When President Donald Trump interrupted his Oval Office meeting with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa to play a video evidencing widespread persecution against white South Africans in May, the left-wing media called it an “ambush.”
Which only leaves one to wonder what the media would call what happened to the Heunis family the night of Oct. 1, 2016. Two intruders, one armed with a shotgun, raided the home of Johann and Mariandra Heunis, then pregnant with their fourth child. The intruders, Mariandra later told Fox News, demanded money, but when the couple said they did not keep cash in the house, one intruder “just started shooting.” Johann was shot five times.
“They stormed at me and grabbed me up from the couch, demanding that I go with them downstairs,” Heunis recalled. “My little girl then put her hand up and offered them her piggy bank,” and “at that moment, my husband got up for the last time. He pleaded. I pleaded. They shot him execution style in the head.” The intruders threatened the lives of Mariandra and their children before fleeing the scene with only the couple’s cellphones. Mariandra would give birth five days after Johann’s funeral.
What happened to the Heunis family is not an isolated incident. At least 3,000 white South African farmers have been killed since 1994. Over the last decade, the violence has intensified as the South African government has pushed broader expropriation and land reform efforts and radical black Marxist political forces have gained momentum. In January, Ramaphosa signed a new Expropriation Act that strengthened provisions authorizing land seizures without compensation.
Quite a far cry from President Abraham Lincoln doing some math on the back of an envelope to see if the federal government could buy every remaining slave in the state of Delaware during the Civil War, but I digress.
Nevertheless, the left-wing media zealously defends the policies of Ramaphosa and the African National Congress. From one side of its mouth, it says the data in South Africa is inadequate to come to any hard conclusions, on the other side, it definitively says the Trump administration’s claims are false.
But it’s not just the Trump administration. A review of State Department records conducted by the Washington Examiner found that the government has been tracking “racially targeted” attacks against white South African farmers since at least 1999.
“Killings and other violent crimes against white farmers and, on occasion, their families, continued in rural areas,” annual State Department reports on South Africa read, while others add that “continued killings of mostly white farm owners” at the hands of “black assailants.” This report analyzed by the Washington Examiner, however, notes that the assailants were “generally common criminals motivated by financial gain” and not “part of an organized political conspiracy.”
Former President Joe Biden’s State Department raised similar concerns in a 2023 report on human rights in the Rainbow Nation. Citing research from an NGO, the Biden State Department claimed there were nearly 750 attacks and more than 100 killings between 2021 and 2022.
Biden’s government stayed mum on the issue and let the media fight for South Africa’s reputation on their behalf. But this is not about protecting the public from “disinformation.” It’s about protecting the legacy of liberal icon Nelson Mandela who became president in postapartheid South Africa on May 10, 1994 and started South Africa down the path of land reform.
Common sense helps see what has unfolded in South Africa for what it is. For decades, the ANC, its leaders, and allied radical forces have told poor Black South Africans that white farmers’ land—along with everything farming has brought them—is rightfully theirs (and pay no attention to the ANC’s rampant corruption). Some of these may be robberies gone wrong, but these attacks happen in the first place because the South African government has painted white farming communities, and white South Africans generally, as legitimate targets. Hasn’t this same dynamic unfolded in America repeatedly since the riots of 2020?
The Trump administration has that common sense. On Feb. 7 Trump signed Executive Order 14204 title, “Addressing Egregious Actions of the Republic of South Africa.” The order paused all foreign aid to South Africa and facilitated the resettlement of Afrikaners victimized by South Africa’s racial policies, including land seizures, with expedited paths to U.S. citizenship. Since, more than 80 white South Africans have sought refugee status in the U.S.
“In shocking disregard of its citizens’ rights, the Republic of South Africa recently enacted Expropriation Act 13 of 2024, to enable the government of South Africa to seize ethnic minority Afrikaners’ agricultural property without compensation,” the president’s order claimed. “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.”
In light of those orders, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has continued efforts to monitor human rights conditions and hold South Africa accountable. Officials from the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, & Labor recently returned from South Africa “to learn more about rural farm attacks and the breakdown of rule of law,” a post from the bureau read.
The bureau presented its findings in a thread on X.
“South Africa holds enormous economic and geopolitical promise. However, current breakdowns in law and order are not conducive to growth or collaboration with the United States. The South African government must speak clearly and act decisively to address crime and condemn the violence,” one X post read.
The bureau found that violence is widespread.
“Violent crime is rampant in South Africa, but rural attacks—especially on farms—display a distinctly brutal pattern. Local sources reported 296 farm attacks and 49 murders in 2023, and that victims are disproportionately elderly, isolated, and face delayed police response,” the bureau claimed. “The South African Police Service reports the number increased to 55 farm murders in 2024.”
“These are not ordinary crimes,” another post added. “In some documented cases, reports detail victims tortured or killed without anything being stolen.”
It’s hard to shake the feeling that what makes a “robbery gone wrong” in the mind of a South African radical isn’t so much the killing but the failure to “expropriate.”
