South Africa’s African National Congress has labelled a plan by the Trump administration to build “refugee centres” for white Afrikaners as “madness” in the latest twist of a deepening diplomatic crisis between the two countries.
People in South Africa with knowledge of the Trump administration’s plans told the Financial Times they had met US state department officials in recent weeks who were determined to bring Afrikaners to the US as refugees. “They are very serious about this. They want to see Afrikaners on planes,” said one.
Under a project called “Mission South Africa”, the Trump administration has begun turning empty office space in the capital of Pretoria into temporary housing for Afrikaner “refugees”, according to documents obtained by The New York Times. The newspaper said the US has received 8,200 refugee requests and identified 100 Afrikaners who could be given asylum.
Afrikaners, a white minority group who trace their roots to 17th-century Dutch settlers, led the white nationalist government that implemented apartheid after the second world war, and today constitute less than 5 per cent of the country’s population.
Even while the US clamps down on asylum seekers globally, President Donald Trump and his South African-born adviser, the billionaire Elon Musk, have seized on accusations that Afrikaners became an oppressed minority under a democratic, multiracial government after apartheid fell 30 years ago and now need a haven.
On Tuesday, the ANC, the largest party in South Africa’s coalition government, reacted angrily to the reports.
“That is just madness, that you can build refugee centres in a country as peaceful as South Africa, and claim that people are subjected to genocide,” ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula said at a media briefing. “The real genocide is happening there in the Middle East, that is what needs to be curtailed.”
Church World Service, a US national resettlement agency for refugees from sub-Saharan Africa, said its contracts remained suspended, meaning a pipeline of more than 10,000 refugees from the continent was frozen.
“A lot of them were basically taken off the plane at the last minute when the executive order came down,” operations vice-president Erol Kekic said. “The impact was pretty direct and heartbreaking.”
The news surrounding the plan to resettle Afrikaners “makes me feel that resettlement could potentially be used not for those that need it most, but for other purposes”, he added
Relations between Pretoria and Washington have been strained since South Africa last year accused Israel at the International Court of Justice of committing genocide in Gaza, a charge Israel has denied.
The diplomatic row worsened in January after Trump accused the ANC-led government of treating white Afrikaners “very badly” following a new law allowing state expropriation of land. He has since cut all foreign aid to South Africa, and offered asylum to Afrikaners wanting to escape South Africa’s “unjust racial discrimination” — a description South Africa’s government has said is based on “misinformation”.
Musk, who grew up in Pretoria, has said he has been the victim of racial discrimination that means he has been unable to launch his Starlink satellite communication system in South Africa.
Mbalula, who is close to President Cyril Ramaphosa, said any notion that there was a “white genocide” in South Africa was “a total, unfounded fabrication”. Ramaphosa last week also hit out at what he said was a “completely false narrative that our country is a place in which people of a certain race or culture are being targeted for persecution”.
A minority of Afrikaners have embraced Trump’s messaging. A demonstration outside the US embassy in February attracted several thousand, with some carrying signs saying “Thank You Trump” and “Elon, send the ANC to Mars”. But the majority of large Afrikaner organisations have been cool on the offer.
“We are very grateful to the White House, because it has been a long time since Afrikaners were recognised on the global stage. But as grateful as we are, we don’t want to leave our homeland,” said Frans de Klerk, one of the leaders of Orania, an Afrikaner-only settlement located in South Africa’s most remote province, the Northern Cape.
Frans Cronje, a political analyst who chairs the Washington-based Yorktown Foundation for Freedom, said Trump was misreading the situation.
“Trump is correct that the civil rights of Afrikaners are under threat, that commercial farmers are exposed to disproportionate levels of armed attack, and that property rights are being threatened. But these threats are not unique to white South Africans,” he told the Financial Times.
While Cronje’s research shows that armed attack on South Africa’s commercial farmers is six times that of the broader population, the number of attacks on Black commercial farmers was “likely similar to that of their white compatriots”.
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