\n<\/p>\n
At an Oval Office press conference last month, Donald Trump described present-day South Africa as \u201cthe opposite of apartheid\u201d\u2014a phrase so perfectly weird that the man sitting across from him, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, took several seconds to process it, before literally biting his lip and letting the line pass without remark.<\/p>\n
The opposite of apartheid<\/em> sounds like a compliment. (\u201cApartheid. Terrible!\u201d Trump had said, just seconds before.) But Trump didn\u2019t mean it that way. He accused South Africa of rebuilding the system of racial hierarchy that had once made it, in the words of Nelson Mandela, \u201cthe skunk of the world.\u201d Under opposite-of-apartheid, Trump said, white South African farmers are now the victims. The reek of oppression comes from the \u201cthousands of stories\u201d describing their murders and the theft of their farmland. In the course of dressing down Ramaphosa, Trump dimmed the lights for a screening of a sing-along led by the South African politician Julius Malema, in which a large group chants \u201cKill the Boer.\u201d (Boer <\/em>is \u201cfarmer\u201d in Afrikaans, the native language of most white South Africans.) Trump suggested that the farmers are the victims of a \u201cgenocide\u201d and said they feared having their land taken away. And he reiterated a policy announced in February that welcomed them to resettle in America as refugees.<\/p>\n Ramaphosa denied that a genocide was under way. He reminded Trump that black South Africans are being killed in even greater absolute numbers, in the course of robbery and other nongenocidal crime. (South Africa\u2019s murder rate of 42 per 100,000 people is among the world\u2019s highest. The United States\u2019 is 6.8; France\u2019s is 1.5.) \u201cThere is criminality <\/em>in our country,\u201d Ramaphosa said, copping to a lesser charge. The meeting adjourned awkwardly, with Ramaphosa inviting Trump to South Africa for a state visit.<\/p>\n Trump will probably<\/span> resist this invitation. I could not. Although Trump cheapened the word genocide<\/em> by using it to describe the situation of Afrikaner farmers, many conditions that fall short of genocide are nonetheless intolerable, including living in a country of extreme and routine violence. In that way, the plight of white South Africans resembles, as Ramaphosa suggested, that of their black countrymen. When white farmers are slaughtered in their homes, their murderers\u2019 motivations are not, as Ramaphosa suggested, always genocidal.<\/p>\n Signs of violent criminality are ubiquitous in South Africa. Electric fences and guard dogs protect homes containing something worth stealing. Reported rapes, carjackings, and armed robberies all occur far more frequently than in the United States. In Bloemfontein, one of the safer cities, I asked a hotel clerk for directions to a coffee shop, and she said it was \u201cjust across the road,\u201d not more than 500 feet away. When I headed out on foot, she stopped me and said that for my safety, \u201cI would prefer that you drive.\u201d Driving is dangerous too. On highways, permanent signs announce that the next few miles are a \u201cspiking hot spot,\u201d where brigands plant obstacles to blow out tires and ambush drivers when they stop to change their flats. A couple of years ago, an American tourist rented a car at the airport in Cape Town and set up navigation on his phone. His app had an option to avoid tolls but not to avoid being shot in the face. Within an hour he was in a bad neighborhood, with his jaw hanging off his head and all his possessions gone. (He survived and vowed to sue Google Maps.)<\/p>\n Per-Anders Pettersson \/ Getty<\/p>\n White crosses at the Witkruis (\u201cWhite Cross\u201d) Monument on a private farm in Ysterberg, near Polokwane, South Africa, on June 3, 2025. The monument commemorates about 2,800 of the alleged 4,000 white farmers who have been killed in the country since 1994.<\/p>\n Afrikaner farmers suffer, in this context, from what might be called the Willie Sutton problem. Why rob and assault them? Because that\u2019s where the money is.<\/em> In rural areas, farmers have expensive motors and other agricultural equipment, and sometimes stashes of cash to pay workers. It stands to reason that in dangerous and thief-ridden land, the richest people would get attacked now and then. White farmers are responsible for about 90 percent of agricultural output.<\/p>\n A little more than a week after the Trump meeting, I was in South Africa\u2019s Limpopo state, a center of citrus production. At an agricultural training center, I met a white fruit packer, Davon Stoltz, 29, whose story was just as horrible and lurid as Trump had implied. Stoltz sat by me in a flimsy plastic chair, in the shade of a Tipuana tree, and told me what had happened to his family on the morning of April 30.<\/p>\n His aunt called and begged him to come quickly. She had found his grandfather, Robert Stoltz, 78, apparently lifeless on his bathroom floor. What she saw made her rush out and refuse to go back in. Davon drove 40 miles and beat the police to the scene. He told me Robert \u201cwas in the bathroom, with his face on the ground, in the corner.\u201d The murder weapon was a panga, a type of machete. Robert\u2019s arms had been bound with barbed wire. \u201cThey panga-ed his face,\u201d Davon said. \u201cHis nose was off, all his teeth out, and there was a big hole in his face and on top of his head.\u201d<\/p>\n Why brutalize an old man? Davon was both disgusted and puzzled. \u201cThey didn\u2019t take anything but his phone and his car,\u201d he told me. The car was found rolled, not far away. \u201cThey dragged him through the kitchen. On the way, there\u2019s a lot of things to steal.\u201d But the TV was still there, and the cupboards were undisturbed.<\/p>\n Davon said the police, who were just a few miles away, dawdled and ignored key evidence. His grandfather didn\u2019t smoke, but cigarette butts lay everywhere at the scene and remained there even after the police collected evidence, bagged up the body, and left. Only when the family came in to wash the gore from the tiles did they find the murder weapon, a homemade panga stashed above the bathroom mirror and still dripping with Grandpa\u2019s blood. \u201cI get angry when I talk about this,\u201d Davon said. \u201cThe forensic team just didn\u2019t care.\u201d They don\u2019t care, he told me, because \u201cwe are white.\u201d He contrasted the indifference with the solidarity expressed by the 10 black workers on Robert\u2019s farm, who attended the funeral and offered to help find the killers.<\/p>\n The family hired private investigators, and their efforts, not the police\u2019s, yielded a suspect, Bobo Mokoena, now under arrest for the crime. Davon told me he confronted Mokoena at one of his first court appearances. Mokoena laughed at him and said he had thought the old man had money. That motivation does not satisfy Davon. \u201cWhy would you think he has money?\u201d Robert was mostly retired, and not rich. \u201cWhy kill him? Come on. Honestly it\u2019s because he\u2019s white; he\u2019s a Boer.\u201d<\/p>\n Davon said mere greed could explain some roughing up, but not disfigurement and murder. \u201cShow me where a black person is killed, and then I will show you my grandpa\u2019s pictures, how he looked when he was killed\u2014like my grandpa was an animal.\u201d Davon said he was so traumatized by seeing his grandfather\u2019s mangled face that after the corpse had been cleaned up, he asked to see it again, in hopes of replacing a gruesome sight with a sanitized one. \u201cI tried to get that picture out of my head,\u201d he told me. \u201cDidn\u2019t work. I promise you: That\u2019s not a picture you want to see.\u201d<\/p>\n I spoke with<\/span> other white farmers in Limpopo who had suffered home invasions. Some, such as a woman who was beset in her kitchen by another panga wielder, had barely survived. Others managed to alert neighbors and police in time to avoid serious harm. For years, rural South Africans were spared the crime afflicting big cities\u2014in part because the old rural security architecture, known as the Commando system, remained intact for a decade after apartheid\u2019s end. That system\u2014semi-militarized, with armed citizens patrolling the countryside\u2014was tainted by its association with apartheid and disbanded in the 2000s. Now farmers are reacting to the rise in farm attacks by informally reviving it. They have hardened their defenses. They stuff guns in their trousers and have turned their farms into little islands of security, with so many cameras, drones, and surveillance monitors that in a drought year they could quit farming altogether and film a Truman Show<\/em> remake.<\/p>\n How, in a country where violence is this common, is one to know whether it is racially motivated? It seemed possible that Davon\u2019s grandpa was not targeted for his race, and that the cops missed the clues because of incompetence and corruption, rather than indifference to the murder of white people. (Twice I was told that to get police to consider evidence of a crime, one should bring a bribe to the precinct in the form of a tasty treat.) But it would have taken a lot of nerve to suggest to Davon and other white farmers that they ought to lighten up, when stories like theirs are so common, and \u201cKill the Boer\u201d is pump-up music at political rallies. Hate speech is illegal in South Africa, but courts there have ruled that \u201cKill the Boer\u201d is not to be taken literally, because the song is an anti-apartheid Communist revolutionary anthem and now no more offensive than an anti-Nazi song that calls for drubbing \u201cthe Krauts\u201d or \u201cthe Hun.\u201d Pleas to appreciate this nuance are less convincing when your Boer grandpa has recently been hacked to death.<\/p>\n Some incidents are not just grotesque but also mystifying\u2014criminal encounters that are opaque in motivation, which leaves them open to interpret as one sees them, whether as race attacks or something else. One Afrikaner, Joachim Prinsloo, told me about a very peculiar home invasion that involved no violence at all. He said the intruder was easier to catch than he might otherwise have been, because he apparently believed that magical spells had rendered him invisible. He was found in the white family\u2019s living room browsing Cook and Enjoy It<\/em>, a classic Afrikaans cookbook, while holding it upside down. \u201cWhen I spoke to him, at first he ignored me,\u201d Prinsloo told me. \u201cAnd then he was shocked that I could see him.\u201d<\/p>\n White racists were preoccupied with these sometimes brutal, often extremely idiosyncratic, sometimes just strange incidents well before they became a source of outrage and fascination for Trump and people orbiting him, such as Elon Musk. They have implied that South Africa is experiencing what Zimbabwe suffered a quarter century ago: government-sanctioned attacks on white farmers, uncompensated seizure of their land, and eventually the collapse of the country\u2019s agricultural sector and ability to feed itself. Trump referred to \u201cover a thousand\u201d dead farmers (upping it to \u201cthousands\u201d in the Q&A with reporters).<\/p>\n Bronze busts of the Afrikaner leaders (from right to left<\/em>) J. B. M. Hertzog, Hendrik Verwoerd, D. F. Malan, J. G. Strijdom, and\u00a0B. J. Vorster are seen on a hill in Orania, South Africa, on May 24, 2024, under the flag bearing the image of the Kleinreus, or \u201cLittle Giant,\u201d the town\u2019s symbol. (Marco Longari \/ AFP \/ Getty)<\/p>\n In part because of this context, many South Africans are suspicious of those who track the killings and organize farmer efforts to arm themselves and patrol their properties. AfriForum, a Pretoria-based advocacy group, does both. Even its data do not suggest organized mass killings or farm seizure resembling Zimbabwe during the late Robert Mugabe era. They count five farm murders so far in 2025, 37 in 2024, and 52 in 2023, out of roughly 27,000 annual murders in the country as a whole. But South Africa has only about 44,000 white commercial farmers, according to one estimate. AfriForum does not have complete data on the racial classification of the victims, but the group told me that in each year at least half were white, and only about 10 percent were confirmed to be nonwhite. That suggests that the murder rate for white farmers is higher than for the general population, and possibly as much as double the already very high national rate.<\/p>\n Kallie Kriel, AfriForum\u2019s CEO, considers the South African government\u2019s inattention to these killings an outrage and argues that the murder rate, rather than confessions or other statements about motives\u2014of which there are few\u2014shows that farmers are particularly targeted. These killings are not \u201cordinary crime,\u201d he told me. He called the government\u2019s refusal to denounce Malema\u2014the politician who leads the \u201cKill the Boer\u201d chants\u2014\u201cshameful,\u201d and further evidence of non-ordinariness. (Ramaphosa distanced himself from Malema in the Trump meeting.) And Kriel noted the hypocrisy of South Africa\u2019s position; in The Hague, South Africa is demanding that Israel punish and prevent incitement to genocide. (Indeed, the same lawyer, Tembeka\u202fNgcukaitobi, argued both cases\u2014for Malema\u2019s right to chant \u201cKill the Boers\u201d in South Africa, and for Israel\u2019s obligation to shut up its own violent loudmouths there.)<\/p>\n Nevertheless, Kriel declined to say that \u201cgenocide\u201d was taking place just yet, and he refused to accept one of Trump\u2019s premises: that Afrikaners are helpless victims who need shelter abroad. He noted that Afrikaners arrived in what is now South Africa more than 100 years before my own country was founded. \u201cIf we were victims, we would just say we\u2019re finished, and that would be that,\u201d he told me. That was not the Boer way.<\/p>\n Per-Anders Pettersson \/ Getty<\/p>\n An Afrikaner youth parade with flags in a residential area on October 6, 2023, in Orania.<\/p>\n The Boer way<\/span> is to dig in, to outlast challengers, and, above all, to survive. Perhaps the weirdest manifestation of this hardiness is a little town called Orania. More than three decades ago, a small band of Afrikaners responded to the end of apartheid by creating a whites-only private settlement in the Karoo, a parched scrubland in the Northern Cape near the border with the Free State. The survival and growth of this pasty rural town, which now has thousands of inhabitants, is evidence that Trump\u2019s assessment of South Africa\u2014that it is systematically attempting to murder its white farmers\u2014is wrong.<\/p>\n Orania is probably the most openly racist place I have ever visited. That is not to say that I, who would have been classified \u201cAsian\u201d or \u201cColoured\u201d under apartheid, felt unwelcome. As a guest, I could come and go as I pleased, and during my two-day visit, I was treated graciously. The town looked like a sedate subdivision or kibbutz or retirement community, fringed with industrial parks. It was also safe\u2014the only place I visited in South Africa where I had no fear of petty crime or violence. Its people were nice and patient with my attempts to speak Afrikaans. Their gift shop sold me a little keychain that says Vryheid in Ons Tyd<\/em>, or \u201cFreedom in Our Time.\u201d \u201cFreedom from what?\u201d I asked, without getting a good answer. Vryheid <\/em>from stupid questions, I guess.<\/p>\n \u201cThey say we are racists, and we hate black people\u2014which never was true,\u201d Hennie Pelser, one of the town spokespeople and tour guides, told me. The goal of Orania, he said, was to \u201cprotect ourselves, ensure our existence, and make sure we have something for our kids to inherit.\u201d But he told me that to live there I would need to be white, Christian, and Afrikaans-speaking, a triple whammy in my case, and I noticed that the first of the whammies was unambiguously racial. He said that Oranians performed all work, so black people spotted walking around would be intercepted and politely asked to state their business. A sign at the entrance to the town announces no crime will be tolerated<\/span>, and Orania may question any suspicious person<\/span>. Elsewhere in Orania, residents spoke openly of their disdain for black people: their mentality, their morality, their smell.<\/p>\n I met Carel Boshoff IV, Orania\u2019s leader from 2007 to 2019 and the son of one of its founders, at a coffee shop on Orania\u2019s main street. The son and grandson of major Afrikaner politicians, he was dressed in a tweed jacket and reading a book by Ng\u0169g\u0129 wa Thiong\u2019o, the Kenyan novelist and cultural theorist, who had died the previous day. Boshoff told me Ng\u0169g\u0129 had influenced his thinking, and as we spoke I could see how. Ng\u0169g\u0129 had advocated for the strengthening of \u201ccultural freedoms\u201d in the face of hegemonic powers.<\/p>\n Boshoff told me that he views Orania as \u201can evolutionary development towards something very fundamentally federalist.\u201d From its beginnings in the 1990s, he said, Orania has found legal and spiritual shelter in the South African post-apartheid constitution, which recognizes \u201cthe right of self-determination of any community sharing a common cultural and language heritage.\u201d If Zulus can have their land, why not Afrikaners? He said that Orania was conceived as a way to have an Afrikaner community, with schools and churches and security all provisioned by a recognized political entity. Boshoff said that the South African government would prefer that Orania not exist. But the constitution protects it. \u201cThey did not like it, but they could not be totally against it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Per-Anders Pettersson \/ Getty<\/p>\n Family and friends of Wilhem Boshoff, the son of Carel Boshoff IV, celebrate his 18th birthday at the family farm on the outskirts of Orania on April 29, 2023.<\/p>\n Pelser said that Orania was working well, and that Afrikaners being lured to the United States should instead come here. \u201cWe don\u2019t have any crime,\u201d he claimed. \u201cWe don\u2019t have any unemployment.\u201d He said that the Afrikaners of Orania didn\u2019t think any work was beneath them. Because the land is private, they police themselves, admit residents according to their own criteria, and eject them even for lawful activities, such as smoking pot. Using white manual labor, he told me, made Oranians rugged and self-reliant. Pelser had previously been a banker. I asked whether the lack of black labor, and therefore cheap labor, had held Orania back. \u201cBlack labor eventually gets to you,\u201d he said. \u201cHaving black labor costs you a lot more at the end of the day, you know.\u201d It softens you, he said, and the presence of outsiders ultimately corrodes the community. \u201cYou should never rely on anybody else to do your work for you.\u201d<\/p>\n The irony of this boring monoculture was that it was in some ways a repudiation of apartheid, and not, as it might appear, an attempt to revive it. Both systems endeavored to separate the races. But apartheid was fundamentally an attempt to keep black people out of cities while profiting from their rural labor and depriving them of political and civil rights. The Oranians, by contrast, eschewed black labor and retreated from South Africa\u2019s cities to its countryside, just as black South Africans were doing the opposite. Orania is also a repudiation of Trump because it shows that Afrikaners can be as Afrikaner as they wish, and even openly racist, without being harassed, let alone crushed and exterminated, by the government.<\/p>\n I asked Boshoff what he thought of the 59 Afrikaners who came fast-tracked to America as refugees, while the Trump administration was working to halt resettlement of so many others. \u201cThe whole idea has more to do with President Trump\u2019s politics than with ours,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s his agenda and his interest and might be the United States\u2019 interest for all I know.\u201d He was savvy enough to know that anyone seriously concerned about the survival of Afrikaners, collectively or individually, or about preventing genocide, would not approach these topics so cavalierly, and with such disregard for the efforts of Afrikaners themselves.<\/p>\n By leaving the place where his people had lived for 350 years, were these Afrikaners giving up, hastening a cultural suicide? He seemed very sad at the thought. The Afrikaners who came to America, he said, might find that they had lost something important by consenting to play this part in Trump\u2019s pageant, at the price of leaving their country. \u201cWait for the depression to set in\u2014the homesickness. It sits in your bones. And it is coming.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" At an Oval Office press conference last month, Donald Trump described present-day South Africa as \u201cthe opposite of apartheid\u201d\u2014a phrase so perfectly weird that the man sitting across from him, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, took several seconds to process it, before literally biting his lip and letting the line pass without remark. The opposite<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9429,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[1671,587,1129,1388],"class_list":{"0":"post-9428","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-atlantic","9":"tag-extreme","10":"tag-genocide","11":"tag-violence"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9428"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9428\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9429"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}