Days before South Africa’s president meets with US President Donald Trump at the White House, Afrikaner farmers at the center of an extraordinary new US refugee policy roamed a memorial to farm attacks in their country’s agricultural heartland, some touching the names of the dead — both Black and white.
Here in Bothaville, where thousands of farmers gathered for a lively agricultural fair with everything from grains to guns on display, even some conservative white Afrikaner groups denied the Trump administration’s “genocide” and land seizure claims that led it to cut all financial aid to South Africa, reports AP from Bothaville, South Africa.
The late President Nelson Mandela — South Africa’s first Black leader — stood in Bothaville over a quarter-century ago and acknowledged the increasing number of violent attacks on farmers in the first years following the decades-long racial segregation system of apartheid. “But the complex problem of crime on our farms, as elsewhere, demands long-term solutions,” he said.
Some at the agricultural fair said fleeing the country isn’t one of them.
“I really hope that during the upcoming visit to Washington, (President Cyril Ramaphosa) is going to be able to put the facts before his counterpart and to demonstrate that there is no mass expropriation of land taking place in South Africa, and there is no genocide taking place,” John Steenhuisen, minister of agriculture, told The Associated Press. He will be part of the delegation for Wednesday’s meeting.