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Fact-checking Trump’s claims of white farmer ‘genocide’ in South Africa [1]
['Amy Sherman']
Date: 2025-05-21 14:51:32-04:00
This article originally appeared on PolitiFact.
President Donald Trump recently allowed 59 white Afrikaner farmers to resettle in the U.S. as refugees, saying they are losing their land in South Africa and are targets of genocide.
READ MORE: Trump suspended the refugee program. Why is he inviting white South Africans to find a new home in the U.S.?
When a reporter asked May 12 why he created an expedited path for Afrikaners, Trump said, “Because they’re being killed. And we don’t want to see people be killed. But it’s a genocide that’s taking place that you people don’t want to write about.”
Trump added, “White farmers are being brutally killed and their land is being confiscated in South Africa.”
Trump has shared versions of this narrative since 2018, as have others in his orbit, including Elon Musk, a Trump adviser from South Africa.
Trump’s decision about resettling Afrikaners was a reversal; he suspended all U.S. refugee admissions after taking office.
The South African government criticized Trump’s Feb. 7 executive order on allowing Afrikaner resettlement in the U.S.
“It is ironic that the executive order makes provision for refugee status in the US for a group in South Africa that remains amongst the most economically privileged, while vulnerable people in the US from other parts of the world are being deported and denied asylum despite real hardship,” the statement said.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa is slated to visit the White House on May 21.
White farmers have been murdered in South Africa. But those murders account for less than 1% of more than 27,000 annual murders nationwide. Experts said the deaths do not amount to genocide, and Trump misleads about land confiscation.
“The idea of a ‘white genocide’ taking place in South Africa is completely false,” said
Gareth Newham, who heads a justice and violence prevention program at the Institute for Security Studies in South Africa.
“As an independent Institute tracking violence and violent crime in South Africa, if there was any evidence of either a genocide or targeted violence taking place against any group based on their ethnicity this, we would be amongst the first to raise (the) alarm and provide the evidence to the world.”
There are about 2.7 million white Afrikaners, who are descendants of Dutch and French settlers, in South Africa. About 80% of the people living in South Africa are Black. From 1948 until the early 1990s, South Africa lived under apartheid rule, racial segregation that gave only white people power and forced Black South Africans to live separately from white people.
South Africa crime data and its limitations
In response to our email seeking evidence for Trump’s statements, the White House provided no data. A spokesperson said Afrikaners told U.S. officials about violent attacks, death threats, vandalism and racial slurs against farmers.
Newham said the primary motive for almost all farm attacks is robbery, which has long been documented.
“Attacks where there may be evidence of racial or political motives (i.e. slogans written on the wall at a scene of a crime, or words spoken by the attacker according to the victim), are exceedingly rare and make up only a few percent of the cases recorded,” Newham said.
The majority of murder victims nationwide are poor, under- or unemployed young Black males, Newham said.
WATCH: White South Africans arrive in U.S. after receiving refugee status from Trump
“Murder victimisation is far more correlated to class, gender and location than race,” Newham said. About half of murders take place in about 12% of the precincts, “primarily townships or poor areas in metropolitan cities mostly populated by black African people.”
The South African Police Service’s crime report for the period from April 1, 2022, to March 31, 2023, shows there were 51 murders on farms of a total of 27,494 murders nationwide. But the data has limitations.
The race of farm murder victims is not consistently recorded in official data, said Anthony Kaziboni, a senior researcher at the University of Johannesburg’s Centre for Social Development in Africa.
While anecdotal evidence suggests many victims are white, other victims are Black or nonwhite, Kaziboni said. “Media reports sometimes mention race, but these are sporadic and not methodologically robust enough to support claims of systemic racial targeting.”
Nechama Brodie, a journalist who wrote a book on farm murders and has fact-checked the topic, told PolitiFact that the South African Police Services has not always been effective at creating a farm murder count. One challenge is deciding who is counted as a farmer because there are commercial farms and “smallholdings,” which can simply be plots of land.
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[1] Url:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/fact-checking-trumps-claims-of-white-farmer-genocide-in-south-africa
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