AfriForum’s Racial Hoax Shapes American Foreign Policy on South Africa

On February 7, 2025, the US President Donald Trump signed the executive order on Addressing Egregious Actions of The Republic of South Africa which instructed the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Homeland Security to “prioritize humanitarian relief, including admission and resettlement through the United States Refugee Admissions Program, for Afrikaners in South Africa who are victims of unjust racial discrimination.” Trump’s mobilisation of the refugee discourse to describe Afrikaners as “refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination” serves a broader American agenda to embarrass the South African government and tarnish the country’s image on the world stage. 

This article examines how AfriForum’s politics, operating within a broader ecosystem of powerful actors, is shaping US foreign policy and its relations with South Africa through the deployment of a racial hoax. Trump’s executive order is an outcome of AfriForum’s lobbying of the American government to discipline the post-apartheid government for allegedly perpetrating atrocities against white farmers. Although AfriForum’s global campaign against the post-apartheid black government has been repeatedly exposed as a false narrative that has been circulating in global far-right chat rooms for at least a decade, with the vocal support of Trump's ally, South African-born Elon Musk. AfriForum’s campaign revolves around the re-authoring of the murders of white farmers in remote rural parts of the country as proof of a politically orchestrated campaign of ethnic cleansing, rather than as ordinary violent crime. The fact of the matter is that South Africa has one of the highest murder rates in the world, and violent crime affects all South Africans, not mostly white people or farmers. 

AfriForum’s campaign is a classic racial hoax in that it centres around white people’s fears of liberated blacks in post-apartheid South Africa. This is expressed in a myth of white genocide that relies on anti-black stereotypes, and that, according to Nicky Falkof,  depicts white South Africans as facing “extinction at the hands of violent racially-motivated attackers, exacerbated by an African National Congress government that ignores or even actively encourages attacks on whites.” In her book The Color of Crime, Katheryn Russell-Brown defines a racial hoax as “a cynical manipulation of our deepest fears about race, violence, and victimization.” 

White South Africa had a longstanding practice of leveraging racial hoaxes to call for subordination and domination of black people. For example, Theodorus van der Kemp, the first South African director of the London Missionary Society, wrote in 1802 that white settlers were prone to false claims and hyperbole to sow racial discord. According to van der Kemp, white settlers in nineteenth century South Africa were known to spread false rumours about blacks allegedly stealing cattle, stating that, “a few vagabonds, having been seen here and there, will be enough to cause equal alarm: and the common cry is, ‘if we escape not today, we shall be murdered tomorrow’”. Van der Kemp gives a concrete historical example of how white settlers started racial hoaxes in nineteenth century South Africa:

I remember the whole of Bruintjis Hoogte once fled in a body. Upon inquiring the cause, I was told of the Caffres[i]’ intolerable depredations. More minute investigation proved the whole complaint to be a fiction, and not a single Caffre had been seen. Then, however, a new ground was pretended, in the expectation that the British government intended to transport these people to a foreign country. 

In the early twentieth century, when white settlers had violently conquered Africans, white settlers mobilised a racial hoax that centred around sex panics. Dubbed the ‘black peril’, this racial hoax was premised on, as I have argued elsewhere, “a wide-ranging racist discourse that demonised black men as potential rapists of white women.” This particular hoax led to the criminalisation of interracial sex between black men and white women and functioned as a key premise of white demands for racial segregation. By the 1920s, the ‘black peril’ (‘swart gevaar’) hoax had broadened its discursive theme of sex panic to include the perceived political danger posed by blacks to white rule in South Africa.

The end of apartheid in 1994 activated racial moral panics among whites about what black liberation and “impending social change might mean for white people.” AfriForum’s campaign emerged out of these racial panics. Long before Donald Trump gave AfriForum’s campaign legitimacy, the alleged exceptional plight of White South Africans functioned, ideologically, according to Falkof, “both cause célèbre and cautionary tale for the White far right as far afield as Europe, the United States, and Australia.” For instance, in 2018, AfriForum travelled to Australia to meet with Australian government ministers. In the same year, Australia's Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton told the media that he was exploring a “range of methods to fast-track” white South Africans’ “path to Australia on humanitarian or other visa programs.” Dutton declared that “white South African farmers ‘deserve special attention’ from Australia due to the ‘horrific circumstances’ of land seizures and violence”. 

In other words, by 2018, AfriForum’s racial hoax had become a fully-fledged rallying point for the resurgent white right in Australia. Though it took the AfriForum longer to influence US government’s foreign policy on South Africa, Trump has, since his first presidency, seemed sympathetic and receptive to AfriForum’s racial hoax. For instance, in May 2018, AfriForum went on a tour of the US where the group was also photographed with Trump’s security adviser, John Bolton. In August of the same year, Trump tweeted:

I have asked Secretary of State  @SecPompeo to closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers. South African Government is now seizing land from white farmers.  @TuckerCarlson@FoxNews

AfriForum’s worldwide racist propaganda campaign against South Africa’s black democratic government has been wildly successful in the US because it dovetails with anti-woke propaganda. The US anti-woke propaganda has led to the elimination of diversity and gender equity programming, and the dismantling of US higher education. AfriForum’s campaign and anti-woke propaganda in the US discursively overlap in that, as Jelley Mampaey and Jeroen Huisman put it, the backlash against wokeness “contributes to the denial of the ubiquity of racism in contemporary organizational fields”. AfriForum’s  worldwide racist propaganda campaign against the black democratic government in South Africa downplays white privilege and white wealth which contribute to ongoing racialised inequality, while simultaneously positioning the white minority as victims of the new democracy - not the perpetrators of white supremacy.[ii] 

AfriForum’s campaign is gaining political credibility in this historical moment because the organisation is in ideological alignment with the politics of what has been termed the ‘PayPal Mafia’, which includes Elon Musk, David Sacks, Peter Thiel and Roelof Botha - grandson of Pik Botha[iii]. The PayPal Mafia is described by Max Chafkin as a white male “informal network of interlocking financial and personal relationships” that are connected to the PayPal company which was purchased by eBay in 2002. It includes the founders of YouTube, Yelp, and LinkedIn, individuals who became wealthy and powerful over time, to the extent that they later provided the capital for Airbnb, Lyft, Spotify, Stripe and DeepMind.[iv]

Incidentally, some of the PayPal Mafia, white men like Elon Musk, David Sacks and Peter Thiel, all spent some part of their formative years in apartheid South Africa. Another defining feature is that the politics of the PayPal Mafia can be described, according to Jamie Ranger and Will Ranger, as holding a “cyber-libertarianism, neo-reaction, white supremacism” worldview that envisions a world governed by startup companies, with their billionaire leaders controlling social and political institutions. Both AfriForum’s campaign and the PayPal Mafia’s politics form part of what has been described as “overlapping ideologies with a shared diagnosis of the world that runs parallel with other groups of similar influence over the second Trump administration.” Illustrative of these overlaps is that Elon Musk was a prominent actor in the Trump Administration when it signed the executive order inviting Afrikaners to emigrate, as refugees, to the United States.

South African history is full of powerful white men, like Elon Musk, who have used their whiteness and wealth to universalise white supremacy. Cecil Rhodes is the original political and cultural archetype of this type of whiteness. Unlike Musk, who fantasises about colonising Mars, Rhodes was a British imperialist, an Anglo-Saxon social Darwinist who believed colonialism was beneficial to blacks. Though Musk has not come out explicitly to advocate for Anglo-Saxon supremacy like Rhodes, he nevertheless believes, like Rhodes, that what is good for white people in the West is inherently good for human progress. The worldviews of both Musk and Rhodes have a background operating system that takes for granted that whites have a monopoly on intelligence. In Musk’s case, this operating system is often unstated, but sometimes implied, whereas Rhodes embraced it, articulated it and defended it in his advocacy for an Anglo-Saxon hegemony. And, both men deeply believe that their whiteness and wealth gives them a right to impose their regressive politics on the world. 

Racial hoaxes are not new, and South African history is littered with false allegations of crimes by black peoples, along with moral, social and sex panics that were mobilised to give legitimacy to racial segregation and to a broader racist agenda to subordinate, dominate, and colonise blacks. AfriForum is a continuation of this longstanding white political tradition in South Africa, and its racial hoax of ‘white genocide’ is a re-tooled twenty-first century version of ‘black peril/swart gevaar’. Consequently, AfriForum has universalised swart gevaar, thereby adding a bespoke anti-black South African racism to the global discourse of white supremacy. AfriForum’s contribution to anti-black racism in the world is consistent with a longstanding conservative white South African politics, which Jacques Derrida and Peggy Kamuf once described as “the ultimate racism in the world”. White conservatives have a long history of having the last word on global anti-black racism, and that is what this moment represents for the likes of AfriForum.

Mandisi Majavu is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political and International Studies at Rhodes University. He serves on the editorial board of Ethnic and Racial Studies and his research delves into the political history and dynamics of racial formation across space and time, with a particular focus on South Africa.