Donald Trump’s bizarre and unprecedented 2025 offer of refugee status to white Afrikaners led to an explosion of media attention both within South Africa and across the globe. Ranging from the sceptical to the celebratory, journalists, policy-makers and others debated the dubious wisdom of creating a special category of white victims, and examined how Trump’s enmeshment in this narrative was spurred by online outrage and the whisperings of an influential billionaire with roots in apartheid South Africa. The Trump-Musk axis was birthed on X, formerly Twitter, and had all the hallmarks of a social media moral panic, driven by spurious claims of white genocide that have in recent years migrated from the global white supremacist imagination into the mainstream.
As an academic who has spent much of my career writing about the anxieties of white South Africans, watching this unfold has been fascinating and disturbing in equal measures. Digital culture, which was initially sold as a way to democratise the media and amplify the voiceless, has turned out to be a highly effective tool for disseminating far right mythologies to a broader audience.
Those of us who write on whiteness tend to be attuned to the silences and absences in these kinds of narratives. One of the common critiques of my field of study is that we risk ‘recentring whiteness’, that our progressive politics and critical views on white identity and behaviour actually force the focus away from the larger problematics of race - as a structuring social principle - and back to white people. The narrative about Afrikaner refugees displays this tendency from the other side of the political spectrum: it makes white people the central issue of any debate about South Africa, even though we are a small minority (albeit a very privileged one, with significant economic and social power).
The question that we need to address is what the myth of white genocide, and its social and political effects, truly achieves. We know that Trump’s policy on Afrikaner migration means that some white people – mostly middle-class urbanites rather than put-upon agrarians, so economic migrants rather than refugees – have been able to move to the US. The apparent plight of white South Africans that was used to justify this policy has, as I suggest above, been the subject of much debate, and the refugee programme brought international ridicule upon the already dangerously ridiculous Trump administration. Beyond these facts, however, what has gone largely unremarked is how this recentring of whiteness has functionally erased black people from global narratives about risk, crime and danger in South Africa.
South Africa has, notoriously, one of the highest rates of gender-based violence and femicide (GBVF) in the world, a consequence of a toxic combination of patriarchy, poverty, generational trauma and weak rule of law. Those most vulnerable to this kind of violence, as with violence in general, are overwhelmingly black and poor. White women do of course experience GBVF: let us not forget Reeva Steenkamp, whose whiteness and wealth did not protect her from Oscar Pistorius. But black women, particularly precarious black women, face excessive risk of intimate partner violence and other forms of gender-based violence. These appalling truths were highlighted during Johannesburg’s hosting of the G20 meeting in November 2025, when the NGO Women For Change organised a women’s shutdown to force the state to declare GBVF a national disaster. (It is currently unclear what this declaration achieves – more well-paid commissions of inquiry, perhaps?)
It is not only women who need to be part of this conversation. Black men are responsible for the majority of violent crime in South Africa. They also, however, form the majority of its victims. Internal narratives around violence in South Africa often fail to consider men as victims, despite – again – the disproportionate risk faced by black men and boys who are poor, queer, disabled, lacking in resources, and/or living in dangerous areas. Rates of GBV perpetrated on boys are shockingly high and often normalised as child or adolescent ‘virility’ or ‘masculine success’ within communities.
These women, girls, boys and men are almost entirely absent from the current story about violence and threat in South Africa. Instead, the far right’s fabricated and nonsensical insistence that white people are the only meaningful victims of violence has effectively erased black people from a global understanding of risk in South Africa. If they feature at all, black South Africans are dismissed as collateral damage or demonised as violent provocateurs and venal politicians intentionally targeting whites. These two modes of representation are intimately intertwined. Presenting black people as endemically violent or corrupt effectively ensures that they are not perceived as victims, or that their victimhood is easily written off as a consequence of this same violence and corruption. The international debate around danger in South Africa has thus, for the past few years, been centred on whether white people are extraordinary victims, and whether we deserve special protections for being especially vulnerable.
To return to the question I asked earlier, what does the myth of white genocide do? Whether or not the term is used, the ideas that swirl around it have a particular utility. In highlighting the apparently unusual level of threat faced by white people because of our whiteness, it effectively silences and erases black victims of violence, treating their deaths and injuries as meaningless. Violence, when it happens to black people, is normalised. It just is, and it does not require global attention, refugee programmes or pressure groups. Here we catch an unsettlingly loud echo of the language of apartheid: it is simply ‘black-on-black violence’ and does not mean anything else. Violence that happens to white people, however, undergoes the opposite process: it is anything but ordinary. White victims of violence inspire debate, donations and chartered flights to the Global North.
My own research on the white genocide myth has revealed its hollowness. White discomfort about social change – about streets being renamed, about the Expropriation Act[i], about changes to the status of Afrikaans – is rewritten as an existential threat to white South Africans, who are presented as extraordinary victims in need of extraordinary measures to preserve their basic human rights. While criticising the above described disturbing turn of events, we need to remain cognisant of the black South Africans who remain almost entirely invisible in this story. The work of understanding media narratives, moral panics, Trump’s war on truth, and the damaging consequences of social media monopoly, requires us also to consider who is left out of the stories, and what the consequences of that exclusion might be.
Nicky Falkof is a Professor of Media Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand. She currently holds the DST-NRF SARChI Chair in Critical Diversity Studies and is Director of the Wits Centre for Diversity Studies. Her books include Worrier State: Risk, anxiety and moral panic in South Africa and The End of Whiteness: Satanism and family murder in late apartheid South Africa.
[i] The Expropriation Act has been a central pillar of the culture war around white Afrikaners. The Act allows the South African government to expropriate land for the public good, in specific instances without compensation. Despite general legal agreement that the Act is very moderate and is in line with laws elsewhere in the world, including the US, and that expropriation without compensation can only be used in rare cases where land is clearly abandoned, the Act has become a flashpoint for angry Afrikaners who have lobbied Trump to stop the state from ‘stealing’ their land.
