The intoxicating lie of white genocide — how US refugee policy weaponises SA’s pain

Nobody thought the imbawula would kill Sbu. It was cold, and an imbawula is for warmth.

He had been drinking. He brought the brazier into his rondavel and lay down beside it. Carbon monoxide has no colour and no smell. It does not wake you. It makes you drowsy, and a man who has been drinking is already halfway there. By the time the flames took the rondavel, Sbu was beyond waking. In the morning they found him burnt like a log.

I have been thinking about Sbu this week, because that is how a certain kind of lie works. It arrives as warmth. It fills the room without announcing itself. And if it is served with enough intoxicating power, nobody wakes up in time.

On 22 September, the Trump administration told Congress it planned to admit up to 17,500 refugees over the next 12 months, “primarily” white Afrikaners from South Africa, at an expected cost of about $500-million. This follows a fiscal year, now just ended, in which all but three of the people the US admitted as refugees were South Africans.

Understand first why the imbawula was brought into the room. South Africa is cold with fear. Our violent-crime numbers are among the worst on earth, and farm attacks are real and brutal. I will not minimise a single one. The lie did not invent that cold. It offered itself as warmth: you are not just afraid, you are hunted, and someone powerful has come to rescue you.

But warmth is not the same as truth, and in my profession a finding needs evidence before anyone signs it.

Start with the people whose job it is to know. The UN refugee agency has not designated Afrikaners as a group warranting refugee status and played no part in vetting them. Then ask the alleged victims’ own advocates. Solidariteit says it knows of no emergency refugee situation. AfriForum, which represents more than 300,000 Afrikaners and has spent years telling the world about farm attacks, says it has no information supporting the claim. Both say Afrikaners should build their futures here. And South Africa’s new ambassador in Washington, Roelf Meyer, himself an Afrikaner, has said there is no evidence of any campaign against the country’s white minority.

Even Washington’s own paperwork does not claim a massacre. When it raised the ceiling in May, the “emergency” it cited was a South African immigration raid on a US processing centre in Johannesburg and remarks by our politicians that Washington chose to call incitement. That is a diplomatic quarrel. It is not a genocide.

Crime wave

What South Africa has is a crime wave that spares nobody. The overwhelming majority of those murdered every year are young, black, poor and male, and nobody is offering them resettlement. A crime wave is not a genocide. A victim of crime is not, by that fact alone, a refugee.

Words have meanings, and this one was earned in blood. Genocide is the attempt to destroy a people, in whole or in part. It is Rwanda. It is Srebrenica. To borrow that word for a minority whose own major advocacy organisations reject the claim of an emergency is balderdash, and it cheapens the word for everyone who will one day need it.

A lie on its own is usually survivable. Someone coughs, someone smells something wrong, someone opens the door. What made the imbawula fatal was the drink.

This lie has been served with the strongest drink in the world. In May last year, the US president showed President Cyril Ramaphosa a printout of what he said were the graves of white South Africans. One image turned out to be from Democratic Republic of the Congo. It did not matter. It came from the Oval Office, amplified by a South African-born billionaire with a platform of hundreds of millions, and backed by the budget of a superpower. When the most powerful government on earth repeats a thing, it stops sounding like a claim and starts sounding like the weather. The senses dull. Nobody gets up to check the door.

And while the room fills, look at what the smoke is hiding.

In 2023, the United States Supreme Court ended race-conscious admissions at US universities. In January 2025, the same administration now running this programme ordered diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) dismantled across the federal government, in the name of colour-blind equality before the law.

Then look at the admissions office at the border. Two years ago, the US resettled more than 100,000 refugees from dozens of countries. This year, nearly every refugee it admitted came from South Africa. Haitians are being sent back to a country engulfed in gang violence while Afrikaners are flown in through a programme closed to almost everyone else. The government’s own notice says it expects its preferred arrivals to “fully assimilate.”

Racial preference

Call it what Washington refuses to call it: a racial preference. The same administration dismantling DEI at home, because the state should not sort people by race, has built a refugee pathway whose beneficiaries are overwhelmingly white South Africans, while the wider programme has been all but shut. The notice never uses those words. It does not need my help to describe what the numbers show.

The charge against South Africa is that our laws take race into account. Washington’s answer is to condemn racial preference here while practising it at its own border.

None of this puts our own house beyond criticism. Our redress policies deserve scrutiny, and I have given them some. Too often black economic empowerment has enriched the connected few and left the many where it found them. But scrutiny is not persecution. A citizen who loses a tender is not a refugee. A farmer who pays for private security because the police do not come is failed by his state, like millions of his neighbours. He is not hunted by it.

Who is in the room with the imbawula? Not Washington. It is the Afrikaners who stay, now cast by a foreign government as a people in flight from their own country, and eyed by their neighbours accordingly. It is the refugees elsewhere whose door has been shut while this one was opened. And it is the word genocide itself, drowsing by the brazier, losing its power to wake anyone.

The village saw the fire. What killed Sbu was the smoke, hours earlier, and the drink that stopped him noticing it.

The flames of this lie will be visible soon enough, in diplomatic rows, trade threats and headlines. But the damage is being done now, quietly, in rooms where the door is shut.

South Africa’s task is not to put out the fire in the morning.