“‘White supremacists in suits and ties’: the rightwing Afrikaner group in Trump’s ear
Chris McGreal
Fri 14 Feb 2025 11.00 GMT
Donald Trump’s offer of political asylum to South Africa’s white minority, just days after blocking genuine refugees from travelling to the US, followed years of campaigning by an Afrikaner group that has promoted ‘white genocide’ conspiracy theories while also lobbying on behalf of Elon Musk’s business interests.
Last week, Trump issued an executive order that misrepresented a new South African law, the Expropriation Act, as a racist move to persecute white Afrikaners by seizing their farms without compensation.
The law is intended to address deep inequalities as the result of apartheid and colonial legislation that resulted in the white minority, who make up just 7% of South Africa’s population, still owning more than 70% of agricultural land more than three decades after the end of the apartheid system imposed by the Afrikaner-dominated government. It permits expropriation in exceptional circumstances, such as abandoned land, but generally requires “just and equitable” compensation.
That did not stop Trump from falsely claiming: “South Africa is confiscating land, and treating certain classes of people VERY BADLY.”
The president’s order came after years of lobbying by an Afrikaner rights groups, AfriForum […]. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) civil rights organisation has described AfriForum’s leaders as white supremacists in suits and ties.
[…]
[South African born Elon] Musk has accused South Africa of “openly racist ownership laws” as he applied pressure on the government to exempt Starlink from regulations to uplift people of colour oppressed by apartheid by requiring major business deals to include Black investors. He has rejected a requirement that foreign investors in the country’s telecoms sector provide 30% of the equity in the South African part of the enterprise to Black-owned businesses.
AfriForum is campaigning on Musk’s behalf by claiming that Starlink is being prevented from doing business in South Africa because it is “too white” and is subject to “strict race-based criteria”.
[…]
AfriForum has called apartheid a “so-called” historical injustice. Its chief executive, Kallie Kriel, also said that apartheid was not a crime against humanity because not enough people were killed during the more than four decades of white minority rule.
In May 2018, Kriel and his deputy, Ernst Roets, travelled to the US to lobby the Trump administration in wake of the ANC’s decision to redistribute land and to highlight what AfriForum called the “persecution of South Africa’s minorities”.
The pair exploited South Africa’s high murder rate, including of white farmers, to characterise the killings of Afrikaner landowners as racially targeted. […]
But the deaths of South African white farmers are mostly the result of the country’s high crime rate […]. No farmers who have been murdered have then had their land confiscated.
[…]
In September [2024], as Musk’s dispute with the South African government over Starlink ratcheted up, AfriForum launched a campaign on his behalf that claimed Black empowerment laws were leaving white farmers without communications and vulnerable to attack by keeping the satellite network out of South Africa.
[…].”
- Full report ‘White supremacists in suits and ties’…” on the website of the Guardian (last checked in February 2025)
- See also opinion piece “We Afrikaners are once again skunks” by Max Du Preez in the Daily Maverick