White Christian leaders in South Africa have rejected claims that white Afrikaner people are victims of violence and hateful rhetoric. “The narrative presented by the [U.S.] government is founded on fabrications, distortions, and outright lies,” they said in a joint statement released on Feb. 12. “It does not reflect the reality of our country and, if anything, serves to heighten existing tensions in South Africa.”
The signatories, more than 400 leaders from a number of Christian denominations, also expressed “serious concern” about the sudden withdrawal of U.S. aid to South Africa, noting that the nation’s poorest will suffer the most because of the halt in aid. Especially concerning has been the suspension of U.S. funds from Pepfar, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief.
The leaders explain: “[T]he support being withdrawn from South Africa disproportionately affects the HIV community who rely on antiretroviral medication. South Africa has a significant number of people who are HIV+, and for whom access to antiretroviral medication is a matter of life or death.”
The letter was composed in response to an executive order issued by President Donald Trump on Feb. 10, “addressing human rights violations in South Africa.”
Mr. Trump said that he would hold South Africa accountable for rights violations against white Afrikaners, a group of people he described as “innocent disfavored minority farmers.” Mr. Trump announced that he would be “cutting off all future funding to South Africa until a full investigation of this situation has been completed!” He extended an invitation to white Afrikaners to come as refugees to the United States even as his administration essentially shut down the nation’s refugee resettlement programs for all other refugee classes.
Mr. Trump’s executive order followed swiftly after South African President Cyril Ramaphosa signed the controversial “Expropriation Bill” on Jan. 23. That measure allows farmland seizures and redistribution of property by the state.
Land equity remains unfulfilled promise
The new law is meant to address historic inequities in South Africa. Thirty years after the end of apartheid, Black South Africans still own only a small fraction of farmland nationwide—the vast majority of land remains in the hands of the nation’s white minority. The new law contends that land can be expropriated without compensation when it is “just and equitable and in the public interest” to do so, that is, when it concerns land that is not being used or land that the current holder has no intention to develop.
The Rev. Peter-John Pearson, the director of the Parliamentary Liaison Office of the Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference, in an interview conducted by text, said that Mr. Trump’s proclamation has the effect of normalizing “far-fetched racist ideas” meant to “create sympathy for whiteness,” an attempt to normalize what he described as absurd beliefs.
Father Pearson worries “racism is being justified by creating a fellowship of the walking-wounded, which plays directly into the hands of the notion of besieged whiteness,” indifferent to facts. A narrative of white persecution in South Africa, apparently endorsed by Mr. Trump, he said, closely aligns with right-wing portrayals of white South Africans as “perpetual” victims who require constant protection.
For several years, two right-wing political bodies in South Africa, Solidariteit and AfriForum, have been petitioning U.S. officials to view Afrikaners as victims. Reacting to these claims, the prominent political journalist Max du Preez, himself an Afrikaner, wrote: “Afrikaners are not victims. Along with other white South Africans, we remain privileged and vastly overrepresented in professional and economic spheres.”
Father Pearson believes the White House’s sudden attention to South Africa is motivated by the government’s decision to bring genocide charges against Israel to the International Court of Justice in the Hague, Netherlands, in December 2023.
In his executive order, Mr. Trump accused the South African government of taking a position against the United States and its allies. He remarked, “Merely two months after the October 7th terrorist attacks on Israel, South Africa accused Israel, not Hamas, of genocide in the International Court of Justice.” Many of the current leaders in South Africa believe, based on their own experiences, that observing what is happening to Palestinians is akin to holding a mirror reflecting South Africa’s own struggle for justice and freedom.
In their statement, South Africa’s Christian leaders recalled that in the nation’s recent history, the Christian faith was used to justify the apartheid regime. “We have watched in horror as political rhetoric in the United States of America has also drawn on the Christian faith in ways which dismiss the most basic Christian call to caring for the vulnerable, loving of neighbours, and working for a good society for all,” they said.
Tensions resulting from the president’s decision, according to the statement, “are now being weaponized for cheap political points in the USA. Similarly, there are South African leaders, especially within the white community, who are using the deplorable actions and statements of the President of the United States of America and his supporters to serve the narrow needs of their local constituencies.”
“We call on our fellow South Africans,” they said, “to reconsider this dangerous political strategy and to rather give their energy towards working for a more just future in South Africa.”
White Afrikaners are a Southern African ethnic group descended from Dutch settlers who arrived in what is now South Africa in 1652. Until the dawn of democracy in 1994, Afrikaners dominated South Africa’s political and commercial agricultural sectors. Afrikaner nationalism took root in the mid-20th century, leading to the formation of the National Party to promote the interests of Afrikaners. This party implemented the apartheid system in 1948.
“Forced removals” of Black South Africans from their lands were conducted by the white nationalist government between 1960 and 1983. The government displaced more than 3.5 million Black South Africans against their will to enforce a system of physical racial segregation.
The campaign was given a veneer of legality by the Group Areas Act of 1950. Many South Africans were relocated to areas with limited natural resources that were distant from employment opportunities. The social and economic disparities resulting over the ensuing decades have been stark. According to Germany’s Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, just 5 percent of South Africans, predominantly white, own 85 percent of the national wealth, and 50 percent of South Africans, mostly Black, possess just 1 percent of the wealth.
Addressing the land issue, Christian leaders said that successive South African governments have failed to address the racial injustices of apartheid and colonialism effectively. Describing the reasons for that failure as complex, they write, “One factor is the sustained resistance by many white South Africans to initiatives that seek to meaningfully address the economic and land ownership consequences of these systems of racial oppression.”
Aid loss is life threatening
In their February statement, Christian leaders said that “the sudden and immediate withdrawal of aid, particularly aid which supports our health systems, promises devastation for our communities.”
South Africa received $453 million in aid from the United States in 2024, according to the Institute for Security Studies. Pepfar pays for nearly 20 percent of the country’s HIV/AIDS intervention programs. U.S. aid has also helped fund initiatives to address climate change, promote gender equality, support community-based violence prevention and uphold democratic principles.
The Rev. Hugh O’Connor, secretary general of the Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference, told America that support from the U.S. Agency for International Development and Pepfar “have played a significant role in providing health care and especially antiretrovirals; their work has saved many lives and helped to provide stability in the wider society.” U.S.A.I.D. has essentially been shut down in recent weeks by the Department of Government Efficiency, an initiative sponsored by Tesla billionaire Elon Musk, who has emerged as a close advisor to Mr. Trump.
“They prevented many homes from becoming child-headed households by improving the well-being of adults living with HIV/Aids,” Father O’Connor said. “The sudden cut in funding and the consequent confusion put lives at risk.”
“The way the funding was stopped indicates a disregard for the humanity and dignity of the beneficiaries and a lack of concern for the wider community,” he said. “The lesson learned from this experience is that total dependency on international aid carries risks and that donor recipients must develop sustainable structures for future growth and development.”
South African political observers warn that the abrupt withdrawal of U.S. aid not only raises the risk of more deaths from HIV/AIDS, but could also mean more human rights abuses and could hamstring economic development programs across the continent. They say that African countries ultimately could be more vulnerable to violent extremism.
There are growing perceptions from South African and African political and social analysts that Mr. Musk has unduly influenced Mr. Trump’s decision regarding South Africa. Mr. Musk was born into an affluent white family in South Africa and left the country in 1988 (two years before former South African President F. W. de Klerk announced the release of Nelson Mandela and the end of apartheid) to attend college in Canada.
During the term of former President Jacob Zuma, South Africans contended with the problem of “state capture” when unelected actors, the members of the wealthy and powerful Gupta family, essentially controlled government agencies. While that may seem unlikely to occur in the United States, political analysts in South Africa have begun to ask if Mr. Musk’s influence on Mr. Trump suggests that a similar phenomenon may be taking place.
