How the US far right bought into the myth of white South Africa’s persecution

The article, written by Eve Fairbanks — a US journalist who has lived in South Africa for 16 years — opens with a portrait of Orania, a tiny all-white town founded in 1991 as white minority rule was ending. Despite nothing of consequence happening there, it has attracted disproportionate media attention from both mainstream and right-wing outlets abroad, largely because it symbolizes white separatist ideals.

Fairbanks traces how, starting in the mid-2010s and accelerating around Trump's political rise, American and other Western conservative commentators began using South Africa as a cautionary tale. A small, vocal contingent of white South Africans — often connected to two lobby groups, the Suidlanders and AfriForum — toured US right-wing media circuits claiming that post-apartheid South Africa proved that when people of color gain political power, they inevitably persecute white people. Tucker Carlson speculated about a potential 'white genocide,' and Trump issued executive orders cutting aid to South Africa and offering expedited refugee status to Afrikaners.

Fairbanks systematically dismantles this narrative with data. White households' average income remains 4.5 times that of Black households. White South Africans are statistically less likely than Black citizens to be crime victims. The white population has remained stable at around 4.5 million since the late 1990s. Violent crime fell by half in the two decades after apartheid ended, and while homicide rates have risen since the late 2010s, they remain 30% below their 1993 peak.

A central and historically rich section of the article details how apartheid itself was deeply damaging to white South Africans. The apartheid state was a police state: it censored the press, banned television until 1975, seized passports, prosecuted interracial relationships, forcibly conscripted white teenage men into a brutal military fighting wars in neighboring countries, and subjected suspected gay men to electric shock therapy and forced sex reassignment surgery. Hundreds of conscripts attempted suicide annually by the mid-1980s. A 1982 study found white South African men had triple the suicide risk compared to English and Welsh counterparts, and four times the risk of death from alcohol-related liver disease.

Fairbanks interviews multiple white South Africans who describe the psychological terror of living under apartheid — the manufactured fear of Black neighbors, the suppression of natural human warmth across racial lines, and the violence within white families and institutions. She also interviews a former anti-apartheid activist of Indian descent who now runs rehabilitation programs for white veterans, and who says he found deep common ground with the men he once considered enemies.

The article concludes that the two South African lobby groups — Suidlanders and AfriForum — have run sophisticated overseas PR campaigns to pressure foreign governments and shape right-wing opinion, while most white South Africans at home ridicule their efforts. Fairbanks argues that the real lesson from South Africa is that a police state harms the people it claims to protect, and that the transition to democracy was experienced by most white South Africans as a relief rather than a catastrophe.