South Africans of All Hues Are Laughing at Trump’s Ridiculous Claims of ‘White Genocide’
But that cannot stop the damage he is doing to their economy and psyche
In the discussion about the alleged White genocide in South Africa currently underway in America, something has been lost: the voice of local South Africans. Most of those counseling Donald Trump don’t live in the country. For example, Trump’s ex-First Buddy Elon Musk emigrated from South Africa in 1989. His rage against the country’s supposedly “racist ownership laws” helped queue up Trump’s tense May meeting with South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, in which he confronted Ramaphosa with lurid allegations about anti-White persecution in South Africa.
The relatively wealthy Afrikaner lobbyists who do live in South Africa and whisper in the ears of the Trump team—and have represented their country on Tucker Carlson’s show, where such allegations have been a staple—are a tiny handful representing a small fraction of South Africa’s White minority. Their Afrikaner-rights organization, AfriForum, claims merely 7% of the country’s 4.5 million White people as members. And those 4.5 million White South Africans themselves only make up about 7% of South Africa’s population.
Africa’s biggest economy, in other words, is now being represented on the world stage by people who have barely lived there during its democratic era. Or by those who speak for 0.4% of the country’s citizens. It’s as if only those British citizens who voted Reform UK in 2024 were really permitted to depict the state of the entirety of Europe. Or if the 1.4 million Americans that identify as transgender were exclusively invited to describe the United States.
Straighten What Record?
I have lived in South Africa for 15 years, and my American friends keep asking me what South Africans “think of” Trump’s attack on their country. How are they dealing with it? I don’t know what to say, because most of my South African neighbors aren’t sure what to say.
Trump’s rhetoric about South Africa, you see, is not a conspiracy theory. Even conspiracy theories start with a real fact: There really is a condition we call “autism.” The Twin Towers really did collapse on 9/11. Conspiracy theories entail a bogus claim about the cause of that fact and can thus be debated and debunked. Trump’s claims about South Africa are something different: bullshit, nonsense, non sequitur.
There is no “White genocide” in South Africa. No farm has been taken from a White owner without compensation. White-owned farms occupy about half of South Africa’s territory, despite Whites making up, it bears repeating, only 7% of the population. White South Africans enjoy strong constitutional protections, and, in fact, White people grew wealthier, in comparison to Black people, since apartheid ended. Conversely, apartheid South Africa was a police state and not a happy place to live for many of its White citizens as well as its people of color.
So, what is there for most South Africans to do in the face of Trump’s topsy turvy, surreal portrayal? Mainly, make fun of it. And in this, they are helped by a long tradition. Over the course of decades of repression, laughing in the face of persecution became a fine South African tradition, in the same way that so many oppressed peoples have defied the hopelessness of their conditions by turning to humor to assert agency. A few years ago, the Black stand-up comic Noko Moswete explained to me that “joking actually existed all the time” under apartheid: “People overseas maybe didn’t know South Africans were funny,” she said, because the country’s dominant story was so dark, but its people “found humor even in protests and funerals. People cracked jokes while crying.” She stole a “dirty joke” in her standup routines, for example, from a grim sermon delivered by her childhood pastor.
So that is what my journalist colleagues and neighbors have turned to as a response to Trump’s vilification of their country. In The New York Times, the South African writer Richard Poplak notes in his piece, “A South African Grift Lands in the Oval Office,” that the claims about genocide have been met with “bazillions” of memes. “A vast majority” of South Africans, he writes, including White ones, are “mocking” the special refugee program that Trump created by executive order for Afrikaners. One Cape Town-based actor, for instance, produced a TikTok short about the “pride” South Africans feel for producing “the best-fed, wealthiest refugees the world has ever seen.”
But beyond the jokes, it’s hard for South Africans, regardless of their race, to know what to think. How can you have thoughts about rhetoric that, itself, does not contain real thought?
Return White Flights
White South Africans used to flee apartheid South Africa. But that changed after 1992 when White people, in an all-White referendum, voted to end this brutal system. That’s because in many, many ways, South Africa offers the best quality of life on earth for the relatively well-off, a category that includes most White citizens.
And the few who did leave after apartheid’s end, as I wrote in my 2022 book on the country, The Inheritors, came back:
Many White South Africans who emigrate return, finding it unbearable to live in White-majority countries like New Zealand in which their skin color doesn’t still confer so many material and psychological boons. Shortly after I got to South Africa, I met a man whose brother had made a big deal of moving his family to Australia. ... A few years later I learned my friend’s brother had quietly brought his family back, with no fanfare. My friend told me his brother actually struggled to find work in Australia. He’d gotten a supreme shock, finding himself just another White guy in a sea of White guys struggling to stay afloat in an ordinary White working class.
Ernie Els, one of the golf stars Trump invited to the White House, is building houses and golf courses in South Africa. But the more telling rebuke of Trump’s fanciful allegations is that despite intensive efforts by the U.S. Embassy staff in South Africa to find recruits for the special refugee program—even as he is ejecting Afghans, Haitians, Ukrainians, and others facing extreme persecution—has had vanishingly few takers. Indeed, fewer than the 50 or so that live on my street in Johannesburg—and participate in our block’s lively WhatsApp group—have taken up the offer of a free plane ticket and a fast-track to citizenship in the world’s most powerful economy.
Finally, United Against Trump’s Bullshit!
South Africa remains politically divided by class, race, language, and political culture. Social life is shot through with suspicion—though it is still not as polarized as the United States. But like the false prophet in Revelation who tries to destroy mankind but whose efforts enable its resurrection, Trump has—at least temporarily—healed rifts and brought rivals toward each other.
Black commentators have admired the role played at the Trump-Ramaphosa meeting by Johann Rupert, a hyper-rich industrialist who is normally mocked as a poster child for the country’s inequality. But after Rupert objected to the Trump administration’s characterization of South Africa as a dangerous hellscape for White people, the prominent Black journalist Khaya Dlanga wrote on X: “I know some people will try to make this a controversial topic, but it’s not. Johann Rupert is a real true patriot for doing what he has done. He represented us as a country very well.” He earned over 500 retweets—10 times the number of “White refugees” Trump has been able to scare up. Many commentators of color, also unaccustomed to praising rich, White men like Rupert, echoed Dlanga. Gayton McKenzie, a politician, wrote: “Rupert ... loves this country and I wanna be the first to admit that I was wrong about him.” “This man loves South Africa with a passion,” Katlego Molekoa wrote; the post was retweeted over 700 times.
Even Ramaphosa, a president on whom South Africans heap scorn, has come in for praise. When Deon Maas, a South African filmmaker and journalist, complimented the South African delegation’s performance on Facebook, other South Africans lined up to agree. Dirk Hanekom, a commenter, chimed in: “CR and his crew did impress yesterday, and handled the situation admirably.” Another added, “The plane joke was hilarious. Give [Ramaphosa] credit.” He was referring to Ramaphosa’s quip during the White House meeting as to what it’ll take for him to get Trump to back off. “I’m sorry I don’t have a plane to give you,” he said, referring to the luxury jetliner that Qatar was gifting Trump. “I wish you did,” Trump replied tetchily.
And thus Trump’s unpleasant and false slams have, paradoxically, brought some relief to South Africans, some sense of a shift. White South Africans have been invited to contemplate their enduring privilege, and many are doing so; Black South Africans have been invited to consider that an Afrikaner like Rupert could be a post-apartheid patriot and a kind of ally.
South Africans yearn for the chance to feel proud of their country, of their transition from minority-White to Black-led democratic rule. It has fallen far short of the mid-1990s idealized hopes, although it remains an accomplishment unmatched in history. Their shared revulsion over Trump’s remarks offers South Africans a chance to reflect on that achievement and the common identity that they have built.
No Joking Matter
That doesn’t mean that Trump’s smears have had no cost for South Africa. In March, the U.S. State Department specifically ordered an “immediate pause” on all aid to the country, citing its purported “unjust racial discrimination” against White people. That directly threatens South Africa’s HIV/AIDS treatment program, the world’s largest—and a project that doesn’t only benefit its poorer citizens. Also threatened is the epidemiological expertise and infrastructure that another U.S.-backed program created and that helped South Africa become a global leader, for instance, in identifying new Covid-19 variants and investigating the efficacy of vaccines. In May, the South African government was forced to reduce its health budget by nearly a third, thanks to Trump’s baseless targeting of the country.
And then there is the harm to the South African economy that depends on tourism and foreign investment. The Afrikaner lobbyists who got this ball rolling are racing to try to push back against the implication that nobody should come or put money in the country anymore. Toward the end of a March segment with Ernst Roets, a South African lobbyist selling the notion that White people are victimized, Tucker Carlson said, “I wanted to go to Cape Town for Christmas. ... I think I probably shouldn’t go, right?” Roets discordantly pleaded: “No, you should come to South Africa.”
But one group that South Africans are not joking about are the “White refugees” who signed up for Trump’s offer. They are seen as “scammers” and “crooks” who need to be exposed. “Errol Langton, who told New York Times that he was threatened because he is ‘a White guy and farmer’ has never been a farmer,” the journalist Bianca van Wyk bitterly posted on X. South Africans on TikTok are working feverishly to uncover the luxurious houses in which these “refugees” lived in South Africa. They are slamming them for leaving their mothers or dogs behind.
All of this pushes South Africans back into a trap they badly want to escape: continually relitigating their own past. Was the shift to democracy the beginning of a great vengeance, an equal and opposite crime? Was it a victory, an exemplar to the world of forgiveness and the rule of law? Few other nations have become a tale in history, a kind of parable, so soon after they endured the events that made them a teachable story.
But the special frustration that South Africans are trying to mask is this: South Africans of all political stripes were intensely concerned with what the world thought of them during apartheid and tried to enlist global opinion for their respective sides. The embattled White regime desperately needed allies to beat sanctions. Apartheid opponents needed to muster a huge amount of foreign sympathy to prevail against a nuclear-armed, punitive state that curtailed their access to weapons, money, and intellectual exchange. The apartheid government spent enormous amounts of money cultivating connections with France, Israel, Switzerland, and the United States; it put celebrities like the golfer Gary Player on its payroll as propagandists. Likewise, the African National Congress established “embassies” in nearly a hundred countries. At times, each faction did more work to achieve its goals outside the country than inside of it.
The new duel is déjà vu. Trump is forcing the country to look outward, care again about what the world thinks of it, rather than focus inward.
This is counterproductive when South Africa is trying to figure out where to go now with its remarkably good and resilient people saddled with an infrastructure of terrible physical segregation, government neglect, and economic inequality. The country’s people can feel mired forever in the 20th century—its particular hopes for progress, its specific fears of backslide.
Converting something terrible into a joke is not always a sign that you are not affected, that you are taking things lightly. It can be a coping mechanism, a way to deflect the pain.
You’d have to come and spend time here to understand the complexity of the place—its mix of love and bitterness, disappointment and great hope—and fully understand the ridiculousness of the Trump team’s bizarre and fake portrait.
Tucker may not come and visit. But you should.
© The UnPopulist, 2025
Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X.
We welcome your reactions and replies. Please adhere to our comments policy.
 | A guest post by
|
Laughing and mocking authoritarians can be quite effective in countering them. Gene Sharp elaborates in his books on non violent ways to thwart dictators. Encourage any fan of democracy to check ‘em out.
“Genocide” may be overstating it a smidge (though i hear that everybody’s doin it these s
Days), but to belittle what is happening to white farmers is grotesquely inhumane in and of itself. Having helped engineer the death of apartheid, the left just shrugs at the brutality because, well,
live by the sword, die by the sword, they figure. So they don’t care when a stadium of tens of thousands of ANC delegates chant “kill the boer” gleefully.