Lawmakers seek transparency after repeated requests for a briefing
The State Department is awarding AfriForum $986,500 to document violence affecting Afrikaners and other South African minority populations, according to multiple sources knowledgeable about the funding. The money is intended to “document hateful rhetoric and violent acts” against Afrikaners and other minority populations. AfriForum said the allocation had not yet been finalized and that it would announce the grant if it received it. In a statement, the group said its “understanding is that the allocation has not yet been finalised” and that “Should the allocation indeed be awarded to AfriForum, we will make a public announcement in this regard.”
The award is among the first new grants from a State Department bureau responsible for democracy and human rights programs. Until last year, the bureau mainly spent that money in poor and authoritarian nations, including efforts to fight corruption in the Democratic Republic of Congo and combat child exploitation and sexual abuse in Afghanistan. Since President Donald Trump returned to office, his appointees have gutted the bureau’s staff, canceled programs and redirected some funding toward conservative causes in Europe.
ProPublica reported in July that the State Department initially intended to give a $1 million research award to Lex Libertas, an organization founded last year by former AfriForum executive Ernst Roets. Trump officials then expanded the potential recipients to a small pool of handpicked organizations, drawing congressional objections over the award’s content and plans to bypass the usual competitive bidding process. After ProPublica’s reporting, the department released an open call offering $986,500 to a nonprofit to “create a comprehensive record of violence affecting Afrikaner and other South African minority populations.” The grant is now being awarded to AfriForum.
A senior State Department official said the department does not comment on funding deliberations but routinely keeps Congress informed and consults extensively on the year’s programming. In an email, the official wrote that “The Administration has been clear about its concern about the abhorrent race-based discrimination and violence in South Africa” and that “Human rights protections do not depend on a person’s income or ethnicity.”
A Senate aide to Democrats said repeated requests for a briefing on recipients of democracy-and-human-rights funds had gone unanswered, a gap the aide described as “highly unusual.” Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, a New Hampshire Democrat and ranking member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, said, “The Trump Administration proceeded with funding fringe right-wing causes internationally despite objections from Congress.” She called the lack of transparency “unacceptable.”
AfriForum is a nonprofit founded 20 years ago that advocates for Afrikaners, a subset of South Africa’s white population. It says its members have a “God-given calling,” aims to “establish self-dependence and growing self-governance” and provides local services such as garbage collection and systems for reporting potholes and broken traffic lights. With some 300,000 members, it claims to be South Africa’s biggest civil rights organization. AfriForum says the South African government is “targeting the continued existence of Afrikaners” through racial legislation and downplaying farm murders. It also says it distances itself from “white supremacist and extremist groups” and disagrees with Trump’s assertion that white South African farmers face a “white genocide.” Academics and former U.S. diplomats have repudiated some of the ideas the group promotes as racist. In February 2025, the group met with the Trump administration to plead for help, telling officials that Afrikaners faced racial discrimination and more frequent murders and asking officials to “act strongly against hate speech that incites violence” against them, according to a statement.
South Africa has high rates of violence, and some Afrikaners have been tortured and murdered. But independent researchers found that killings of Afrikaners represent a tiny fraction of murders nationwide, whose victims disproportionately live in poor urban areas populated mainly by Black residents. Official government statistics and two formal inquiries do not reveal a pattern of targeted violence against Afrikaners.
The award also enters a political history between Afrikaner groups and white nationalists in the United States, said Audie Klotz, a political science professor at Syracuse University who has studied those connections. Klotz disputed the administration’s heritage argument: “There’s no heritage connection here. It’s pure scientific racism. In the history of U.S. immigration, there’s no direct connection between South Africa and the United States.” Samuel Samson, whom Trump appointed deputy assistant secretary to the bureau, has instead claimed a U.S. “civilizational” connection to Afrikaners, who descend primarily from Dutch migrants and predominantly speak Afrikaans. Samson, who has met with leaders in Europe described as far-right since joining the administration last year, said U.S. support rests on “a common heritage, a common culture, a common way of life, shared history and ultimately a common anthropology.”
AfriForum’s advocacy operates in the aftermath of apartheid: white South Africans governed the country for decades under a segregation system that kept the Black majority an impoverished underclass until it was dismantled in 1994. Now, with Black South Africans governing the country, white people — of whom Afrikaners are the majority — remain one of its wealthiest segments. AfriForum unsuccessfully challenged a ban on the “gratuitous display” of the national flag flown during apartheid, which a South African court found to be a form of hate speech. Its leader, Kallie Kriel, has said apartheid “was wrong” but has also argued it did not constitute a “crime against humanity” as the United Nations determined, on the grounds that not enough people were killed. AfriForum has focused on farm attacks since at least 2009. In 2018, during Trump’s first presidency, Kriel and then-deputy Ernst Roets met with government officials in Washington, D.C., about the issue, and Roets spoke with Tucker Carlson on Fox News under the chyron: “White farmers brutally murdered every week in SouthAfrica.”
Support for the grant has caused dismay among former high-level diplomats, who spoke to ProPublica anonymously because they feared retribution. Two former senior U.S. officials responsible for Africa policy said they would never have met with AfriForum, let alone funded it, because they considered the group politically extreme and not credible. They said it cherry-picks crime statistics to create a misleading narrative. “We would certainly not have funded what we would see as a racially incendiary initiative,” one official said.
The decision follows the Trump administration’s halt to programs that advocated for an end to violence in African countries such as Sudan, where the Biden administration determined in 2025 that a genocide had occurred and called the crisis “the world’s largest humanitarian catastrophe.” David Jandura, who managed the Africa portfolio for the State Department human-rights bureau for several years and lost his job during the 2025 mass layoffs, said: “It’s offensive to provide funding solely to this one group after we’ve cut off funding in countries undergoing real documented crises.”
Both AfriForum and Lex Libertas advocate for Afrikaner rights and have developed relationships with the Trump administration. L. Brent Bozell III, Trump’s ambassador to South Africa, visited AfriForum’s headquarters in September, praised its neighborhood-watch programs and criticized the South African government for not enacting policies requested by the administration. AfriForum met with Trump officials in Washington, D.C., drawing public criticism from South African President Cyril Ramaphosa. Roets met with administration officials in September and with the White House about what he described as the Afrikaner community’s crisis. Along with the New York Young Republican Club, he placed 3,000 white crosses on the National Mall to commemorate South African farm murders. Roets declined to answer specific questions from ProPublica but, in a text message, described the murders of several Afrikaners that he knew personally. He also wrote, “I see the suffering of black people in South Africa, I am deeply moved by it, and I spend every day of my life campaigning to make things better for us all.”
The Trump administration has made the plight of white, rural South Africans a key foreign policy issue. Trump subscribes to the idea that white farmers face a “genocide” and has cited disproportionate violence against them as a reason for punishing Africa’s wealthiest nation. In February 2025, he issued an executive order cutting off hundreds of millions of dollars of aid to South Africa and welcomed Afrikaners to the United States as refugees. Since then, the administration has opened the doors to more than 16,000 white South Africans while halting virtually all other immigration. Officials recently told Congress they plan to invite as many as 17,500 Afrikaner refugees to the United States in 2027. Trump also held a contentious White House meeting with Ramaphosa last year in which he claimed white farmers were being executed, and the administration considered an advertising campaign encouraging more Afrikaners to come to the United States.
Carolyn Holmes, a University of Tennessee, Knoxville professor who studies democracy in southern Africa, said additional research on crimes against white South Africans was unnecessary and confusing use of taxpayer dollars. AfriForum already produces annual reports on crimes against farming communities. “These data already exist,” she said. “You don’t need a new study. You don’t even need a far-right study, we have those.” Alex Dyzenhaus, a University of St. Andrews lecturer in international relations and African politics, said the U.S. support would also give AfriForum greater standing. “For some time, AfriForum has been campaigning for recognition of their claim that white people face discrimination and persecution,” he said. “Before, they were only getting the Tucker Carlsons and the far right of the news ecosystem. Now they have the U.S. government on their side.”
At a press conference for the Lex Libertas event, Samson described South Africa’s current government as having discriminatory “race-based” policies and as a cautionary tale for the rest of the world. He said South Africa was a “flourishing, prosperous society” at the end of apartheid in 1994 but had gone to “ruin” since then. He blamed the decline on what he called a radical ideological left movement that used human rights, tolerance and inclusivity as a “skin suit” to advance a Marxist communist worldview. Samson presented the research funding as part of the administration’s proposed response. AfriForum has acknowledged the uncertainty surrounding the award, saying it would announce the allocation if the grant were finalized.