Apartheid president’s foundation slams Trump’s ‘dangerous’ Afrikaner-genocide claims
The FW de Klerk Foundation says South Africa has pressing and serious challenges, but genocide is not one of them.
The FW de Klerk Foundation has fiercely rejected Donald Trump’s assertions of Afrikaners “being killed and slaughtered” in South Africa, calling the US President’s politically charged comments “untrue, dangerous and not supported by any credible data”.
The foundation – named after South Africa’s last apartheid president and Nobel Peace Prize winner FW de Klerk – issued the strong rebuke after Trump announced at the weekend that no US officials would attend the upcoming G20 Leaders’ Summit in Johannesburg, citing alleged persecution of white farmers.
“While farm attacks remain a serious criminal concern that demands firm policing and justice, they are not racially motivated nor part of a state-directed campaign,” the foundation said.
The foundation’s position aligns in parts with both the South African government and the African National Congress (ANC), both of which have dismissed Trump’s repeated lies of systematic racial persecution and land confiscation.
The ANC viewed Trump’s intervention as an extension of a “disgraceful pattern of imperial arrogance and disinformation”, designed to distort reality and mobilise racial fear in the US.
Trump used his social media, Truth Social, platform to claim there were “abuses” including violence, death, and the “illegal confiscation” of land and farms targeting Afrikaners.
Executive director of the foundation, Christo van der Rheede, said that genocide is simply not one of the nation’s fundamental challenges. He pointed out that approximately 50 to 60 people of all races are murdered on farms annually, set against more than 19,000 homicides recorded nationwide in a nine-month period.
The South African government has already noted that Trump’s statements – which often characterise Afrikaners as an exclusively white group – lack factual substantiation and are ahistorical.
“The South African government wishes to state, for the record, that the characterisation of Afrikaners as an exclusively white group is ahistorical. Furthermore, the claim that this community faces persecution, is not substantiated by fact,” the Department of International Relations and Cooperation said at the weekend.
Trump’s G20 boycott harms US interests, FW de Klerk Foundation
The foundation characterised the US decision to boycott the G20 Summit in Johannesburg – a major global gathering hosted under the theme “Solidarity, Equality, Sustainability” – as “equally troubling”.
Trump, who had already announced his personal non-attendance, had previously gone further, calling South Africa a “communist tyranny” and suggesting the country should be thrown out of the G20 entirely.
The boycott, based on these discredited allegations, risks undermining global cooperation and alienating South Africans, the foundation said.
Furthermore, the FW de Klerk Foundation warned that the move damages US strategic and economic interests, potentially “handing influence in Africa to powers such as China and Russia”.
Van der Rheede insisted that punishing South Africa based on misinformation spread on social media is unjust and short-sighted.
“The South African government has correctly described Trump’s statements as ‘not substantiated by fact”, and President Cyril Ramaphosa has reiterated that white South Africans enjoy some of the highest living standards in the country, decades after apartheid’s end,” the foundation stated.