South Africans dispute Trump, Musk claims of genocide against white farmers in their country

South Africa has a dark history of racism, including confiscating land from Black residents, before and during the anguish of apartheid.

A day after 59 white South Africans were welcomed to America as refugees, more than 86,000 South African farmers — who are mostly white — are gathering this week at the NAMPO Harvest Day trade fair, an annual agricultural exhibition considered the largest in the Southern Hemisphere. 

Over four days, the attendees will discuss innovations in technology, collaborations and various other elements of an industry that last year generated nearly $14 billion in revenue. 

Notably, according to one participant, there is no planned discussion of violence against white farmers or “Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored, race-based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation” without compensation, as President Donald Trump wrote in a Feb. 7 executive order that opened the way for the 59 South Africans to come to U.S., despite a ban on refugees from other nations. 

The executive order referenced South Africa’s Expropriation Act enacted last year, which in some cases allows the government to seize unused land without compensation, something Cyril Ramaphosa, the country’s president, said has not happened.  

Afrikaner refugees from South Africa, at Dulles International Airport in Dulles, Va., on May 12.Julia Demaree Nikhinson / APThe act awakened a profoundly troubling argument over land rights. South Africa's dark history of racism includes the confiscation of land from Black residents, both before and during the apartheid. Afrikaners, the minority white descendants of Dutch and French settlers who arrived in South Africa in the 1600s, were leaders of the apartheid regime that ended in 1994.