The president of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, said a group of white Afrikaners who chose to move to the U.S. as part of a resettlement program created by the Trump administration are “cowards,” stating he has no doubt they will return to their home country soon.
The cohort of about 60 Afrikaners, which included babies and children, landed in Washington, D.C. on a private charter jet on Monday after the U.S. government granted them expedited refugee status over claims they were facing racial discrimination on home soil.
Afrikaners were the leaders of the apartheid system of white minority rule that ended in 1994 and are descendants of predominantly Dutch and French settlers who arrived in South Africa in the 1700s.
Of the country’s 62 million people, about 2.7 million are Afrikaners, making them the country’s largest white group. More than 80 per cent of South Africans are Black, according to The Associated Press.
Two children, part of the first group of Afrikaners from South Africa to resettle in the U.S. as part of a program created by the Trump administration, play with balloons after they arrived at Washington Dulles International Airport in Dulles, Virginia, on May 12, 2025.
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Afrikaners are one of South Africa’s most economically privileged and culturally integrated minority groups. Many are successful business leaders and some hold government positions.
Their mother tongue, Afrikaans, is also widely spoken and recognized as an official language, while their way of life is reflected in churches and other institutions across the country.
But U.S. President Donald Trump said Monday that Afrikaner farmers are victims of a “genocide” at home, allegations South African authorities strongly deny, calling them “completely false.”
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa gestures as he delivers the State of the Nation address at the Cape Town City Hall on Feb. 6, 2025.
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Nonetheless, the group had their immigration applications fast-tracked in February after Trump announced the relocation program.
In light of their resettlement, Ramaphosa chastised the group’s decision to leave.
“As South Africans, we are resilient. We don’t run away from our problems. We must stay here and solve our problems. When you run away, you are a coward, and that’s a real cowardly act,” he said on Monday at an agricultural exhibition.
“We’re the only country on the continent where the colonisers came to stay and we have never driven them out of our country,” he told an Africa CEO forum in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, the BBC reported, before writing off claims that Afrikaners were being persecuted — adding that the dozens of South Africans who arrived on U.S. soil “don’t fit the bill” for refugee status.
Farm attacks
Trump and his South African-born colleague, Elon Musk, have accused the South African government of enacting anti-white laws and policies, but the president’s claims of persecution and genocide pertain to a relatively small number of violent farm attacks and robberies on white people living in rural communities.
In February, a South African court dismissed claims of a white genocide in the country, saying they were “clearly imagined” and “not real,” as it blocked a wealthy benefactor’s donation to a white supremacist group called Boerelgioen, the BBC says.
In addition, a press release from the South Africa Police Service dated March 5 said “only one murder of a farm owner is reflected” in its most recent figures.
The statement came following a review of the initial data after claims by AriForum, an advocacy group for victims of farm attacks in South Africa, said that numbers were misrepresented in the findings.
South African police say its agencies “continue to address crimes affecting all communities, including those in rural and farming areas, with the seriousness they deserve.”
According to the BBC, Ramaphosa stated those who left South Africa were unhappy with efforts to address the past inequities of apartheid, labelling the move a “sad moment for them.”
Meanwhile, Trump’s decision to grant them American citizenship, according to The Associated Press, has left refugee advocacy groups puzzled as to why white South Africans are being prioritized.
The president’s welcoming of them comes at a time when some refugees belonging to racial minority groups in the U.S. are facing threats to their legal status in the country.
In March his administration deported a group of mostly Venezuelans, the majority without criminal records, to a maximum security prison in El Salvador on government sanctioned flights, and later ignored a Supreme Court order to facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a mistakenly deported Salvadoran man aboard one of the planes who had been living in Maryland with his wife and three children for more than a decade.
Trump is also detaining foreign students who are known to have taken part in pro-Palestinian rallies on U.S. university campuses as part of an effort, his administration claims, to curb growing rates of antisemitism, the most high-profile being Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil, who is currently being held in a detention centre in Louisiana.
Khalil is a green card holder and married to an American citizen. The couple have a son, who was born while Khalil was in detention.
— With files from The Associated Press