Exodus

Many months ago, the world watched as forty-nine Afrikaners (native white South Africans, most of whom descended from the Dutch and Huguenot settlers of the seventeenth century) boarded a flight en route to the United States of America.

According to several news outlets, these Afrikaners were claiming, first and foremost, to be farmers (although not a single one of them has to date produced valid documentation to prove so).

Secondly, they claimed to be fleeing persecution. According to these people claiming to be ‘Afrikaner farmers’, who for some weird reason refused to be identified much less interviewed (possibly because if their real names and backgrounds were revealed then the truth about who they really are would have come out), in fact the only information that the world got about these supposed forty nine white farmers came from third sources (and very few media outlets), so let’s just say that according to some unverified sources as well as some shady websites, these Afrikaners were claiming to be fleeing from persecution and mass murders of white farmers which took place in South Africa, and the proof was a string of crosses planted in the ground, each of those crosses representing a dead white farmer – although so far no pile of dead bodies belonging to Afrikaners have been shown to substantiate their claims.

Watching that heated back and forth between US Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt and an NBC journalist over a video that President Trump showed to a South African delegation led by President Ramaphosa of alleged burial sites of thousands of white South African farmers who were murdered served as proof of just how ridiculous these allegations of white genocide are. Here’s a transcript of that Press briefing that aired on Fox News:

NBC journalist: “The president showed a video that he said showed more than a thousand burial sites of white South Africans that he said were murdered. We know that that was not true and that video was not true, and that’s why I wonder, why did the president choose to show the video that showed a burial site? It was unsubstantiated...”

To which US Press Secretary Leavitt fired back: “The video indeed showed the crosses, the video showed images of crosses in South Africa about white farmers who have been killed and politically persecuted because of the colour of their skin. And those crosses represent their lives, and the fact that they’re now dead, and their government did nothing about it. Are you disputing that there’s no…”

NBC reporter: “I’m disputing the fact that the video showed what the president claimed that it showed because it did not show that, but furthermore, what I’m asking is at the white house…”

To which Press Secretary Leavitt interrupted: “It did show white people who have perished because of racial persecution…”

To which the NBC reporter interrupted: “who verifies the videos that the president shows, and what protocols are in place when there’s unsubstantiated information being put out for the world and world leaders?”

Press secretary Leavitt: “What’s unsubstantiated about the video? The video shows crosses that represent the dead bodies of white people who were racially persecuted by their government. In fact, the Associated Press of all places has a picture of that very monument. In the caption from the Associated Press is ‘each cross marks a white farmer who has been killed in a farm murder’.

So it is substantiated not just by the video and the physical evidence that everybody saw on display in the Oval Office, but also by another outlet, the Associated Press, so you should take it up with them if you believe the claim is unsubstantiated, and that’s a ridiculous line of questioning.”

My personal thoughts on this are, why isn’t anyone exhuming those thousands of bodies for everyone to see? Why are there no piles of death certificates and police reports being published as evidence? Surely those thousands of Afrikaner farmers who were allegedly murdered in farm attacks have names! Right? So where are the incident reports, death certificates, pictures from funerals, addresses of the farms where the murders took place…you get the gist! Most importantly, why aren’t those thousands of bodies underneath those crosses being exhumed, because that would actually be evidence!

If in 2008, when President Barack Hussein Obama, whose father was a native black Kenyan man, took office, forty-nine Kenyan farmers had been given asylum to the US on grounds of tribal discrimination/tribalism, how do you think Americans, let alone the world, would have reacted?

Let’s put it another way! What if somewhere between 2008 and 2016, a time when first lady Michelle Obama was making headlines around the world, when her husband, Barack Obama, was President of the United States, I, a black Mozambican woman, had woken up one beautiful morning, called up forty nine of my buddies, bought hundreds of wooden crosses (they are so cheap in Mozambique), planted them on some loose soil in an unoccupied rural area, then taken pictures and sent them to the mass media and governments around the world claiming “these crosses represent thousands of black farmers who were killed in Mozambique.

We are a group of forty nine black gamers …sorry farmers who have been illegally expropriated from our farms because we belong to a certain minority tribal group. Please kindly admit us into the USA as refugees. Thank you.” Then a few days later, this unverified information was all over the news, President Obama was up in arms accusing the Mozambican government of doing nothing about the mass murder of black Mozambican farmers belonging to a certain tribe and a month later, the Obama Administration (the United States Government) bought my friends and myself free tickets to enter the USA as refugees - how do you think the world would have reacted to this?! How do you think that the vast majority of Americans would have reacted?

I think that we all remember the abundance of evidence that was there for all to see when there was genocide in Rwanda and Burundi, how piles and piles of dead bodies were shown lying on the streets, in buildings, in bushes; we were inundated with images of human remains, which were being shown endlessly by the mass media. Remember how traumatic it was to see those horrific images and how the world was so shocked that the intervention was collective? No one doubted that there was genocide in Rwanda because there was irrefutable proof!

Do you remember how the media bombarded us with images of the first and second civil wars in Liberia in the early nineties, showing us live images of people getting shot, stabbed, and even decapitated? Will we ever forget the horrific images of those piles of dead bodies belonging to certain tribal groups, which were shown piled up on the streets of Monrovia and other parts of Liberia, and how the news outlets all over the world couldn’t stop streaming those horrific images again, and again, and again?

Have you ever seen the faces of refugees when they speak about their experiences? About how they lost parents, brothers, sisters, friends, colleagues, cousins, and other loved ones? How do they break down in tears as they remember the brutality that they witnessed or experienced in their respective countries?

Now think about those giggly alleged Afrikaner farmers going through airport security and landing in the United States, smiling from ear to ear while waving American flags!

Did you ever witness a single survivor of the Rwandan genocide leaving the violence and death that their country was in the nineties smiling and waving a Belgian flag for the world to see in that manner? Think about it? Did the survivors of the holocaust (the systemic persecution and murder of millions of Jews by the Nazi regime), board trains and airplanes with big smiles on their faces and/or enter the safety of other foreign countries smiling happily and waving at the cameras!?

I’ve experienced trauma before, and I’ve interviewed a good number of people who have experienced different forms of trauma, and one thing I have never seen is someone who is fleeing from a deeply disturbing and distressing experience who looks like those 49 refugees who landed in the US. I’ve never seen people who are running away from mass killings, violence, and persecution looking as relaxed and happy as those Afrikaners from South Africa who landed in the USA.

Those Afrikaners were claiming that white people were being killed in masses in South Africa, that they lost their farms (even though there were and still are zero images or no addresses of those farms anywhere), they were claiming to have witnessed and /or experienced trauma while smiling, celebrating, and waving American flags?

During a visit to the Abathembu King on Sunday, 18 May 2025, Julius Malema, President of the Economic Freedom Fighters, weighed in on the Trump Administration’s decision to give refugee status to the aforementioned 49 Afrikaners. Here’s what he said to journalists at the Nkululekweni Royal Residence:

“There are no Afrikaners who have been killed here in South Africa. It’s not true, there are no 49 Afrikaners who left South Africa. You all know that it’s fiction, it’s drama, you know, America with drama is number one. That thing is Muvhango in Afrikaans; it’s just drama.

I believe they landed, and then they waited for the cameras to take pictures, and then hopped on the next flight back to South Africa. If those people are farmers, it means there are 49 farms available; why are we not expropriating them because they’ve abandoned them? But why is the media not telling us, because they say these are farmers?

Why is the media, through its own investigation, not saying to us, ‘this one, this picture you see is a farmer at this, this, this’? They are not farmers. There is no one who has left farming here in South Africa. I suspect that these whites were those who were looking after cars in the parking lot, they were attending to cars, and they went to fetch them there. They can’t leave.

They will never live the kind of life that they live here in South Africa anywhere else. If you live here as a millionaire and you go to the USA, your money gets reduced to nothing. So no Afrikaner would leave South Africa for America. It’s not true! In our country, there is no killing of white people; we’re not killing white people; we’re demanding our land. We’re saying let’s share this land, let’s all work the land. And if that is a crime, then it’s a crime we’re prepared to commit, because we can’t, when we’re asking for food, be told that we’re committing crimes by asking. We’re having a robust debate on land in South Africa, and that must never be used to silence us by America.” – statement from Julius Malema, President of the Economic Freedom Fighters of South Africa.2

It's not just the fact that we haven’t seen any piles of white dead bodies anywhere in South Africa (or any other part of Africa or the rest of the world ), it’s also the fact that, not a single government in Europe, Middle East, Asia, South America or Africa sent their condolences to these so called “victims of white genocide in South Africa”, no one has so far intervened because there was and still is absolutely no evidence of persecution of white farmers, leave alone white genocide, in South Africa, or any other part of the world.

As mentioned earlier, on Wednesday, 21 May 2025, President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa met with President Donald Trump at the White House, where the now infamous video of the alleged mass burial site of Afrikaner farmers who were supposedly murdered in farm attacks was shown. During that meeting, the South African Minister of Agriculture, John Steenhuisen of the Democratic Alliance, who was part of the South African delegation present at the White House, said the following:

“I’d say we have a rural safety problem in South Africa. I don’t think anyone wants to candy coat that, and it requires a lot of effort to get on top of it. It’s going to require more policing resources; it’s going to require a different strategy to be able to deal with it. But certainly, the majority of South Africa is commercial and smallholder farmers who really do want to stay in South Africa and make it work. And I’ve come from the largest Agricultural show in the Southern Hemisphere with organized agriculture and farmers, and the majority of them want to stay.

But they, too, have a memorial to those who’ve died as a result of farm attacks. And as the Minister of Agriculture, it’s something that I’m particularly exercised with my colleagues at the police and my colleagues in the justice cluster to start making farm attacks and stock theft a priority crime.

And it affects all farmers in South Africa, particularly stock theft, which has a disproportionate effect on small-holding farmers. I also just want to say that the two individuals that you see are both leaders of minority opposition parties in South Africa, Umkhonto Wesizwe under Mr. Zuma, and the Economic Freedom Fighters under Malema. Now, the reason that my party, the Democratic Alliance, which has been an opposition party for over 30 years, chose to join forces with Mr. Ramaphosa’s party was precisely to keep those people out of power.

We cannot have those people sitting in the union buildings making decisions. And that is why, after 30 years of us exchanging barbs across the floor in parliament and trying to get one over each other, we’ve decided to join hands precisely to keep that lot out of government because the day they get into the doors of the union buildings in South Africa or control our parliament, that’s what you’re going to see.

And that’s why this government, working together, needs the support of our allies around the world, so that we can strengthen our hands, grow our economy, and shut the door forever on that rebel.” - statement from John Steenhuisen (Minister of Agriculture of South Africa, during an Oval Office meeting that took place on 21 March 2025 between President Trump and President Ramaphosa).3