Already and this is the daily This is the Daily OS. Oh now it makes sense. Good morning, and welcome to the Daily ODS. It's Tuesday, the twenty seventh of May.
I'm Lucy Tassel, I'm Zara Zeidler.
Earlier this month, a group of white South African refugees arrived in the US after an executive order by President Donald Trump. Trump claims the group are being targeted as victims of quote racial discrimination, and has therefore extended refugee protection to the group. In today's podcast, we'll explain the story behind the headlines and what you need to know about the Trump administration's decision to grant refugee status to white South Africans.
Lucy, this is a story that has been flying around now for a few weeks, and then last week we published a video to TDA Instagram showing US President Donald Trump and South African President Cyril Ramafosa arguing in the White House.
White South Africans are fleeing because of the violence and racist laws. Look, here's burial sites all over the place. They're all these are all white farmers that are being burned. And when they killed the white farmer, nothing happens to them. No, there is nothing happens.
There is criminality in our country.
People who do get killed, unfortunately through criminalibity are not only.
White people, majority of them black people.
Now, there's a lot going on here, there's a lot of history, there's a lot of context. Can you, I guess, start by just explaining more about what Trump specifically is alleging is happening in South Africa today.
Basically as soon as he came to office for the second time earlier this year, US President Donald Trump began making public statements and shoeing official guidance claiming that white South Africans, specifically the ethnic group called Africanas, were having their land stolen by the government. He said these people would be granted refugee status in the US because they
were the quote victims of unjust racial discrimination. Then a couple of months down the track, so earlier this month, fifty nine white South Africans arrived in the US as refugees. They're going to be resettled around the country. It's a very serious allegation to lay against South Africa, against any country, but I think particularly against South Africa, that a group of people are being so racially discriminated against that we need to extract them.
And so why is that such a loaded, I guess accusation for a country like South Africa.
Unfortunately I don't have a simple answer. I wish I did in order to understand that, we need to take a step back in time. So the Netherlands began colonizing the region we now know as South Africa in the sixteen fifties through the Dutch East India Company. You might remember from a couple of weeks ago when we were talking about Kashmir, how the British had the British East
India Company. Same deal, but in the Netherlands, a very very powerful company, effectively a state unto itself, with its own kind of representatives and just being like incredibly powerful. Through trade, through colonization, through slavery, through farming, the Dutch took control of the region from its southern tip, the
Cape of Good Hope. Over time, these Dutch colonizers developed into an ethnic minority in the region called Africanas, with their own language that was a dialect of Dutch that then became its own language called Afrikaans. They also fought wars with the British for control of the land during this time. Then fast forward again to nineteen fourteen when the Afrikaanas founded their own political party, National Party. It
became a very powerful force. It was aligned against black South Africans and against the British, their long term enemies in the war for resources and for land. And then we'll jump forward one more time to nineteen forty eight. The National Party takes power by itself, not in a coalition, and it enacted the policy known as apartheid.
Okay, and apartheid is obviously a huge moment in history, in world's history, local pastory. For anyone who's perhaps less familiar with this history, can you just give a bit of a refresher. What was apartheid?
Yeah, just broad brush strokes. From nineteen forty eight to nineteen ninety four, South Africa separated people based on their race. The government passed laws either limiting or outright banning movements, education, jobs, pay, and marriage for non white people. This ended after decades of peaceful and violent struggles when the party, the African National Congress, led by Nelson Mandela, won the country's first modern elections. Since then, things have not been completely peaceful
in South Africa. I think it's easy to understand that when you end a system that longstanding and that kind of corrosive, you don't just like snap your fingers and everything becomes multicultural harmony. The crime rate is fairly high, particularly the murder rate, and the economy has definitely struggled in South Africa. The latest started though that I looked at this week, shows that the rate of murders is
down in all but one region of South Africa. And then just a final note on the kind of state of the country in its modern era. White South Africans make up around ten percent or less than ten percent of the population, but white farmers own around three quarters of the country's land.
And so you've spoken there of land, and land is at the center of the claims that Donald Trump is now making about modern day South Africa. Specifically, he's claiming, as you said, that white South Africans are being targeted or murdered and are having their land stolen. Where is this claim from US President Donald Trump coming from? What is the basis for this claim?
The land theft aspect is easier to explain to I'll start there. South African President Cyril Ramafosa signed a bill into law in January which allows the government to redistribute land deemed in the public interest. It includes provisions enabling land distribution without compensation in very specific cases, such as
when it's deemed to be abandoned. Following that announcement, Trump accused South Africa of quote confiscating land and treating certain classes of people very badly, and then soon after that, he signed his executive order allowing white South Africans to apply for refugee status.
We'll be back with the rest of today's deep dive after a quick message from our sponsor.
To the other point. As I said, the murder rate in South Africa is high. It is true that some white farmers make up this statistic. We have official data that shows this. However, in February, a South African court ruled that claims of genocide against white South Africans were quote clearly imagined and not real. Then over the weekend we heard from South African Police Minister Senzo mccunu, who released new crime data and specifically went out of his way to deny Trump's claims.
It is claimed that his white genocide in South Africa, and as evidence, a lot of material has been put into circulation all over social media, including in the White House in the USA. Now, we have respect for the United States of America, and we have respect for the President of the United States, but we have no respect for his genocide story.
So the minister said he wasn't going to deny that crime levels were high, and he did say there had been six attacks on people on farms in rural areas in the first three months of this year, but that of the six attacks, only one victim was white.
Okay, So if those are the statistics, where is this idea coming from?
Yeah?
So, Reuters has reported that the idea of a like quote unquote white genocide of farmers in South Africa originated as a conspiracy theory in far right chat rooms. Another place it has popped up this month is in text generated by an AI chatbot on the social media platform X, which is owned by Elon Musk, who is himself white and from South Africa. I'll say X has called that
randomly generated text an unauthorized modification that's being fixed. However, Musk has publicly suggested that the current government of South Africa is perpetrating a genocide against white people, and he is also so a close advisor of Donald Trump and was in the room when Trump raised these allegations with Cyril Ramafosa.
I want to circle back to this idea of Donald Trump making a special executive order to bring white South Africans into the country because so much of Donald Trump's immigration policy has been about deporting people out of the country. Yeah, how can we understand this in the context of the Trump administration and Donald Trump's immigration policy.
Yeah, it is definitely different to the other things that he has done or has overseen. So you might remember that on his first day in office, he signed a bunch of executive orders, which are official actions that the president can take that circumvent the need to go through the Congress, and one of those things was pausing the
country's refugee program indefinitely. But then he has also opened it up to this specific group, and he's also overseen the deportation and imprisonment of legal micro pereants and edended programs that allowed people without official documentation to live and work in the US. So it certainly stands in contrast to the remainder of his immigration policy that this very select group, so select that it's fewer than sixty people so far have been allowed to come in on this
refugee program. It's certainly interesting to see how that squares with the rest of his documented policy, and I guess it remains to be seen how many more people will be given this opportunity to come to the US, and given that they've come, I suppose from rural South African farming communities, what their life is going to look like once they're settled in the US.
Lucie, thank you so much for explaining the story behind the headlines that I know so many of our audience will have seen, and thank you for joining us for another day of the Daily Ours. We'll of course be back later today with the headlines, but until then, have a great day.
My name is Lily Maddon and I'm a proud at a udah Banjelung Kalkadin woman from Gadighl country. The Daily oz acknowledges that this podcast is recorded on the lands of the Gadighl people and pays respect to all Aboriginal and torrest Rate island and nations. We pay our respects to the first peoples of these countries, both past and present.