For decades, some members of the white Afrikaner minority have been trying to convince anyone and everyone who would listen that they are the true victims in post-apartheid South Africa.
They have made claims of mass killings of their people and widespread land grabs by a Black-led government that they insist is seeking retribution for the sins of the Afrikaner-led apartheid government. Their stories have been false or greatly exaggerated, but that hasn’t stopped them from being widely amplified and repeated online.
Afrikaners, an ethnic group that descended from European — primarily Dutch — colonizers, have found a champion of their cause in President Trump, and it has led to a moment that few of them could have imagined.
Mr. Trump on Friday put the weight of American influence behind a hotly disputed claim that Afrikaners were the “victims of unjust racial discrimination,” issuing an executive order to allow them to migrate to the United States as refugees, and halting aid to South Africa.
The move was met with dismay in South Africa, a majority-Black nation where more than 90 percent of the population comes from racial groups persecuted by the racist, apartheid regime. These groups — Black, Colored and Indian — remain statistically far behind the white minority in virtually every economic measure.
There have been gruesome murders of white farmers, the focus of the Afrikaner grievances, but police statistics suggest that they account for a very small share of the country’s killings.
It is not clear whether Mr. Trump’s interest in South Africa has been influenced by Elon Musk, now one of his close advisers, who was born and raised there and has been harshly critical of its government.
For Afrikaners, who make up about 4 percent of the population, Mr. Trump’s action was the culmination of years of international lobbying.
“What happened last night is probably the most significant international action” on South Africa since 1994, when the apartheid regime lost power, Ernst Roets, the executive director of the Afrikaner Foundation, an advocacy group, said on Saturday.
Mr. Roets has made several trips to Washington over the years to meet with lawmakers and think tanks, and has another long-planned trip coming up in two weeks, he said. His organization has not met with any officials in the second Trump administration and was not directly involved in the executive order, he said. But they have spoken with people in Mr. Trump’s orbit and have raised international awareness for their cause, he said.
“We’ve done some things wrong, but every community has done some things wrong,” Mr. Roets said of Afrikaners. “We’ve had this sense of being scapegoated and blamed for everything. The fact that there’s now a recognition is something that I think a lot of people will welcome.”
South African government officials were somewhat blindsided by Mr. Trump’s order, learning of it through news reports, said Ebrahim Rasool, South Africa’s ambassador in Washington.
Mr. Trump began focusing publicly on South Africa last Sunday, with posts on social media and comments to reporters, suggesting that the country’s government was seizing white-owned land.
President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa last month signed a law that allows the government to take private land, in limited circumstances, without compensating the owners. But legal scholars say such seizures are subject to judicial scrutiny and in most cases the government will compensate owners for land it acquires for public purposes.
Supporters of the law say it is needed in part to redress the imbalance created by a history of white people taking control of most land, while Black ownership was limited by force and by law.
After Mr. Trump made his comments, Mr. Musk asked Mr. Ramaphosa in a post on X, “Why do you have openly racist ownership laws?”
Vincent Magwenya, a spokesman for Mr. Ramaphosa, said, “we have never witnessed such an escalation of diplomatic tensions,” and added that the issues Mr. Trump raised had “been laced with complete lies and distortions about our country.”
Mr. Ramaphosa spoke with Mr. Musk this past week and was “emphatic in saying we don’t have racist laws,” Mr. Magwenya said. But Mr. Musk has continued to insist that white people in South Africa are persecuted.
Kallie Kriel, chief executive of AfriForum, an Afrikaner rights organization, said South Africa’s own actions had alienated American leaders, particularly its accusation before the International Court of Justice that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza.
While he dismissed claims that white South Africans were victims of widespread killings, he cited several laws that he said target Afrikaners. One law allows the government greater control over the language of instruction in schools, which can vary from place to place, and some Afrikaners think it will restrict use of Afrikaans in classrooms.
“It’s a direct threat on our cultural existence,” Mr. Kriel said.
Melanie Verwoerd, a former ambassador to Ireland for South Africa, said the focus on Afrikaner rights inverted the history of a people who have benefited since the 17th century from land their ancestors took from Black people. She said she was speaking “as a white person, and as an Afrikaner,” adding that it was “categorically” false that white South Africans were being persecuted.
“The vast majority of poor in this country remains Black people,” said Ms. Verwoerd. “If any group is being treated badly, or if there are any human rights abuses to talk of, then that is in fact the Blacks, not the whites.”
Mr. Ramaphosa met twice with Mr. Musk last year to discuss bringing his businesses, most notably the Starlink satellite communications system, to South Africa. In those meetings, Mr. Musk did not express concern about white people being mistreated in South Africa, Mr. Magwenya said.
Instead, Mr. Musk’s main concern was South Africa’s requirements that foreign companies cede some ownership to Black South Africans or other historically disadvantaged groups, Mr. Magwenya said. Mr. Musk told the president that he worried that it would set a bad precedent for the other markets where he operates Starlink, Mr. Magwenya said.
Mr. Musk is primarily of English, not Afrikaner, descent. Tensions are rife between white, English-speaking South Africans and Afrikaners, who are often stereotyped as more blue-collar and less sophisticated.
Afrikaners tend to have a grimmer view of the country than the population at large. In a 2023 survey by the Human Sciences Research Council, 79 percent of Afrikaners said they were dissatisfied with the country’s democracy and 47 percent said they belonged to a group suffering discrimination — higher rates than any other group.
The white population, now about 4.5 million, has declined steadily for decades — there has been net out-migration of 700,000 white people since 1985, according to Statistics South Africa, the official government statistics agency. But there has been no sign — at least so far — that Afrikaners would be inclined to emigrate en masse to the United States.
Mr. Roets and the leaders of AfriForum said they wanted to remain in South Africa to make it better. They said they planned to ask the Trump administration, rather than cutting all funding to South Africa, to invest in organizations that help Afrikaner communities.
Among the primary grievances of Afrikaners is that they face violence on farms and that the government discriminates against them with policies that seek to give preference to Black South Africans in areas like business and land ownership. But proponents of race-based policies argue that because apartheid used race to oppress and impoverish the Black population, race-conscious rules are required to even the scales.
“It’s not completely devoid of all truth,” Albert Grundlingh, an emeritus professor of history at Stellenbosch University and an Afrikaner, said of Afrikaners’ concerns. “To say that as a group they’re now being downtrodden and they’ve got no prospects whatsoever, that’s an exaggeration.”
Bennie van Zyl, the general manager of the Transvaal Agricultural Union in South Africa, said that his fellow Afrikaners want Black farmers to be successful.
“But government makes the land issue a race issue,” he said. “For us, this is not about race — this is about success.”
Reporting was contributed by Jeffrey Moyo from Harare, Zimbabwe.
