South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said Monday the claim that white people are being persecuted in his country is a “completely false narrative.” It was his latest attempt to push back against allegations made by President Trump, White House advisor Elon Musk and some white minority groups in South Africa.
South African-born Musk, who has regularly accused South Africa’s Black-led government of being antiwhite, repeated a claim this weekend in a social media post that some of the country’s political figures are “actively promoting white genocide.”
Ramaphosa said in his weekly message to the nation that South Africans “should not allow events beyond our shores to divide us or turn us against each other.”
“In particular, we should challenge the completely false narrative that our country is a place in which people of a certain race or culture are being targeted for persecution.”
Ramaphosa did not mention names, but his denial was a reference to the allegations by Trump and others that South Africa is deliberately mistreating a white minority group known as Afrikaners by encouraging violent attacks on their farms and introducing a law designed to seize their land.
The allegations were central to an executive order issued by Trump last month cutting funding to South Africa to punish the government, while offering Afrikaners refugee status in the United States.
Afrikaners are descendants of mainly Dutch and French colonial settlers who first came to South Africa more than 300 years ago. They were at the heart of the apartheid government that systematically oppressed nonwhites, although South Africa has been largely successful at reconciling its many racial groups after apartheid ended in 1994.
In his post on X, Musk cited a political rally last Friday in South Africa where Black leaders of a far-left opposition party sang a song that has the lyrics “Kill the Boer, the farmer.” Boer is a word that refers to an Afrikaner.
“Very few people know that there is a major political party in South Africa that is actively promoting white genocide,” Musk wrote. He linked to a video of the rally. AP
