South African White Genocide "Does Not Exist," New Washington Ambassador Tells BBC

South Africa's ambassador to the United States, Roelf Meyer, has told the BBC there is no such thing as a "white genocide" targeting Afrikaners in South Africa, directly contradicting a claim that has strained relations between Pretoria and Washington for more than a year.

Meyer, a former National Party minister who was one of the chief negotiators in ending apartheid in the 1990s, said the idea of mass attacks on white Afrikaners "does not exist." Describing himself as "a born Afrikaner," he said he had never experienced anything of that kind himself, and that he had never received a clear answer about where what he called the "misdirection of information" reaching Washington was coming from.

The claim that white South African farmers, particularly Afrikaners, are being systematically targeted and killed has been repeatedly pushed by US President Donald Trump, including in a tense Oval Office meeting with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa. Trump's administration issued an executive order over the allegations and has since admitted nearly 13,000 refugees, almost all of them South African, under a programme aimed at resettling Afrikaners, with plans to admit up to 17,500 more over the coming year. A White House statement at the time referred to Afrikaners being "raped, maimed, killed."

Meyer pushed back on that framing. He said South African police data shows the majority of crime victims in the country, including on farms, are Black South Africans, and that while attacks on farms are a real and documented problem, most are motivated by robbery rather than racial or political persecution, according to experts. He argued that crime in South Africa's townships is, proportionally, a far larger problem than farm attacks, and framed violent crime as a nationwide challenge rather than one targeting a single racial group.

Meyer presented his credentials to President Trump in May 2026, succeeding Ebrahim Rasool as ambassador. He said he was seeking the revocation of Trump's executive order and wants the United States to help South Africa tackle its broader crime problem, rather than treating the issue as one of racial persecution.

The dispute over the genocide claim has been one of several friction points between the two countries, alongside disagreements over land reform and trade.