By Elizabeth Soer
When Donald Trump confronted South African President Cyril Ramaphosa with debunked claims of a “white genocide,” it was not simply an indication of his ignorance, but rather a broadcast of a longstanding far-right fantasy. It is thus necessary to unpack how conspiracy, race, and far-right networks coalesced to shape American policy and make white fear a global export.
Disclaimer (Sept. 2025): AfriForum has contacted RevDem to dispute how the organization is represented in this article. The author stands by her analysis, but we note AfriForum’s objection for transparency.
Trump transformed Oval Office meetings into reality TV spectacles. Ramaphosa’s visit was no exception, and the meeting quickly spiraled when Trump confronted Ramaphosa with “evidence” of a white genocide in South Africa. This myth has been debunked many times, so I will not revisit the facts. Rather, I will explore how the fate of 2.2 million white people on the southern tip of Africa came to occupy such a prominent place in the imaginaries of the global far-right and made it onto the agenda of the highest echelons of the United States (US) government.
Far-Right Fictions of White Genocide
A quick note on terminology: an imaginary refers to shared ideologies, values, and symbols through which people envision their social existence and collective identity. The far-right is a broad and somewhat loose label encompassing an array of political parties, movements, organizations, and individuals. It has been applied to a range of actors such as white supremacists, xenophobic and authoritarian conservatives, ultranationalists, neo-fascists, and neo-Nazis. Despite salient differences between these categories, groups that have been subsumed under the label are connected through global and regional networks, especially online, where ideas and fictions circulate, producing a common social imaginary.
One of the most influential of these fictions is the “Great Replacement,” popularized by Renaud Camus’s 2011 book, Le Grand Remplacement. Camus argued that European, particularly French, identity was being eroded by immigration from Muslim-majority countries. As it spread, the idea evolved into a full-blown conspiracy of a globalist cabal (often anti-Semitically coded) plotting to replace white populations in Europe and North America with “non-white” immigrants.
This narrative echoes older, though rather fringe, fears of a “white genocide.” For example, in 2007, conservative US commentator Ann Coulter suggested immigration amounted to white extermination. Moreover, the anti-Semitic undertones mirror conspiracy theories from the 1920s-30s. In summary, far-right movements have long fed off the apocalyptic fantasies of white genocide and the Great Replacement — conspiracy theories that offer a kind of millenarian script for white ethno-nationalist mobilization.
The white genocide narrative migrated from the fringe to the mainstream, particularly after Trump’s 2016 election. Web 2.0 platforms like Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) undoubtedly enabled this “mainstreaming of the fringe,” while ideological entrepreneurs such as Steve Bannon, Alex Jones, and Tucker Carlson amplified the message. Andrew Wilson’s analysis of the Twitter hashtag “#whitegenocide” revealed that it circulates between the US, Western and Eastern Europe, parts of South America, Australia, and, notably, South Africa. Apocalyptic visions of white genocide thus proliferated in far-right networks worldwide.
South Africa as the Future Present
South Africa has held symbolic weight for far-right groups, conservatives, and neo-liberals like Milton Friedman since at least the 1960s. As Rita Abrahamsen notes, for many on the far-right, South Africa represents “a futuristic dystopia that shows to their supporters an image of their own […] fears, a future where they have been replaced by immigration and other cultures.” To be clear, this dystopian imaginary of South Africa bears very little resemblance to the country’s realities. The country has the world’s highest levels of income inequality, which remains starkly racialized in favor of white people, who earn more and own more land and other assets.
As Ramaphosa attempted to clarify during his Oval Office visit, violent crime in South Africa is widespread, but white people are not being specifically targeted. In fact, in 2024, 36 of the 46 people killed on farms were workers and therefore almost certainly Black. Yet far-right narratives, particularly those amplified by Afrikaans groups, focus exclusively on white victims. Maroelamedia, the media arm of these groups, reports on white murders in gruesome detail, but overlooks Black victims.
Consider the 2019 killing of Aron Mutavhatsindi, a Black man shot in Krugersdorp by a white security firm owner, who wrongly assumed he was stealing the tractor he was driving. Though technically a farm murder, it is a far cry from the dominant imaginary among the far-right. This selective outrage underscores the racialized hierarchy of grief— something the Black Lives Matter movement has drawn global attention to since 2014.
In spite of the economic privileges enjoyed by the white minority, the fixation on the country is partly driven by the fact that it is governed by a majority Black administration, which plays into far-right anxieties about the “takeover” of state institutions by non-white populations and presents a specter of Black revenge. Elon Musk, a Trump ally who was born in apartheid-era South Africa, has fanned the flames concerning racist discriminatory laws, alleging that Starlink was blocked from operating in the country due to his whiteness. This too is a drastic misrepresentation, but it reinforces the symbolic role South Africa plays in far-right imaginaries: a cautionary tale of “wokeness” and diversity run amok.
The Ideological Entrepreneurship of Roche and Roets
Far-right Afrikaans groups have been incredibly effective at promoting the narrative that South Africa is on the brink of a white genocide, particularly the Solidarity Movement and the more extreme Suidlanders. Solidarity traces its roots to the apartheid-era Mine Workers’ Union (MWU) and rebranded itself in the post-1994 era as a civil society movement. Today, it comprises various organizations, including AfriForum (a nationalist group advocating for “Afrikaans rights” with a level of legitimacy comparable to that of the men’s rights movement), a charity wing called Helping Hand (which supports destitute Afrikaans people), and a media outlet, Maroelamedia. While Solidarity represents the more respectable face of Afrikaner nationalism, Suidlanders occupy the radical flank, making the former appear moderate by comparison.
Both AfriForum and Suidlanders have successfully embedded their messaging within broader far-right narratives. For example, Suidlanders’ chief spokesperson, Simon Roche, claims that Afrikaners are under threat from a cabal of economic and cultural elites, “the globalists,” seeking to undermine “Western civilization” through open borders, multiculturalism, and anti-Christian sentiment. In far-right circles, “globalism” often serves as a euphemism for long-standing antisemitic conspiracy theories about a Jewish plot to dismantle white Western societies. Roche speaks to local Afrikaner concerns while recasting the African National Congress (ANC) as “puppets of the globalists” to appeal to international audiences.
Roche perceives Suidlanders as part of a transnational movement of conservative Christians and deliberately feeds into the fears of Western audiences. By framing Afrikaners as the frontline victims of a global assault on white identity, he positions South Africa’s overcoming of apartheid as a cautionary tale — a dystopian glimpse of what happens when “wokeness” and multiculturalism are left unchecked.
AfriForum follows a similar strategy, blending Afrikaner nationalism, neoliberalism, and far-right talking points from the US, Europe, and Australia. In 2018, AfriForum CEO Kallie Kriel and Solidarity’s policy head Ernst Roets traveled to Washington to lobby the Trump administration and raise awareness about the supposed “persecution of South Africa’s minorities.” They met with the then-National Security Advisor John Bolton, staffers for Senator Ted Cruz, and various conservative think tanks. Roets famously appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show, alleging that white farmers were being tortured to death en masse. Carlson promoted the clip on Twitter with the caption: “White Farmers are being brutally murdered in South Africa for their land. And no one is brave enough to talk about it.” This prompted Trump’s interest, and he responded by instructing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to “closely study the South African land farm seizures and expropriations and large-scale killing of farmers.”
Meanwhile, Roche appeared twice on Alex Jones’s Infowars, became a regular guest on the far-right media channel Red Ice, addressed the European Parliament in 2018, and even attended the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017. He has been instrumental in promoting South Africa as a “microcosm of what is possible in the US.” Yet, as the European Parliament reference indicates, their claims of a looming “white genocide” have made waves across the Atlantic, with both Suidlanders and AfriForum forging ties with far-right groups in Germany (particularly with the Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD), as well as in Australia, the Netherlands, and even Finland.
Notably, AfriForum and Suidlanders take care to speak of an imminent or expected genocide in South Africa. This imagined future is being rebranded by international actors, particularly in the US, as a present-day crisis, feeding anti-immigrant politics by presenting South Africa’s (fabricated) plight as the West’s likely fate.
Genocide in the Mirror World
On the demand side, Trump’s fascination with “white genocide” in South Africa can be explained by longstanding conspiracy theories in far-right circles about a globalist cabal plotting to replace white Western civilization through multiculturalism. On the supply side, Afrikaner lobby groups such as AfriForum and Suidlanders successfully embedded their cause within a transnational far-right network to garner global support. For figures like Trump, and parties such as Germany’s AfD, amplifying the myth served a political function: By projecting South Africa’s imagined dystopia as a warning for the US and Europe, they could augment racist and/or anti-immigrant sentiment and strengthen their own political positions. The absurdity of far-right narratives around a fictional white genocide in South Africa becomes even starker when juxtaposed with the country’s current role in global legal proceedings on actual atrocities. That these fictions have traveled so far and found such powerful audiences, in Washington, Brussels, and beyond, speaks to the strange logic of the dystopian mirror world we live in, where right-wing pundits co-opt narratives of victimization for their own political objectives.
Elizabeth Soer is a South African currently working as a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies (MPIfG) in Cologne, Germany. Her research focuses on socio-economic imaginaries in the Global South, particularly in southern Africa.
