Ramaphosa Dubs Claim of Persecution of White People in SA

March 27, 2025

(3 Minutes Read)

In his weekly message to the nation, Ramaphosa said South Africans “should not allow external events to divide us or pit us against each other”.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said that the claim that white people are persecuted in his country is a “completely false narrative.” It was his latest attempt to push back against allegations by US President Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and some white minority groups in South Africa.

South African-born Elon Musk, who has regularly accused South Africa’s black-led government of being anti-white, repeated in a social media post this weekend that some political figures in the country are “actively promoting white genocide. “

In his weekly message to the nation, Ramaphosa said South Africans “should not allow external events to divide us or pit us against each other”. He did not name names, but his denial referred to allegations by Trump and others that South Africa is deliberately mistreating a white minority group known as Afrikaners by encouraging violent attacks on their farms and introducing legislation to seize their land.

These allegations were at the heart of an executive order issued by Trump last month, which cut funding to South Africa to punish the government while offering Afrikaners refugee status in the United States.

The Afrikaner group claims that police have sometimes undercounted farm homicides in official statistics. It recently said it had figures showing there were eight farm homicides in the three months between October and December last year, while police recorded only one. According to police statistics, there were a total of 6,953 homicides in South Africa during the same period.

Afrikaners are descendants of Dutch and French settlers who arrived in South Africa over 300 years ago. They were at the heart of the apartheid government, which systematically oppressed non-whites, although South Africa largely succeeded in reconciling its many racial groups after the end of apartheid in 1994.