Nelson Mandela’s great-grandson has called on President Donald Trump to deport the South Africans he allowed into the U.S. as refugees. Mayibuye Melisizwe Mandela said the group does not “qualify to be refugees” in the U.S.
Mandela’s call for deportation
The 31-year-old Mandela opened a criminal investigation into the group of Afrikaners who came to America in May. Newsweek reports the affidavit shows Mandela accused the group of “treason, spreading misinformation and incitement against South Africa.”
“Once they land in South Africa, we must arrest them for lying, for us spending thousands and thousands of Rands of our tax money, flying presidents, our president from South Africa to the United States to go and explain something that he shouldn’t even go there because it was a lie,” Mandela told Newsweek.
Newsweek reports the resettlement program of South Africans to America is being scaled, and numbers will dramatically increase in the next few months.
Afrikaners come to America
Trump accepted 59 Afrikaners on May 13, with several others reportedly coming in later weeks. The president alleges there’s a genocide against white farmers in South Africa, which that country’s leadership denies.
However, the Afrikaners who did come to America said they had issues with the Black community there.
“On the day Trump made the offer…it felt like a miracle had been dropped from the sky,” an Afrikaner farmer’s wife named Zenia Pretorius told The Times UK.
South Africa does have one of the highest crime rates in the world, but there’s no evidence to support that it’s race-based. Republicans have pointed to violent language at political rallies and comments from Afrikaners, but those claims have yet to be substantiated.
“I believe they should face prison,” Mandela told Newsweek. “White genocide is a very serious allegation, and in South Africa, we know that there is no white genocide. It’s a country where there is crime, like every other country.”
Elon Musk, a naturalized U.S. citizen who was born in South Africa, has made similar claims of genocide against the country’s white farmers.
US/South Africa Relations
The genocide allegations grew loud enough that South African President Cyril Ramaphosa flew to the U.S. to meet with President Trump on May 21.
The meeting became somewhat contentious between the two world leaders. At one point, President Trump played a video of a far-left politician chanting, “kill the Boer, kill the farmer.”
The man seen chanting in that video is Julius Malema, who heads the Economic Freedom Fighters, an opposition party that Mandela recently joined.
Following the video, Ramaphosa said that it is not representative of what’s happening in his country. “We are completely opposed to that,” Ramaphosa told Trump following the video.
