South Africa's new ambassador to the United States has directly challenged one of Donald Trump's most explosive claims about his country, saying there is no such thing as a genocide against white Afrikaners and arguing that the facts have been distorted in Washington.
Roelf Meyer, who was appointed ambassador in April after relations between Pretoria and Washington deteriorated, told the BBC that he first reacted with disbelief when he heard Trump repeat the allegation. "Is he talking about us?" Meyer recalled thinking. His answer now is unequivocal. "The notion of a mass attack on the white Afrikaner minority in South Africa does not exist," he said, adding that his own identity as "a born Afrikaner" gives him the authority to say so.
Meyer is not a peripheral political figure. He was one of the chief mediators who helped end apartheid in the 1990s, a role that places him at the center of South Africa's transition from white-minority rule to democracy. His intervention comes as the Trump administration continues to elevate claims that white farmers and Afrikaners are being targeted in South Africa, and as it opens the door to more arrivals under a special refugee pathway.
Last year, Trump accused South Africa of white genocide during a meeting with President Cyril Ramaphosa at the White House. He then launched a U.S. refugee pathway for Afrikaners, a move that has become one of the most politically charged elements in the already strained bilateral relationship. Since then, nearly 13,000 refugees have been admitted to the United States, and all but three were South African, according to the figures cited in the report.
The Trump administration is now planning to admit up to 17,500 additional white Afrikaners as refugees over the next 12 months, according to a notice sent to Congress on Tuesday. The White House has framed the policy as a humanitarian response to persecution. In a statement to the BBC, a White House spokeswoman said: "President Trump has provided a lifeline for Afrikaners, who are being raped, maimed, killed and driven off their property across South Africa." She added that the administration continues to process applications because "the president has a humanitarian heart."
That account is fiercely disputed by South African officials and by Meyer, who said he has never received a clear explanation for where the "misdirection of information" originated. He said the violence problem in South Africa has been misrepresented and that the claims of genocide do not match reality.
Yet the allegations continue to resonate with some Afrikaners who say they feel under siege. One woman, identified publicly only as Lielie, described a life shaped by fear before she and her family moved from South Africa to Texas under the Trump refugee pathway. She said they had lived on her stepfather's farm growing macadamia nuts and bananas, behind walls, an electric fence and eight bull terriers. Even so, she said, she felt "fear the whole time" and on three occasions saw people entering the property. "Nothing was stolen, we weren't harmed, but there are friends of my husband, people that lived around us - they were brutally attacked," she said. Since arriving in the U.S., she said, her life has changed dramatically: she feels safer walking around and "my kids can actually play outside."
Others are pushing the claim even further. SJ Du Venage, who lives on South Africa's west coast and is a council member of the right-wing Afrikaner party Freedom Front Plus, said he is trying to move to the United States under the scheme. He argued that there is "a political drive towards killing white people, and killing the farmers on the farms," and insisted: "There's absolutely an agenda to wipe us out here."
The dispute has become more than a debate over crime statistics or rural violence. It now sits at the intersection of race, memory, migration and geopolitics, with South Africa's post-apartheid identity colliding with Trump-era politics in Washington. An Afrikaner lobby group is planning a vigil on Saturday on Washington's National Mall, where thousands of white crosses are expected to commemorate what it says are victims of "farm attacks."
For Meyer, the challenge is not only to rebut a false narrative, but to do so as a South African Afrikaner speaking to an American administration that has already embraced the claim. His message is that South Africa's violence is real, but the genocide accusation is not. In a diplomatic row increasingly shaped by competing stories of victimhood and fear, that distinction may prove difficult to restore.