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Speaking at a conference in Ivory Coast, President Cyril Ramaphosa said the white Afrikaners had ostensibly left because they were opposed to policies aimed at addressing racial inequality persisting since apartheid, or white minority, rule ended three decades ago.
“We think that the American government has got the wrong end of the stick here, but we’ll continue talking to them,” he said.
Trump said SA’s leadership was travelling to see him next week, and that he would not travel to a G20 meeting there in November unless the “situation is taken care of”.
People interviewed by Reuters in Cape Town on Monday said they bore no ill will to their departing compatriots but doubted they would find life much better in the US.
“I don’t believe in running away from problems, you know, we’ve got a lovely country, and we make it work,” said Robert Skeen, an Afrikaner selling boerewors rolls.
Since Nelson Mandela won SA’s first democratic elections in 1994, the once-ruling white minority has retained most of its wealth amassed since colonial times.
Whites still own three-quarters of private land and have about 20 times the wealth of the black majority, according to international academic journal the Review of Political Economy.
Less than 10% of white South Africans are out of work, compared with more than a third of their black counterparts.
Yet the claim that minority white South Africans face discrimination from the black majority has become an established trope in right-wing online chat rooms, and been echoed by Trump’s white SA-born ally Elon Musk.
Those who claim white South Africans face persecution cite employment laws, violent attacks on white farmers and the new land law.
Out of 26,000 murders in SA last year, 44 were linked to farming communities, according to police statistics. Crime researchers say the overwhelming majority of murder victims are black.
Since his return to the White House in January, Trump has cut all US financial assistance to SA, citing disapproval of its land policy and of its genocide case at the International Court of Justice against Washington’s ally Israel.
A spokesperson for the US department of health and human services said on Friday it was working with the state department to support the South Africans’ resettlement, without giving details about what kind of assistance they would receive.
The spokesperson added that more arrivals were expected in the coming months. The state department paid for Monday’s charter flight, according to someone familiar with the matter.
Reuters
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