The fringe group that planted the seed for some of Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated claims that South Africa is persecuting White farmers saw years of lobbying US politicians pay off.
At a meeting in the Oval Office, the US president lambasted his South African counterpart, Cyril Ramaphosa, in what the foreign delegation called a “well-orchestrated, well-planned” ambush. It all began with Trump asking for a video to be played that echoed the output of Afriforum, a White Afrikaners rights group that met with his allies during his first term.
“We’ve used a lot of that footage in some of our videos,” said Kallie Kriel, chief executive of Afriforum, in a voice note to Bloomberg. “I think it’s the White House’s own compilation of video material that we’ve also used.”
While the group hasn’t claimed there’s a genocide against White people in South Africa — as Trump has — or taken him up on his offer of asylum for White farmers, Kriel said it was important that issues Afriforum has highlighted were aired in the White House.
“Serious problems like property rights and infringement of human rights through racial measures and also this Kill the Boer question” are “now very clearly on the table,” he said.
Three decades after the end of White rule — during which Black people were subjugated and excluded from commercial and political life — the income of White families is on average almost five times as much as Black families, Statistics South Africa said in a January report. White people own more than 70% of rural land owned by individuals even though they make up around 7% of the national population.
Killings of farmers — another specter raised by Trump — have been falling over the last 20 years.
That’s even as more than 27,000 people are murdered annually in South Africa, with a disproportionate number of the victims being young men in low-income areas such as predominantly Black townships. No land has been seized by the state since apartheid ended.
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