Relations between South Africa and the US have deteriorated to a point where what were once domestic South African disputes have become matters of American foreign policy.
Washington has raised concerns about violence against farmers, the “Kill the Boer” chant, expropriation, race-based economic policy and South Africa’s relationships with countries such as Russia, China and Iran. The Trump administration has gone further, creating a refugee pathway specifically for Afrikaners and other South African minorities it considers victims of racial discrimination. In May 2026, President Donald Trump increased the US refugee-admissions ceiling for the fiscal year from 7,500 to 17,500, with the additional places allocated to Afrikaners. The presidential determination explicitly cited what it called “racially motivated violence”.
As an Afrikaner and a South African, I believe Washington has identified several real problems. But those problems have now been forced into a racial morality play that mischaracterises South Africa and may ultimately make our racial divisions worse.
The starting point should be the facts.
Farm attacks
Violence against farmers and farming communities is real. It is brutal, psychologically consequential and insufficiently addressed by the South African state. But the available evidence does not support the claim that South Africa is experiencing a systematic campaign of racial extermination against white farmers.
The Institute for Security Studies notes that the 49 murders on farms recorded by AfriForum during the 2023-24 financial year represented about 0.2% of South Africa’s 27,621 murders that year. The 296 farm attacks recorded by AfriForum amounted to roughly 0.7% of robberies nationally. The same analysis points out that South Africa’s murder conviction rate has been only about 13% in recent years.
Those numbers do not make attacks on farmers unimportant. They place them in their proper context: South Africa has an extraordinary problem of violent crime, lawlessness and inadequate criminal justice.
Nor are the victims of rural violence exclusively white. Individual attacks may sometimes have racial dimensions, and the extraordinary brutality of some crimes understandably leads Afrikaners to experience them through the wider lens of South Africa’s racial politics. But this is different from evidence of a systemic government or societal campaign against whites.
Calling this a “white genocide” does the Afrikaner cause no favours.
Most Afrikaners live peaceably among South Africa’s black majority. We work together, employ one another, attend the same schools and universities, do business together and increasingly inhabit the same institutions. Depicting these communities as the opposing sides of an undeclared racial war collectivises both. It increasingly pushes ordinary black South Africans and ordinary Afrikaners into political camps they did not choose.
Extremists thrive in precisely this environment. Julius Malema and others can capitalise on polarisation just as easily as groups that present every crime against an Afrikaner as evidence of racial persecution.
The American request that South Africa protect rural communities from violence is therefore entirely understandable. But it should rest on a fact-based characterisation of South Africa’s crime crisis. The same reconsideration should apply to the Afrikaner refugee programme: individual South Africans who can establish genuine persecution should be treated accordingly, without converting an entire ethnic community into evidence of an imagined racial war.
A chant in context
The controversy over “Kill the Boer” is different.
The legal position is currently clear, although it is sometimes described inaccurately. In 2022, the Equality Court found that the struggle chant Dubul’ iBhunu did not constitute hate speech in the circumstances before it. The Supreme Court of Appeal upheld that outcome in 2024. In March 2025, the Constitutional Court did not issue a new judgment on the merits; it refused AfriForum leave to appeal because the application had no reasonable prospects of success.
But legality and social desirability are not the same thing.
The courts have placed considerable weight on historical context: the song originated in the struggle against apartheid and is not necessarily understood literally by those who sing it. That history deserves recognition.
Yet South Africa itself has changed, and the new context merits consideration.
Apartheid has been replaced by a constitutional democracy founded explicitly on dignity, equality and nonracial citizenship. Afrikaners are no longer representatives of an enemy regime; they are fellow citizens of a democratic state.
A society does not need to criminalise every offensive expression to conclude that some expressions are destructive to social cohesion. A chant about killing an ethnic or cultural group has a radically different resonance when repeated at a present-day political rally before thousands of citizens than when examined in a classroom, museum or historical commemoration.
This should apply consistently. Racially demeaning rhetoric directed against black South Africans should be equally unacceptable.
Expecting only the ANC to condemn Malema also misses the larger opportunity. In my view, a clear disavowal by President Cyril Ramaphosa would be an act of nation-building rather than political capitulation: an assertion that South Africans of all races may remember the struggle without carrying its language of enemies into the democratic future.
Populist politics of expropriation
The debate over land is more complicated still.
America should be precise here too. South Africa’s Expropriation Act does not authorise the indiscriminate confiscation of private property. It retains the constitutional requirement that compensation be “just and equitable”, provides for judicial recourse and identifies particular circumstances in which nil compensation may be considered just and equitable.
But that should not obscure the political trajectory that brought South Africa here.
Land ownership remains profoundly shaped by apartheid and colonial dispossession. Land reform was therefore not optional after 1994; it was integral to the democratic settlement. The ANC’s failure was less that it pursued land reform than that it administered it badly.
Its own evidence demonstrates this. In August 2026, Parliament was told that 8,913 labour-tenant claims remained outstanding, while the department responsible for land reform estimated that reducing the broader pre-1998 backlog would require about R56-billion. A parliamentary committee had already reported weak internal controls, administrative failures, fruitless expenditure and persistent delays in settling claims.
The government’s own 2019 Presidential Advisory Panel went further, identifying corruption, political interference, manipulation of beneficiary selection and institutional weaknesses in land reform.
That matters because political frustration with failed implementation created fertile ground for a more populist politics of expropriation. Malema, first through the ANC Youth League and later through the Economic Freedom Fighters, successfully turned the land question into a vehicle for racialised political mobilisation.
Rather than fixing the machinery of restitution and redistribution, the ANC increasingly accommodated the politics generated by its own administrative failures.
Washington’s concern about property rights should therefore be considered seriously – but without pretending that South Africa has embarked on indiscriminate land seizures. The better question is whether the state is drifting from administratively competent land reform towards politically expedient state intervention.
The trouble with BEE
Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment presents a similar problem.
The moral case for economic redress after apartheid is undeniable. In 1994, the South African economy was overwhelmingly owned, controlled and managed by whites, despite the country’s black majority. No democratic government could simply ignore that inheritance.
But BBBEE has actually had the effect of confusing politically mediated ownership with genuinely broad-based participation.
Even South Africa’s BBBEE Commission has acknowledged sophisticated forms of “fronting”, including transactions in which companies gain empowerment benefits while little or no meaningful economic value reaches black beneficiaries. Academic work has likewise documented the tendency of earlier BEE structures to disproportionately benefit politically connected individuals.
Thirty years after democracy, the outcome should trouble everyone.
South Africa remains one of the most unequal societies in the world. The IMF has continued to report a Gini coefficient above 60, while unemployment remains extraordinarily high. The World Bank reported that unemployment averaged 32.4% in 2025 and that close to 60% of South Africans lived below the upper-middle-income poverty line.
This is hardly evidence of successful broad-based empowerment.
The tragedy is that a policy intended to draw black South Africans into the centre of the economy has basically enriched a narrow, politically connected class while adding regulatory complexity to investment and leaving millions of black citizens outside the formal economy.
White South Africans have responded predictably. Parts of the community have become increasingly inward-looking, concentrating on their own schools, Afrikaner-to-Afrikaner businesses, language-based communities and institutions. At the other end of the spectrum, sections of the established business elite learnt how to navigate the empowerment system through relationships and transactions with politically connected black partners.
Neither outcome is the integrated, nonracial reconstruction project South Africa imagined in 1994.
There are signs that Pretoria itself recognises the problem. In March 2026, Ramaphosa said his government was reviewing BBBEE specifically to ensure that transformation could coexist with investment and growth.
Credibility problem
The final issue is foreign policy, and it provides the backdrop against which all the others are rightly being interpreted in Washington.
Over the past two decades the ANC has increasingly invested in the idea of a multipolar world: the rise of China, the expansion of BRICS and the relative decline of Western dominance. This fits comfortably with an older liberation movement tradition of anticolonialism, suspicion of Western power and a preference for a developmental state.
South Africa describes its position as non-alignment or “strategic autonomy”. Ramaphosa has said explicitly that relations with the US, Iran, Russia and China should all be understood within that framework.
The difficulty is not that South Africa talks to these countries. It should.
The difficulty is consistency and ambiguity on principles that matter.
South Africa took Israel before the International Court of Justice in December 2023 under the Genocide Convention, arguing that its conduct in Gaza required international judicial intervention. The ICJ subsequently imposed provisional measures while the case proceeded.
Yet when Russia invaded Ukraine, South Africa abstained from the March 2022 United Nations General Assembly resolution demanding that Russia end its invasion and withdraw its forces. Pretoria has repeatedly said Ukraine’s territorial integrity is sacrosanct, but has defended abstentions on the grounds that resolutions should create space for negotiation rather than deepen confrontation.
One can construct arguments for each of these positions individually. Taken together, however, they create a credibility problem for South Africa.
If international law demands assertive action in relation to Israel but diplomatic restraint in relation to Russia, outside observers will inevitably ask whether principle or political alignment explains the difference.
The same problem arises as South Africa deepens relations through BRICS with China, Russia and Iran while insisting that this represents non-alignment. Strategic autonomy is a legitimate foreign policy doctrine. But autonomy requires the ability to apply one’s principles even when doing so inconveniences one’s friends.
This is how the South African government has painted itself into a corner, which the Trump administration has capitalised on.
Domestic failures over crime, racial rhetoric, land administration and economic inclusion have intersected with a foreign policy that Washington increasingly interprets through the prism of global strategic competition.
South Africa responds by invoking sovereignty and dignity. Those principles matter. But sovereignty does not make contradictions disappear.
And somewhere in the middle of this confrontation sits my own community.
Afrikaners are being used as a political football.
We are not experiencing a genocide.
We are experiencing the consequences of living in a country with extreme levels of violent crime and a state that too often fails to protect its citizens. We carry the complicated legacy of having benefited historically from a racial order whose consequences South Africa is still struggling to overcome. We are also affected by contemporary policies and rhetoric that can sometimes make us feel that citizenship is being filtered once again through race.
Those things can all be true simultaneously.
We should not need to choose between pretending that Afrikaner grievances do not exist and pretending that South Africa is conducting a campaign of racial extermination.
Nor should Americans be asked to choose between a romanticised view of the ANC as a liberation movement and a caricature of modern South Africa as a country engaged in anti-white persecution.
South Africa needs accountability. America needs accuracy.
The interests of Afrikaners – and of the black majority among whom we live – are better served by both. DM
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