Donald Trump and the Afrikaners

US President Donald Trump’s rhetoric about white Afrikaners draws on older patterns in American conservative politics, but it also marks an important shift. 

In earlier periods, solidarity by American conservatives with white South Africa rested on two linked ideas: a racial logic that cast whites as uniquely capable of governing over blacks, and an anti-communist framework that positioned apartheid, South Africa, as part of “the West.” Today, by contrast, the American right increasingly casts Afrikaners as victims: white “refugees” supposedly under threat from Black majority rule. Under Trump, this framing has moved beyond rhetoric into state policy, with the U.S. government creating an infrastructure to assess and resettle white Afrikaans speakers in the United States. This shift reveals something significant about how race, power, and grievance now operate in conservative politics globally.

President Donald Trump meets with President of South Africa Cyril Ramaphosa, Wednesday, May 21, 2025, in the Oval Office. (Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok)

At another level, Afrikaners function as useful pawns in Trump-era foreign policy discourse, aimed less at South Africa than at a domestic U.S. audience and key allies, especially Israel, and their supporters. When Trump signed an executive order on February 7, 2025, “sanctioning” South Africa and suspending aid, the justification explicitly referenced South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. Subsequent statements by Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Republican lawmakers show that they are mobilizing the figure of the Afrikaner within broader geopolitical and ideological battles, including South Africa’s attempt to develop its foreign and trade policies.

We must unpack who Afrikaners are and how people have imagined them.

According to South Africa’s 2022 census, white people make up about 7.3 percent of the population, but the census does not specify how many are Afrikaners. Scholars generally understand Afrikaners as descendants of European settlers – primarily Dutch, German, and Huguenot (the latter religious refugees from France) – who arrived in the Dutch-ruled Cape Colony from the seventeenth century onward. These settlers then violently subjugated and controlled local African populations and enslaved people imported from Southern Africa and the Indian Ocean region.

In popular imagination, both in South Africa and abroad, Afrikaners are seen as a racially homogenous white ethnic group. That image, however, is the product of sustained political-ideological work. Beginning in the late-nineteenth century, Afrikaner elites constructed a narrative of racial purity, consolidating it through state power after World War II and, later, after apartheid was abolished in 1994, reframing themselves as victims of “reverse racism” or even “genocide.” The meeting between Trump and a South African delegation led by President Cyril Ramaphosa in Washington in May 2025 marked a low point of the latter phase of this identity politics.

Yet the idea of Afrikaners as exclusively white is historically misleading. Afrikaners have always had a racially mixed identity. Scholars estimate that Afrikaners have significant Black and Asian ancestry, though many people deny this in public discourse. Leading political figures such as Paul Kruger and Louis Botha are said to have had Black ancestry. In the 1970s, genealogist J.A. Heese documented over 1,200 European men who married non-white women between 1652 and 1800, estimating that 7.2 percent of Afrikaner ancestry was non-white and showing how earlier scholarship erased these lineages. In 1981, Cape Town academics confirmed widespread hidden and suppressed Black ancestry among both Afrikaner and English white South Africans. Afrikaners met these revelations with denial and crisis.

Even more striking is that most Afrikaans speakers are not white. The language itself has creole origins, shaped collectively by enslaved people, Indigenous communities, mixed populations, and settlers. The majority of Afrikaans speakers today are classified as “coloured.” In popular usage, coloureds are said to be “mixed,” but in truth they have varied ancestries, including descendants of enslaved people from across Southern Africa, the Indian Ocean, and Southeast Asia; Indigenous communities and of mixed unions between whites and black. White Afrikaners and coloured Afrikaans speakers share foodways, some religious traditions, and cultural practices, including music, that reflect this entanglement.

Despite this, Afrikaners have long defined their identity as white, and apartheid political power depended on enforcing that fiction. Sometimes they protest too much: By calling themselves “The Society of True Afrikaners,” late nineteenth-century language ideologues implied that others claimed Afrikaner identity differently. These contradictions persist. Some Black South Africans have even humorously questioned the “whiteness” of certain Afrikaner “refugees” taking up Trump’s offer to relocate.

Politically, however, the South African groups lobbying Trump today – Afriforum, the Solidarity Movement, and their allies – draw overwhelmingly from white Afrikaner political traditions, often overlapping with far-right and even neo-Nazi networks internationally.

The resonance of Afrikaners’ claims in the United States is not accidental. The two countries share deep structural parallels and connections. Both emerged from European settler colonialism that displaced and subjugated local populations (in the American case, settlers were more successful in this project: carrying out genocide against Indigenous peoples), and in both contexts, made whiteness the foundation of political belonging.

In South Africa, colonizers justified land seizure through the doctrine of “empty lands,” claiming that territory not governed by white Christians was effectively unowned and dismissing Indigenous peoples as incapable of sovereignty. Similar ideas shaped U.S. expansion across the South and West.

Because both Afrikaners and English settlers identified as white and reached a governing compromise in 1910 to rule the new “Union of South Africa” at the expense of Black South Africans, Western powers long imagined South Africa as a white nation on African soil. That designation placed it within the moral and political boundaries of “the West,” even as it enforced one of the twentieth century’s most brutal racial regimes.

Apartheid lawmakers and ideologues drew directly from Jim Crow and from how the U.S. white regime “managed” Native American lives, barring Black South Africans from owning land in white areas from 1913 to 1991, criminalizing interracial marriage, and tightly controlling movement, labor, and residence. In the United States, the racial order operated through poll taxes, literacy tests, racial terror, and state violence, with the Ku Klux Klan functioning as an informal arm of white supremacy.

These parallels were widely recognized. The U.S. Civil Rights Movement and the anti-apartheid struggle unfolded in tandem: the Sharpeville massacre in 1960 was followed five years later by the assault on marchers in Selma. In both cases, states met Black demands for equality with violence.

Yet while the United States eventually incorporated civil rights into its national self-image, it continued to defend apartheid in South Africa throughout the Cold War. Anti-communism provided the alibi. U.S. officials treated white South Africa as a strategic ally, valuing its mineral wealth, staunch anti-communism, and opposition to African nationalism. U.S. officials also dismissed Black South African liberation movements as communist fronts, labeled them terrorist organizations, treated Nelson Mandela as a Soviet proxy, and had the CIA assist in his capture in 1962.

U.S. officials openly supported apartheid leaders as defenders of “Western civilization.” Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s Secretary of State, declared, “The whites are here to stay.” Chester Crocker, architect of Reagan’s policy of “constructive engagement,” admitted: “All Reagan knows about Southern Africa is that he is on the side of the whites.” Constructive engagement assumed the white regime could reform itself. Instead, the 1980s became the region’s bloodiest decade since World War II, with proxy wars, cross-border raids, and widespread repression.

The message was unmistakable: whiteness, wherever it appeared, deserved protection.

The end of apartheid in 1994 forced a recalibration – but not a reckoning. The U.S. embraced South Africa’s democratic transition, yet many underlying assumptions remained. White South Africans retained disproportionate economic power; land reform remained slow and uneven; inequality deepened. Programs like PEPFAR (for AIDS treatment) demonstrated constructive engagement, but did not alter the structural legacy of racial inequality.

That unresolved tension is central to the present moment.

Trump’s focus on Afrikaners taps into a longstanding American right-wing anxiety: Black political power. His interest dates back to 2018, when he instructed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to investigate alleged land seizures and killings of white farmers, claims amplified by a Fox News segment hosted by Tucker Carlson, who, drawing on lobbying by right-wing Afrikaners, promoted the idea of “white genocide.” This, it turned out, was Trump’s first major engagement with Africa as president, framing the continent as a racial morality play rather than a site of policy.

Land reform in South Africa is real – and long overdue. Under apartheid, whites accumulated vast landholdings through law and violence. Today, Afrikaans speakers – just over fifty percent of whites – own roughly 73 percent of commercial agricultural land. Efforts to address this imbalance, including constitutional proposals and the Expropriation Act signed by Ramaphosa, are legal, regulated, and subject to judicial review. Claims that they constitute racial persecution are false.

The real problems lie in governance failures: corruption, weak institutions, and administrative incapacity. Investigations have found significant fraud in land reform projects. But none of this supports claims of genocide.

Meanwhile, Afrikaner political organizations have actively shaped U.S. perceptions. Afriforum has lobbied directly in Washington, presenting demands and framing South Africa as hostile to whites. Right-wing Afrikaner nationalist groups recast cultural symbols like anti-apartheid songs as evidence of genocidal intent, ignoring their historical context and local court rulings that they do not constitute hate speech.

The narrative of “White Genocide” has gained traction despite contradictory evidence. Government data shows that farm attacks are driven by vulnerability and inequality, not race, and that most victims of violent crime are Black and poor and still segregated, black neighborhoods where whites don’t go. Nevertheless, Trump elevated Afrikaners to the status of refugees in 2025, even as his administration deported actual refugees, mostly black and brown people fleeing the consequences of US foreign policy in their homelands.

Figures like Elon Musk have echoed these claims, framing policies such as Black Economic Empowerment as anti-white discrimination. South African media outlets have sometimes amplified similar narratives, republishing right-wing U.S. content or echoing its themes. This is not fringe discourse; it has entered the mainstream.

As political scientist Steven Friedman argues, contemporary prejudice rarely presents itself as overt racial superiority. Instead, it casts historically dominant groups – especially white men – as victims of lost privilege. Equality is experienced as persecution; power-sharing as exclusion. This logic underpins Trump’s rhetoric, Musk’s commentary, and significant strands of white South African political discourse.

Even the Democratic Alliance, the second largest party in parliament, has, at times, echoed some of these claims, supporting U.S. concerns about land reform and repeating misleading narratives about racial targeting. This reflects a longer pattern of seeking international backing while resisting substantive transformation at home. (The DA represents a particular strand of white politics; it claims to be “color blind,” but most of its top leaders are white and deny the effects of racial inequality or disparage any attempt to address these.)

Trump’s intervention could have united South Africans in rejecting external interference and recommitting to justice. Instead, it has been leveraged by white Afrikaner political groups to demand concessions while resisting shared sacrifice – revealing how even the language of non-racialism can be appropriated to defend inequality.

Ultimately, Trump’s fixation on Afrikaners is not about South Africa. It is about the needs of the American right. Afrikaners serve as a portable symbol: white people elsewhere who can be cast as victims to validate grievances at home.

The danger lies not only in Trump’s claims, but in how readily they are echoed, circulated, and normalized – across borders. The myth of white victimhood has become global, adaptable, and politically useful. It travels easily, attaches itself to local histories, and distorts them.

And yet, its contradictions are visible without much effort. In December 2025, Afriforum-linked activist Ernst Roets (he started a new organization, Lex Libertas, to lobby internationally for “Afrikaner rights”)) marked the “Afrikaner Vow” in New York City, hosted by the New York Young Republican Club. The “Vow” refers to an event in 1838 when a group of Boer settlers, facing a Zulu regiment, promised the Christian God that if he delivered them from the battle, they would commemorate the event thereafter.  Soon after, a delegation from the New York Young Republican Club visited South Africa, where the same networks claiming persecution received them and took them out to dine in restaurants, hold press conferences, visit mainstream media outlets for interviews, and travel freely – without incident.

That is the clearest measure of the fiction: What Trump-era politics has done is not reveal a crisis in South Africa, but manufacture one, turning a historically powerful minority into a symbol of grievance. In doing so, it exposes something far more consequential: it reinvents whiteness not as dominance to be defended, but as victimhood to be performed.