"'I have never experienced anything like it': South Africa's new US envoy directly rejects Trump's white genocide claim

ROELF MEYER, South Africa's newly appointed ambassador to Washington, has flatly rejected President Donald Trump's assertion that white Afrikaners in his country are being targeted in a genocide, arguing that as "a born Afrikaner" he has the personal standing and the lived experience to say so. Speaking to the BBC, Meyer said the idea of a coordinated mass attack on the white minority simply does not exist, and that claims to the contrary have misrepresented the actual pattern of violence in South Africa.

The 57-year-old diplomat recalled his immediate reaction when the allegation first surfaced. "Is he talking about us?" he remembered thinking. Now, he says, he has never received a satisfactory explanation for where the claims originated. Meyer said the facts about violence in South Africa had been "misdirected" in international debate, and that he had sought clarity on the source of that "misdirection of information" without ever getting a clear answer.

Meyer brings rare authority to the argument. He was among the chief mediators who negotiated the end of white-minority apartheid rule in the 1990s, representing the National Party — the party that built and enforced apartheid — in talks with Cyril Ramaphosa, then a leading negotiator for the African National Congress. That history, and the personal trust built in the process, is one of the reasons Ramaphosa appointed him ambassador to the United States in April, a posting filled as diplomatic relations between the two countries deteriorated sharply. Meyer said Ramaphosa also "saw the value of me being an Afrikaner" — though he was careful to add: "I'm not here to represent the Afrikaner only."

The dispute began at high level. Last year, Trump confronted Ramaphosa in the Oval Office of the White House over what the BBC describes as widely discredited claims that genocide was being committed against white South Africans, and his administration opened a US refugee pathway aimed specifically at Afrikaners seeking to leave the country. The scheme has moved at a striking pace: according to figures cited in the report, nearly 13,000 refugees have been admitted to the United States since it began, and all but three of them were South African.

That flow is set to expand dramatically. The Trump administration is planning to admit up to 17,500 additional white Afrikaners as refugees over the coming 12 months, according to a notice sent to Congress on Tuesday. A White House spokeswoman defended the expansion, telling the BBC that "President Trump has provided a lifeline for Afrikaners, who are being raped, maimed, killed and driven off their property across South Africa." She accused the South African government and much of the media of dismissing "the horrific lived experiences of this community", and said the administration would keep processing applications "because the president has a humanitarian heart."

Behind the policy lie individual stories that the South African government says have been generalised into something they do not recognise. One of the roughly 13,000 who has already been admitted is a woman who goes publicly by the name Lielie. She moved with her family from South Africa to Texas, where they had lived on her stepfather's farm growing macadamia nuts and bananas. Even with walls around the house, an electric fence and eight bull terriers, she said she felt "fear the whole time", and that on three separate occasions she saw people entering the property.

Lielie stressed that nothing was taken and that she and her family were not physically harmed. But she said friends of her husband — people who lived in the surrounding area — were "brutally attacked". Since moving to the United States under the administration's refugee pathway, she said, her life had changed: she feels safer walking around, and "my kids can actually play outside." Her account illustrates the gap at the heart of the row — real, alarming incidents of farm and rural violence, which South African authorities say remain a serious problem, being recast as evidence of a coordinated national campaign.

That interpretation is not shared by most white South Africans either. SJ Du Venage, who lives on South Africa's west coast and is a council member of the Freedom Front Plus, a right-wing Afrikaner party, disagrees with Meyer. He argues there is "a political drive towards killing white people, and killing the farmers on the farms", and insists: "There's absolutely an agenda to wipe us out here."

Despite the volume of such claims, they have been rejected by every political party in South Africa, including those that represent Afrikaner interests. Meyer, who said he has "never experienced something of that kind" during his decades in South African politics, would like to sit down with Trump and explain the reality of the situation directly — something he said his background uniquely qualifies him to do.

Meanwhile, the diplomatic pressure is still building. Last week, the Trump administration announced visa restrictions on South Africans it accused of being responsible for "race-based discrimination" against white people, and warned of further punitive steps if South African leaders failed to address what it called the problem. Meanwhile, an Afrikaner lobby group is due to hold a vigil on Saturday, placing thousands of white crosses on Washington's National Mall to commemorate what it says are victims of "farm attacks".

For Meyer, the next few weeks will test whether that direct appeal can break the deadlock — and whether the proposed intake of 17,500 more refugees proceeds as planned, with a former apartheid negotiator and self-described Afrikaner now carrying the burden of answering it.