“How could we be expected to go to South Africa for the very important G20 Meeting when Land Confiscation and Genocide is the primary topic of conversation?” asked President Donald Trump in a Friday Truth Social post, indicating that he might not attend the summit this November.
He went on to say that: “They are taking the land of white Farmers, and then killing them and their families. The Media refuses to report on this. The United States has held back all contributions to South Africa. Is this where we want to be for the G20? I don’t think so!”
According to Bloomberg, his references to white farmers being killed and having their land taken away are “unsubstantiated claims” and authorities in South Africa have not confiscated any private land since apartheid ended in 1994. Apartheid refers to the period in South Africa when the white-ruled South African Nationalist Party maintained a harsh, institutionalized system of racial segregation, per the U.S. Office of the Historian.
“Not because they are black, not because they are white, not because they are in the majority, not because they are in the minority, but because they are human beings, every person has fundamental rights,” said Chrispin Phiri, a spokesman for South Africa’s Department of International Relations and Cooperation, in a text cited by Bloomberg.
As Trump mentioned in his post, South Africa is set to be the host of the upcoming G20 summit. Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Türkiye, the United Kingdom, the United States, the European Union and the African Union make up the G20, a forum that seeks to “find solutions to global economic and financial issues.”
Last year, former President Joe Biden attended the summit in Brazil. It has a rotating presidency and this year it is expected to be handed to the U.S. in South Africa, the first country on the African continent to hold the summit, according to Bloomberg’s report.
However, Bloomberg noted that Trump’s Friday post is not the extent of relations between the U.S. and South Africa becoming tense. In February, Trump announced that U.S. aid to the country would be frozen – much of that aid goes towards HIV/AIDS prevention, per NBC News.
Trump said this action was due to the “Expropriation Act 13 of 2024 (Act), to enable the government of South Africa to seize ethnic minority Afrikaners’ agricultural property without compensation. This Act follows countless government policies designed to dismantle equal opportunity in employment, education, and business, and hateful rhetoric and government actions fueling disproportionate violence against racially disfavored landowners.”
He also offered to “promote the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation,” referring to white South Africans called Afrikaners. NPR reported this week that the order has “enflamed tensions in [South Africa] and emboldened some who want to secede.”
Elon Musk, the South African-born multi-billionaire advisor to Trump and leader of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has also made headlines for making claims about violence against white people in South Africa. According to a report in the Associated Press, Musk claimed an “old anti-apartheid song that was a call for Black people to stand up against oppression,” promoted killing white people.
“The song has been contentious for years in South Africa because of its central lyrics ‘kill the Boer’ and ‘shoot the Boer’ — with Boer a word that refers to a white farmer,” said the AP. It reported that the song was declared hate speech by a court more than a decade ago, but that ruling was overturned in 2022.
Other Trump officials have avoided attending G20 summit-related meetings this year, said Bloomberg. For example, it said U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent skipped a meeting of finance ministers and central bankers in Cape Town this February and that Secretary of State Marco Rubio also skipped a foreign ministers meeting in Johannesburg.