“Robert, are you OK with killing all of the South African winery owners?”
This question from a Florida-based wine professional on LinkedIn stopped me in my tracks. How many other Americans – and non-Americans – I wondered, watched the televised encounter between Presidents Trump and Ramaphosa, and now believe that white South African grape-growers and winemakers are the target of government-sanctioned killings?
How many people across the globe are now discouraged from picking up a bottle of wine from Stellenbosch or booking a holiday in the Cape?
Anyone holding those views could be forgiven. After all, the US president presented various pieces of ‘evidence’ including photographs of mass graves and video clips of politicians calling for ‘Death to the Boer’.
Presidential action
There was nothing new in this. On February 7, 2025, Trump issued a Presidential Action entitled “Addressing Egregious Actions of the Republic of South Africa” that referred to “hateful rhetoric and government actions fueling disproportionate violence against racially disfavored landowners.”
The government of South Africa’s “commission of rights violations in its country”, the Action claimed, was “undermining United States foreign policy, [and posing] national security threats to our Nation, our allies, our African partners, and our interests.”
Aid and assistance to South Africa would cease forthwith and — unlike asylum-seekers from other nations — Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored “race-based discrimination” would be welcomed to the US.
Higher tariffs
Two months later, South Africa was hit with 31% tariffs, among the highest of any country, though, as elsewhere, these were delayed till July 9.
During the White House meeting, the world-famous white South African billionaire and winery owner Johann Rupert whose other business interests include Cartier, Dunhill and Shanghai Tang, respectfully did his best to set Trump straight. He acknowledged that his is a very violent country with problems that are exacerbated by illegal migrants, but he also pointed out that the politicians in the clips the President had shown represented minority parties, not the government. If anyone would be a target for the kind of behaviour Trump had described, he, Rupert, would surely be the most obvious. But, he said, he often goes to bed without locking his door.
Having learned from the Trump-Zelenskyy meeting, neither Rupert nor Ramaphosa openly stated that the ‘evidence’ that had been presented with such a flourish was fake.
For that, the world had to wait for rigorous fact-checking by the likes of the BBC which pointed out that the "over a thousand" burial sites of white farmers apparently depicted in video footage shown by the president were part of a protest at the death of one couple in 2020. Another image of "white farmers that are being buried" proved to be from a Reuters report, "about women being killed in the Democratic Republic of Congo".
“Of South Africa’s 26,232 murders recorded by the South African Police Service (SAPS) last year," the BBC went on to say, "just 44 were killings of people within the farming community and of those, eight were of farmers.”
The BBC fact checkers continued that, in other figures compiled by the Transvaal Agricultural Union from media reports, social media posts and reports from its members, last year there were 23 white people killed in farm attacks, and nine black people. So far this year TAU has recorded three white and four black people killed on South African farms. Far from good news, but also far from genocide. By comparison, in 2023, there were around 50 'firearm-related' deaths of children every week.
No evidence
President Trump’s use of the term ‘genocide’ is also countered by human rights professor Dr Gregory Stanton, founder of Washington, DC-based Genocide Watch who was quoted in the Spectator as saying, “For all the tragedy of farm murders in South Africa, there is no evidence of a planned extermination”.
Stanton, who has been studying the situation in South Africa and elsewhere for over 25 years continued, “I’ve done research on the ground.... The numbers show us that white people, urban or rural, are much safer than their black counterparts, and less likely to end up on a slab at the coroner’s office… Farmers… are often vulnerable, isolated and easy targets, but that doesn’t make it genocide”.
Time to stand up for South Africa
South Africa has a vibrant, top-quality wine industry. It also boasts some of the finest examples of wine tourism in the world.
Wine professionals everywhere should join forces to help South African wine producers fight back against this disinformation.
I suggested to my LinkedIn correspondent that he take the time to read what the fact-checkers had said or, failing that (‘you can never trust mainstream news’), contact a few winemakers in the Cape to ask if they were planning to take advantage of the new US open-door migration scheme.
So, if you’re a producer in Stellenbosch, Paarl or Franschhoek who gets a call from a confused Floridian wine professional, I'm the person to blame.
