In March, a South African lobbyist for white rights named Ernst Roets appeared across from Tucker Carlson in an episode on Mr. Carlson’s YouTube channel called, “Man Charged With Treason for Speaking to Tucker About the Killing of Whites in South Africa.” This being the Tucker Carlson Show, at least two pieces of misinformation were shoehorned into the title. A man hadn’t been charged with treason for speaking to Mr. Carlson and white folks weren’t being killed in South Africa — at least, not at a rate higher than the rest of the population.
The title was correct on one point: Mr. Roets had indeed been interviewed by Mr. Carlson before. On the first occasion, he decanted an entire grievance mythos into the MAGAverse. The gist of his argument, as Mr. Carlson summed it up in his recent podcast episode, was that South Africa is shockingly racist against white people — “far more than apartheid ever was” to Black people.
In South Africa, Mr. Roets’ particular brand of performative victimhood is greeted not with jail time or the gallows, as it would be the case in some countries, but mostly with memes. Bazillions of them. The vast majority mock the notion that Mr. Roets’ constituency — white, right-wing Afrikaners disgruntled with the status quo — are in any way singled out for mistreatment by the government. In fact, no one community in South Africa has benefited more from apartheid’s economic legacy than white South Africans, yet for years a small but vocal group has decried what they consider to be institutional discrimination against them, making their claims on television shows, podcasts and social media.
But as Tucker Carlson goes, so goes the Trump administration. In February, after halting lifesaving aid for African H.I.V./AIDS and malaria programs across Africa, President Trump signed an executive order that, among other things, offered refugee status to “ethnic minority Afrikaners,” the vast majority of whom are white. In the middle of May, with uncommon efficiency, a plane chartered by the U.S. government spirited almost 60 new refugees to the United States, where they were met by a welcoming committee.
As we say in South Africa, ’n Boer maak ’n plan. A farmer makes a plan.
Contrary to the claims in Mr. Trump’s order, there is no evidence that the civil rights of white South Africans have been systematically trampled on, or that white landowners face disproportionate violence. They own farms that occupy about half of South Africa’s area, despite making up around 7 percent of the population. No white-owned land or home has been forcibly taken by the government under a new land law mentioned in Mr. Trump’s order.
These lobbyists travel into and out of South Africa without hindrance, facing no bans or financial repercussions. (Such opportunities, most readers will be unsurprised to learn, were not available to Black dissidents during apartheid. They were banned, jailed or forced into exile.) Recently, an opposition party has suggested bringing treason charges against an activist group, an idea drawing some enthusiasm among members of the government. But good luck pulling that one past South Africa’s highest court, which has a liberal bent. Mr. Roets and his backers live in a democracy — a noisy, messy, contested one — but a democracy nonetheless.
What is happening in Nelson Mandela’s Rainbow Nation? And why are the MAGA movement and Mr. Trump — who are mostly disinterested in African affairs — so concerned with the welfare of this particular group of South African citizens? The short answer is: white. The more substantial answer is that South Africa’s transition from apartheid to democracy is wildly misunderstood. “The perfect term for it is transplacement,” the political analyst Ralph Mathekga has said. “What that means is that the old system did not die. It is “still breathing.”
The miracle of South Africa’s first free elections in 1994 was not, as most people assume, the “peaceful” transition to democracy and the ascension of Mandela to the top job, but rather the fact that apartheid’s engineers and upholders were allowed to compete in the first place. They won 20 percent of that vote and assumed a leading role in the government. The old oppressors served alongside the formerly oppressed in a “government of national unity” and had enormous influence in drafting the country’s new constitution. The document could not have turned out better for Afrikaner nationalists, who were asked to give up none of apartheid’s spoils in exchange for a liberal constitution that enshrined their rights.
To this day, the bulk of South Africa’s private wealth remains in white hands. And while life is demonstrably better for the Black majority — especially with regard to nice perks like habeas corpus, freedom of movement and universal suffrage — South Africa is, by many measures, the most unequal society on earth. The white minority is the major beneficiary of this arrangement, but there is a caveat. Even within this cohort, wealth distribution is lumpy. Much of the Afrikaans middle class that was forged and protected by the apartheid system now struggles to make ends meet. Compounding matters, the government runs along rails of corruption and double-dealing that enriches a small Black elite connected to the African National Congress, Mandela’s party that still dominates South African politics.
The decline of the middle class is a global phenomenon, but in South Africa, as in parts of America, it takes on unambiguously racial characteristics. These grievances were blasted into America when Afrikaner lobbyists shared the myth of “white genocide” over the past decade, coinciding with the rise of Mr. Trump. They falsely allege that the South African government is responsible for a campaign of targeted violence against rural “Boers,” the Afrikaans term for farmer. (Boer has a secondary connotation in the language, too: boss, or overlord.)
There is no question that many rural South Africans, like many urban South Africans, have experienced almost wartime levels of violence. South Africa’s gruesome rates of inequality almost ensure this. The police are often useless, or worse. Organized gangsterism and industrial-scale stock theft reduce rural areas to occasional battlefields. But to allege government complicity in the murder of white farmers — let alone genocide — is a falsehood that verges on a full-scale rewrite of South Africa’s history. (By contrast, apartheid itself was never designated a genocide, and no credible revisionist movement has ever argued otherwise.)
Give Ernst Roets and his fellow travelers this much: They intimately understand MAGA culture and its feedback loop, and bafflingly, America’s so-called culture wars have found enormous purchase in South Africa’s elite circles. One would imagine that a major upside of living at the bottom of Africa is not having to know the particulars of Nancy Pelosi’s stock portfolio, or being versed in Fox News talking points on the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop. But one would be mistaken.
By appearing on Tucker Carlson, by posting on X, and by exploiting the animus to Black governance by white South Africans such as Elon Musk, who is closely tied to the Trump administration, the Afrikaner right lobby has vaulted their cause to the top of the geopolitical discussion.
If any more evidence of this was required, it was settled by Wednesday’s meeting in the Oval Office between President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa and Mr. Trump. In a patented example of cringe diplomacy, Team Trump ambushed Mr. Ramaphosa’s delegation with a super cut video of former A.N.C. politician Julius Malema, a cosplay revolutionary who insists on singing an old apartheid-era struggle song called “Dubul’ ibhunu,” often translated as “Kill The Boer,” at his political rallies. For the likes of Mr. Musk and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Mr. Malema’s antics are clearly incitement to genocide, though no incidents of violence have been definitively linked to the song.
Mr. Ramaphosa’s obsequiousness in the face of Mr. Trump’s barrage was to be expected; he is a man of many comforts, who has grown unaccustomed to being challenged. Thankfully, there were golfers and businessmen present in the Oval Office to try to temper the exchange. But, as all of this should make clear, the race-baiting grift is alive and well in South Africa.
Indeed, South Africa helped define and perfect white supremacy, so take it from an expert: This is an effort to flip the narrative of apartheid, and cast former oppressors as victims. It’s an attempt to invalidate the end of legislated white minority rule in South Africa, and render white Afrikaners as victims of reverse racism, to say nothing of targeted mass murder. It’s about spreading the global white replacement conspiracy theory.
Make no mistake, democratic South Africa is, in many respects, a failed, violent and corrupt state. But the forgiveness extended to the white minority at the end of apartheid is one of the most exceptionally human and humane moments of our species’ bloody history. By turning their backs on this, by accepting refugee status and claiming the mantle of exceptional victimhood, right-wing Afrikaners have become bit players in MAGA’s noisy but empty scam. They leave nothing behind them, except their home.
And the memes. Bazillions of them.
Richard Poplak is a journalist and filmmaker based in Johannesburg.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
The post A South African Grift Lands in the Oval Office appeared first on New York Times.
