South African billionaires allege ‘white genocide’ after heated Trump meeting with Ramaphosa
President Donald Trump’s remarks about “dead white people” during a tense meeting with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa two weeks ago stirred international debate after he raised concerns about allegations of genocide and violence against white farmers in the majority black country.
In what quickly became a viral exchange between Trump, Ramaphosa and his delegation, Trump asked aides to dim the lights in the room as a video began to play showing footage of South Africa’s Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) Party singing the apartheid-era “Shoot the Boer” song — with lyrics that include “kill the Boer, kill the white farmer” — in front of a massive crowd filling a stadium.
Despite the president’s Oval Office lesson on South African history, most Americans are unfamiliar with the plight of the Afrikaners, the minority ethnic group who are mostly descendants of Dutch arrivals who began arriving at the Cape of Good Hope Colony in 1652.
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Trump, who expressed concern about the situation even during his first term, labeled Afrikaners as refugees by executive order in February. But was the president’s allegation of white genocide accurate? It depends on who you ask.
Entrepreneur and investor Rob Hersov, one of South Africa’s wealthiest men, says he believes systemic issues such as corruption, mismanagement and race-based laws are behind what he calls an “economic genocide” targeting minorities, especially white farmers.
Hersov, 64, a fifth-generation South African, spoke with Patrick Bet David on a May 21 episode of the “PBD Podcast” about the country’s decline since the end of apartheid in 1994, particularly after 2008 under leaders like Jacob Zuma and Ramaphosa, who signed a law in January that allows land seizures by the government without compensation.
In describing the political status of Afrikaners, Hersov went as far as comparing South Africa to Germany in the early 1930s. “The white minority are being boiled like frogs,” said Hersov. “There’s an economic genocide taking place with black economic empowerment, with expropriation without compensation, with the destruction of the economy.”
Hersov said farm murders in South Africa have reached a critical level, and while official government numbers are hard to pin down, Hersov put the attacks in perspective by comparing the roughly 30,000 farmers in South Africa with the American commercial farming population of about 334 million.
“Our government have flown over here to try and tell Donald Trump there is no genocide,” he said. “If you extrapolate, if you take a pro rata number of South African farmers attacked and murdered and killed to the American population over the last 20 years, 233,000 American farmers would have been murdered. And you don’t think that’s some form of genocide?”
For Darrell Bock, senior research professor of New Testament Studies and executive director for Cultural Engagement at Dallas Theological Seminary, the answer is “no.”
“I am afraid that the portrayal of a genocide in South Africa is a myth,” Bock told CP. “There is still some racial tension in pockets of South Africa. That is, in significant part, the result of decades of violent discrimination that caused the world to isolate South Africa years ago until apartheid ended. Efforts to achieve full reconciliation has struggled to be realized as the division was deep.”
Following the Oval Office meeting, Tesla CEO and Trump advisor Elon Musk, who is South African, contrasted the Ramaphosa government policy of land seizures without compensation with open calls for what he termed “white genocide.”
“White people are a small minority in South Africa and yet over 100 laws against whites in South Africa were passed after democratic rule, including taking property without payment, which was passed this year,” Musk tweeted. “Public calls for white genocide are allowed to happen in South Africa with no punishment.”
But for Bock, calling the policy of the South African government a form of genocide is “to exaggerate significantly what is happening, empties the term of its real comprehensive meaning, and dismisses the past historical context for the current division in South African society.”
Indeed, Ramaphosa pointed to the legacy of the apartheid era during his meeting with Trump, saying, “We’ve got to deal with the past.”
But what about the theology behind apartheid? Afrikaners, also known as Boers, were descendants of primarily Dutch Calvinists and German and Belgian Protestants, who settled in today’s Cape provinces of South Africa in the late 17th century.
Under the leadership of religious institutions like the Low German Reformed Church and the Dutch Reformed Church, led by the former Prime Minister of the Netherlands Abraham Kuyper, Afrikaner neo-Calvinism essentially taught that Afrikaners were God’s chosen people and that South Africa was their promised land.
At the heart of their theology, said Bock, was the “view of many who claimed a curse of Ham relegated blacks to a secondary status as a justification for apartheid.”
“This is a serious misread of Genesis 9 that racialized the environment in the South Africa of the past,” Bock added. “… Apartheid is not something to be proud of or defend, as it reflected a distortion of the idea every human is made in God’s image.”
As many as 80% of South Africans identify as Christian, with 35% considered Evangelical, including Pentecostals and Charismatics. While Dutch Reformed Church numbers have declined due to its association with apartheid, Pentecostal and Charismatic churches have grown significantly. African Independent Churches, particularly Zionist Churches with about 9 million adherents, blend Christian and traditional African practices, creating a syncretistic challenge.
But for Hersov, the debate over whether “white genocide” is occurring in South Africa isn’t theological, but statistical. Hersov believes the current situation for Afrikaners can legally called genocide since it meets seven out of 10 criteria for the United Nations’ own definition of genocide.
“If you go to the United Nations definition … 10 elements make up genocide, starting with classification, organization, persecution, and all the way down to extermination and denial,” Hersov said during a May 24 interview on The Rubin Report with Dave Rubin. “So, there are 10 elements, and South Africa has probably seven of those ongoing simultaneously.”
He said that while “extermination has not taken place,” the video played during Trump’s Oval Office meeting with Ramaphosa suggests that outcome may not be far off.
“If you listen to [EFF leader] Julius Malema, … with 90,000 people jumping up and down … [chanting], ‘Kill the Boer, kill the farmer, one settler, one bullet,'” Hersov recalled, “he [later] said a terrible thing in an interview, ‘We have not yet cut the throat of whiteness.'”
Malema made the comments in February, saying, “These people, when you want to hit them hard, go after a white man. They feel terrible pain because you have touched a white man. We’re cutting the throat of whiteness. We will kill white women, children, and their pets.”
????????????SOUTH AFRICAN POLITICAL LEADER: WE WILL CUT THE THROAT OF WHITENESS
Julius Malema:
“These people, when you want to hit them hard, go after a white man. They feel terrible pain because you have touched a white man.
We’re cutting the throat of whiteness. We will kill white… https://t.co/nFBMwU4RTGpic.twitter.com/TsNzC6W8Hp
— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) February 9, 2025
Musk responded to the comments by asking Ramaphosa, “Why do you allow this?”
“This is a major political party in the South African parliament and their leader is calling for genocide of white people,” Musk tweeted.
This week, Ramaphosa criticized President Donald Trump for demanding that EFF leader Malema be arrested for repeatedly chanting “kill the farmer.” The EFF drew under 10% of the vote in last May’s election and is not included in the government of national unity.
“It’s not a matter where we need to be instructed by anyone [to] go and arrest this one,” Ramaphosa was quoted as saying by Fox News. “We are a very proud sovereign country that has its own laws, that has its own processes.”
According to Hersov, if current trends continue, the number of Afrikaner refugees could end up in the millions — dwarfing the nearly 60 refugees who arrived in Washington, D.C., earlier this month.
“A million South Africans, mainly white, have left the country. Left, gone the other way,” he told Rubin. “If you have the means — even if you’re not being persecuted literally, you know, Gestapo at your door — if you can go, you will go.”
