South Africans Dispute Trump’s Claim of Genocide as Administration Welcomes Some to U.S. As Refugees

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In February 2025, President Trump signed an executive order cutting off all aid to South Africa and announcing the “resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government sponsored race-based discrimination.”

Mr. Trump has claimed that White South Africans – including Afrikaners, the 2.7 million descendants of Dutch settlers who arrived on the continent 400 years ago – are victims of a genocide and their land is being confiscated. But in South Africa, those claims are disputed.

Max du Preez, an Afrikaans journalist and former newspaper editor, called his country’s government “corrupt” but said he’s never been discriminated against as a White South African. There are no large-scale killings of farmers and the government is not seizing their land, he said, as Mr. Trump has suggested.

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Many Afrikaners believe that they are now the victims of discrimination in post-Apartheid South Africa, and point the blame at affirmative action policies meant to redress centuries of discrimination.

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60 Minutes correspondent Anderson Cooper traveled to the spot Mr. Trump was talking about: a lonely, pothole-filled road not far from Darrel Brown’s farm in the rolling hills of KwaZulu-Natal province in the southeast of South Africa.

Brown is the one who placed the crosses seen in the video shown by Mr. Trump on the road. He put them there on the day of his friends’ Glen and Vida Rafferty’s funeral, the couple who were murdered during a 2020 robbery.

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Brown kept the crosses in his shed, then brought them out again in 2024 for the funeral of his best friend, Tollie Nel, who was murdered on his farm. Nel was killed in front of his wife, Rene, as he tried to fight off burglars. Their son, Theunis, was tied up while the burglars stole cash and guns. No one has been arrested.

Theunis now runs the farm and carries a weapon with him almost all the time. The Nels have hired private security guards and fortified their property with electric fences and cameras. They say they can’t rely on the country’s ineffective and overwhelmed police to keep them safe.

Despite losing her husband, Rene Nel doesn’t feel Mr. Trump’s use of the word “genocide” is appropriate.

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