By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
US President Donald Trump on Monday claimed that the US media was refusing to write about a supposed “genocide” taking place in South Africa.
Trump made the comments in the Oval Office during a media briefing around the signing of an executive order aimed at establishing price controls for pescription drugs.
Trump’s remarks came as the first flight of white South African “refugees” were set to imminently disembark at Dulles airport.
“It’s a genocide that’s taking place that you people don’t want to write about,” said Trump. “It’s a terrible thing that’s taking place. And farmers are being killed. They happen to be white, but whether they’re white or Black makes no difference to me, but white farmers are being brutally killed, and their land is being confiscated in South Africa.”
Afrikaners make up South Africa’s largest white group and were the leaders of the apartheid government, which brutally enforced racial segregation for nearly 50 years before ending it in 1994. While South Africa has been largely successful in reconciling its many races after apartheid ended, tensions between some Black political parties and some Afrikaner groups have remained.
Trump insist that US media would cover the situation in South Africa more were the racial demographics reversed and a white majority was persecuting a Black minority.
“If it were the other way around, they’d talk about it. That would be the only story they’d talk about,” he said.
That characterization is strongly denied by the South African government and has been disputed by experts in the country and even an Afrikaner group.
Speaking at a business conference in Ivory Coast, President Cyril Ramaphosa said Monday that he spoke with Trump by phone recently and told him that his administration had been fed false information by groups who were casting whites as victims because of efforts to right the historical wrongs of colonialism and South Africa’s previous apartheid system of forced racial segregation, which oppressed the Black majority.
“I had a conversation with President Trump on the phone and he asked me, ‘What’s going on down there?’ and I told him that what you are being told by those people who are opposed to transformation back in South Africa is not true,” Ramaphosa said.
Ramaphosa said he thought Trump “understood that.”
The Trump administration’s acceptance and even encouragement of migration from South Africa stands in stark contrast to the administration’s efforts to fast-track the asylum process and expel as many as one million undocumented immigrants during the president’s first year in office.