Donald Trump’s offer of political asylum to South Africa’s white minority, just days after blocking genuine refugees from travelling to the US, followed years of campaigning by an Afrikaner group that has promoted “white genocide” conspiracy theories while also lobbying on behalf of Elon Musk’s business interests.
Last week, Trump issued an executive order that misrepresented a new South African law, the Expropriation Act, as a racist move to persecute white Afrikaners by seizing their farms without compensation.
The law is intended to address deep inequalities as the result of apartheid and colonial legislation that resulted in the white minority, who make up just 7% of South Africa’s population, still owning more than 70% of agricultural land more than three decades after the end of the apartheid system imposed by the Afrikaner-dominated government. It permits expropriation in exceptional circumstances, such as abandoned land, but generally requires “just and equitable” compensation.
That did not stop Trump from falsely claiming: “South Africa is confiscating land, and treating certain classes of people VERY BADLY.”
The president’s order came after years of lobbying by an Afrikaner rights groups, AfriForum, which caught Trump’s attention during his first term by claiming that white farmers in South Africa were being murdered for political ends and to seize their land. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) civil rights organisation has described AfriForum’s leaders as white supremacists in suits and ties.
Musk, who was raised in apartheid South Africa and is now a member of Trump’s inner circle as head of the “department of government efficiency”, has echoed claims portraying Afrikaner farmers as victims of racist murders and suggesting that a genocide against whites is imminent.
However, the tech billionaire appears to be leveraging that false narrative to challenge affirmative action laws that conflict with attempts to sell his Starlink satellite network in South Africa.
Musk has accused South Africa of “openly racist ownership laws” as he applied pressure on the government to exempt Starlink from regulations to uplift people of colour oppressed by apartheid by requiring major business deals to include Black investors. He has rejected a requirement that foreign investors in the country’s telecoms sector provide 30% of the equity in the South African part of the enterprise to Black-owned businesses.
AfriForum is campaigning on Musk’s behalf by claiming that Starlink is being prevented from doing business in South Africa because it is “too white” and is subject to “strict race-based criteria”.
Musk and the Afrikaner rights group have both sought to turn history on its head by linking the killing of white farmers, land redistribution laws and affirmative action programmes into a common narrative of state-sponsored persecution of racial minorities by the ruling African National Congress.
AfriForum has called apartheid a “so-called” historical injustice. Its chief executive, Kallie Kriel, also said that apartheid was not a crime against humanity because not enough people were killed during the more than four decades of white minority rule.
In May 2018, Kriel and his deputy, Ernst Roets, travelled to the US to lobby the Trump administration in wake of the ANC’s decision to redistribute land and to highlight what AfriForum called the “persecution of South Africa’s minorities”.
The pair exploited South Africa’s high murder rate, including of white farmers, to characterise the killings of Afrikaner landowners as racially targeted. They also played on the legacy of President Robert Mugabe in neighboring Zimbabwe who unleashed violence against white landowners in the early 2000s to prop up his unpopular regime by redistributing land.
But the deaths of South African white farmers are mostly the result of the country’s high crime rate rather than political targeting by the government. No farmers who have been murdered have then had their land confiscated.
In 2018, Kriel and Roets met John Bolton, Trump’s national security adviser, Senator Ted Cruz’s staff and conservative thinktanks in Washington.
Roets appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show to claim that Afrikaner farmers were being “tortured to death on farms in unusual ratios”. Carlson tweeted a clip of the interview with a caption: “White Farmers are being brutally murdered in South Africa for their land. And no one is brave enough to talk about it.”
Trump was watching and tweeted an instruction to his then secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, to “closely study the South African land farm seizures and expropriations and large scale killing of farmers”.
The president went on to call that “a massive Human Rights VIOLATION, at a minimum and is happening for all to see”.
Other far-right South Africans pushed similar messages claiming that whites were being victimised by the post-apartheid democratic order. Simon Roche, head of Suidlanders, a group that claims to be preparing the “Protestant Christian South African minority for a coming violent revolution”, appeared on Alex Jones’s Infowars channel claiming that white people in South Africa “expect to see a genocide against them”.
AfriForum officials also travelled to New York last July for the US launch of the Afrikaner Foundation to “represent the Afrikaner cause internationally”. Roets was appointed to lead the foundation and appeared as a guest speaker at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington and addressed New York Young Republicans as well as visiting the US Capitol and making television appearances.
The Afrikaner Foundation and AfriForum are both part of the Solidarity Movement in South Africa, also headed by Roets. The Solidarity Movement said last week that it would be holding discussions with the Trump administration in the near future and expected to hold a meeting at the White House.
In September, as Musk’s dispute with the South African government over Starlink ratcheted up, AfriForum launched a campaign on his behalf that claimed Black empowerment laws were leaving white farmers without communications and vulnerable to attack by keeping the satellite network out of South Africa.
“By prohibiting Starlink from operating in South Africa because of racist criteria, [the government] is depriving rural communities of a reliable alternative that may save lives,” it said.
The statement ends with: “Stop the racism and fight together with AfriForum.”
The day after Trump signed his executive order, South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, called Musk in an attempt to defuse the row. The country’s communications minister, Solly Malatsi, has suggested an exemption for Starlink from the Black empowerment rules, but other members of the government object and are not likely to look favourably on Musk after Trump’s intervention.
Musk and AfriForum are not the only ones who have Trump’s ear on South Africa. Other tech billionaires close to the president were also born in the country, including other members of the “PayPal mafia” raised under apartheid.
Trump also plays golf regularly with Gary Player, the renowned South African golfer who in the 1960s declared his support for apartheid and its architect, Henrik Verwoerd. Player also described the country’s Black population as “alien barbarians”. Trump awarded Player the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2020.
In December, Player took a South African mining entrepreneur, Reon Barnard, for a game with Trump where they were photographed with Musk.
Joel Pollak, editor of Breitbart, the alt-right publication, was also born in South Africa and has been tipped as a possible ambassador to the country. Pollak told the South African site, News24, that Trump’s attack on the ANC government was not unexpected and “that the new president has a coherent and long-standing desire to force change” in South Africa.
