White supremacist ideology and false claims that South Africa’s Afrikaner minority is being racially persecuted pose a threat to the country’s sovereignty and national security, the country’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, has warned.
Since taking office for his second US presidential term in January, Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed without evidence that South Africa’s government is seizing land and encouraging violence against white farmers.
“Some in our society still adhere to notions of racial superiority and seek to maintain racial privilege,” Ramaphosa said on Monday at a conference of his African National Congress (ANC) party, which is the largest in South Africa’s governing coalition and has led every national government since the first post-apartheid democratic elections in 1994.
He continued: “The vehement opposition by some groups to our policies of transformation and redress conveniently align with wider notions of white supremacy and white victimhood, fed by false claims of the persecution of white Afrikaners in our country. The propaganda of these false claims has real implications for our sovereignty, international relations and national security.”
Both Trump and the South African-born billionaire Elon Musk have promoted the false claim that there is a “white genocide” in South Africa, bringing what was previously a niche, far-right conspiracy theory to a far wider audience.
Without naming either man, Ramaphosa said in his speech: “It is essential that we counter this narrative and defeat this agenda … This is a campaign that needs to be launched not only in our country, but globally as well, particularly to address the notions that some globally are perpetrating about what is happening in South Africa.”
The US boycotted last month’s G20 leaders summit in Johannesburg and argued that a consensus could not be reached in its absence. The meeting, led by South Africa, produced a final communique that cited the importance of tackling issues such as gender inequality and climate breakdown, positions that have become anathema to Trump’s agenda.
The 2026 summit will take place at the Trump National Doral Miami golf resort in Florida, which is owned by the Trump Organization.
The US has invited Poland instead of South Africa to the first meetings of its G20 presidency later this month. The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, justified the decision, claiming: “The South African government’s appetite for racism and tolerance for violence against its Afrikaner citizens have become embedded as core domestic policies.”
The US has said it will take just 7,500 people as refugees this year, most of them white South Africans, while closing its refugee programme to people fleeing war and persecution.
Afrikaners, who make up about 4% of South Africa’s population, or about 2.5 million people, are descendants of Dutch colonisers and French Huguenot refugees who came to South Africa in the late 17th century. They led the apartheid regime from 1948, which violently repressed the black majority, while keeping white people safe and wealthy.
White people remain many times wealthier than black South Africans and in 2017 owned 72% of private agricultural land, according to a government land audit. While there have been horrific, high-profile murders of white farmers and their families in recent decades, there is no evidence that they are systematically targeted because of their race or that they suffer disproportionately from South Africa’s high violent crime rate.
