A few days after Donald Trump boycotted a G20 summit in Johannesburg, he announced that South Africa would not be invited to the next G20 meeting, taking place at his resort in Miami in March 2026.
Trump said it was a “total disgrace” that South Africa hosted the November event, citing allegations of a “white genocide” against Afrikaner farmers. This is vigorously denied by the South African government, which says such claims are “widely discredited and unsupported by reliable evidence.”
Trump’s fixation on South Africa’s white Afrikaner minority has become a central plank of U.S. refugee policy, with their applications now given priority under a new refugee system.
This preoccupation of some Americans with white Afrikaners has a long history dating back to the publication of a large sociological study focusing on poor white Afrikaners in the 1930s.
In a recent episode of ‘The Conversation Weekly’ podcast, Assistant Professor of Political Science Carolyn Holmes traces the history of the links between white nationalists in the U.S. and South Africa. Read more and listen to the podcast at The Conversation.
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