Trump's South Africa 'white genocide' lie

"Unacceptable. There's no other way to put it," said Armstrong Williams in Independent Online (Cape Town). Last week, the South African president, Cyril Ramaphosa, became the latest White House guest to be subjected to a diplomatic "hit job" at the hands of Donald Trump.

As journalists gathered round, the US president asked for the Oval Office lights to be dimmed – and then proceeded to lay out evidence of what he falsely claimed was a "genocide" against white South African farmers.

Trump began his "grotesque" presentation with some old footage of politicians singing the Apartheid-era resistance anthem Dubul' ibhunu (Kill the Boer), said Redi Tlhabi in the Daily Maverick (Cape Town), followed by images of rows of crosses that "he falsely claimed were a burial site for white farmers". (They were, in fact, a memorial for victims of farm murders.) "Trump then launched into a deranged handout of gory pictures" – one of which was actually of women from the Democratic Republic of Congo. "It was dramatic, effective, but untrue."

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Luckily, Ramaphosa handled the situation "with diplomacy and composure", said Weaam Williams in Independent Online. Flanked by two white South African golfing legends, whom he'd brought along to charm Trump, he calmly fact-checked the claims – giving the world "a lesson in grace".

Ramaphosa will have seen this coming, said Tom Eaton in Business Day (Johannesburg). Trump has swallowed the lie that Afrikaners – descendants of the white Dutch minority that ruled South Africa under Apartheid – are being slaughtered on their farms and a racist government is seizing their land.

Fifty-nine white South Africans have already jumped at his offer to resettle as refugees in the United States. In reality, they're economic migrants, taking advantage of "perverted politics to get a toe in the door of the world's biggest economy". They'll regret it once "they realise they can no longer hire a domestic worker for $10 a day". Afrikaners' biggest gripe has been that their kids must learn English over Afrikaans, said Makhudu Sefara in the Sunday Times (Cape Town). But "it's hard to imagine a quicker way of killing Afrikaans than packing your children off to Idaho".

As a "blue-blood Afrikaner", I was bewildered when Trump declared we're a "threatened species", said Max du Preez in The Guardian (London). Afrikaners are actually "better off today" than when Apartheid fell in 1994: far from being dispossessed, we own about 72% of farmland despite making up just 7.2% of the population. True, a new law would allow the expropriation of some farms, but it has yet to be implemented; not one Afrikaner has been kicked off his land.

The law in question is undoubtedly "a terrible policy", said Armstrong Williams. "It violates basic principles of property rights and risks inflaming racial tensions." But it's not genocide. It is white supremacists in the US who are spreading that lie, led by Trump's first buddy, the South African-born billionaire Elon Musk, said Christian Vooren in Die Zeit (Hamburg).

South Africa does have shocking levels of violence – its murder rate is nearly eight times higher than that of the US – and scores of white farmers have been killed. But so have many farm workers and smaller landowners, a number of whom are black. Musk's real motive is greed: a law requiring foreign firms to share business with "communities disadvantaged during Apartheid" has held up licences for his Starlink internet service.

Ramaphosa withstood the barrage of fake news last week, said Jonny Steinberg in Time (New York), but his Oval Office visit was hardly a success. His main aim was to discuss a trade deal and persuade Trump to attend the G20 summit in Johannesburg in November. Instead, South Africa's appalling murder epidemic dominated the meeting. It was "painful to watch": Ramaphosa was forced to admit he presides "over a country that has lost control over itself". "We do not need your opprobrium," he seemed to be saying; "we need your help."