Letter to US ambassador Bozell — Afrikaners are being used as a political football

South Africa’s problems with crime, racial rhetoric, land reform, economic empowerment and foreign policy are serious. They do not add up to ‘white genocide’.

Dr Marius Oosthuizen is a strategic foresight expert and writes in his individual capacity as a South African citizen.

Relations between South Africa and the US have deteriorated to a point where what were once domestic South African disputes have become matters of American foreign policy.

Washington has raised concerns about violence against farmers, the “Kill the Boer” chant, expropriation, race-based economic policy and South Africa’s relationships with countries such as Russia, China and Iran. The Trump administration has gone further, creating a refugee pathway specifically for Afrikaners and other South African minorities it considers victims of racial discrimination. In May 2026, President Donald Trump increased the US refugee-admissions ceiling for the fiscal year from 7,500 to 17,500, with the additional places allocated to Afrikaners. The presidential determination explicitly cited what it called “racially motivated violence”.

As an Afrikaner and a South African, I believe Washington has identified several real problems. But those problems have now been forced into a racial morality play that mischaracterises South Africa and may ultimately make our racial divisions worse.

Violence against farmers and farming communities is real. It is brutal, psychologically consequential and insufficiently addressed by the South African state. But the available evidence does not support the claim that South Africa is experiencing a systematic campaign of racial extermination against white farmers.

The Institute for Security Studies notes that the 49 murders on farms recorded by AfriForum during the 2023-24 financial year represented about 0.2% of South Africa’s 27,621 murders that year. The 296 farm attacks recorded by AfriForum amounted to roughly 0.7% of robberies nationally. The same analysis points out that South Africa’s murder conviction rate has been only about 13% in recent years.

Those numbers do not make attacks on farmers unimportant. They place them in their proper context: South Africa has an extraordinary problem of violent crime, lawlessness and inadequate criminal justice.

Nor are the victims of rural violence exclusively white. Individual attacks may sometimes have racial dimensions, and the extraordinary brutality of some crimes understandably leads Afrikaners to experience them through the wider lens of South Africa’s racial politics. But this is different from evidence of a systemic government or societal campaign against whites.

Most Afrikaners live peaceably among South Africa’s black majority. We work together, employ one another, attend the same schools and universities, do business together and increasingly inhabit the same institutions. Depicting these communities as the opposing sides of an undeclared racial war collectivises both. It increasingly pushes ordinary black South Africans and ordinary Afrikaners into political camps they did not choose.

Extremists thrive in precisely this environment.