the issue.

27:26But what does this actually mean? What does it actually mean for South Africa for the US to pull out of this big summit? What we've seen in recent years is a growing sense that America, the West, is losing ground, not just in South Africa, but across the whole continent. That it is China, particularly, that is now the most influential force. China is certainly putting a huge amount of effort and investment into Africa. And Russia as well, diplomatically, is punching way above its weight on its diplomatic missions and engagements with African countries. So I think the first thing to say is this is a huge missed opportunity for America to remind South Africa and the continent in general that it is engaged, that it is a partner.

28:23This is the youngest continent, It's a huge, growing population. That could be an incredible opportunity for the world, for manufacturing, for all sorts of things in the future. But it's an opportunity that needs foreign investment to make sure it happens. And right now, that foreign investment, those profits to come, they're not going the way of Western democracies. At the moment, it looks going towards China. And it feels to me, and it's felt to me for a long time when I was living in South Africa, that European countries were simply falling behind. There was simply the legacy of an era when Britain and America were respected and very influential.