By Sue Harris
November 3, 2025
Early in 2025, while he was barring most asylum seekers from the United States, Trump offered to grant U.S. asylum to some 7,500 people. Almost all were Afrikaners, descendants of 18th-century European settlers who occupied a Dutch colony in South Africa. Most were from the Netherlands, Germany and France and were known as Boers (farmers).
South Africa’s land question: White people, about 7% of the population, own 70% of the land. The struggle for land reform Trump calls genocide.
Trump falsely claimed that this population faced prejudicial treatment in South Africa, where the Indigenous African population won control of the government in elections in 1994. Trump offered the Afrikaners a swift integration into refugee status and eventual citizenship in the U.S. Simultaneously, he froze aid to South Africa and on Aug. 8, imposed a 30% tariffs on the country’s exports to the U.S.
When the British Empire, with its own settlers, took control of South Africa at the end of the 18th century, Afrikaner farmers migrated to nearby lands and forcibly displaced Indigenous populations. In the early 1880s and again at the turn of the 20th century, the British Empire fought wars with the Afrikaners or Boers.
Both British and Afrikaner ruling classes oppressed the Indigenous African population. European settlers and their descendants seized land and resources from the Indigenous Africans, who were relegated to “Bantustans” or overcrowded townships. In 1948, a Boer-led regime imposed the white supremacist system of apartheid, that is, vicious anti-Black laws, increasing the already existing discrimination, superexploitation and brutal repression of the Indigenous African population.
Despite a long and heroic struggle for liberation and the victory of the African National Congress in 1994, the Indigenous African people have not repossessed the land and other resources stolen by the settlers. Recent popular movements have demanded a return of this land, and a new law was introduced making it easier to expropriate unused land.
It’s these more recent developments that led Trump, whose statements have no relation to facts, to describe a fair land distribution as genocide against the Afrikaners. That he offers asylum to people of European origin while forcibly expelling people of color from the U.S. fits the MAGA racist playbook, combining insult and injury to South Africa’s people and government.
