WeeklySA_AdminREALITY: AfriForum and Solidarity’s betrayal of South Africa comes neatly gift-wrapped in counterfeit patriotism, peddled to Washington as moral virtue, and paraded as statesmanship…
By Themba Khumalo
The United States’ boycott of the 2025 G20 Summit in Johannesburg is not diplomacy — it is a disgraceful display of deceit, orchestrated by local hands and exported as truth.
Let’s stop pretending this was some grand moral gesture from Washington. It wasn’t. It’s treachery — raw, deliberate, cowardly — dressed in the pomp of foreign policy. And the architects of this shameful spectacle were not Americans. They were white Afrikaner supremacists masquerading as defenders of “minority rights.”
AfriForum and Solidarity packed their bags, flew across the Atlantic, and poisoned the well. They stood before right-wing think tanks, Fox News panels, congressional aides, spinning a doomsday fantasy of South Africa — a nation supposedly overrun by machete-wielding mobs, baying for white blood, teetering on the edge of genocide. A grotesque distortion of reality, a performance so vile it could only have been scripted by those nostalgic for a time when oppression was law and privilege inherited.
Trump, ever the opportunist for political theatre steeped in grievance and racial undertones, swallowed their lies whole hook, line, and sinker. Within weeks, he sermonised about “racial persecution of white farmers” and “human rights abuses,” parroting the exact rhetoric these two groups whispered into American ears. Then came the boycott — Washington’s grand “moral stand” built on a foundation of deceit imported from Pretoria.
Let’s be blunt: this wasn’t America turning its back on South Africa. This was narrow-minded South Africans turning America against South Africa. A betrayal with a local accent, polished boots, and forked tongues. And let’s not mince words about who AfriForum and Solidarity really are. These are not freedom fighters or defenders of democracy. They are organisations still pining for the “good old days” — that poisonous era when privilege was law and inequality legislation. They see transformation as persecution, equality as dispossession, justice as revenge. Every reform becomes a horror story if it fits their narrative of victimhood.
They still dream of the old flag — and they wave it, proudly, defiantly, in racially charged rallies, as if summoning that ghost called apartheid. They flaunt it like a sacred relic, blind to the pain it represents. They ache for a South Africa frozen in time, where the world revolves around them. And because history denied them that fantasy, they peddle toxic myths to anyone willing to listen — especially Washington, desperate for a new bogeyman.
Their message? That South Africa is collapsing — that every reform, every attempt to redress past imbalances, is a sinister plot. In their poisoned imagination, the country swarms with furious black citizens, torches in hand, guns ready, machetes raised, marching to crush Afrikanerdom into oblivion. Land reform becomes “ethnic cleansing,” equality becomes “erasure of whiteness,” and the government itself is cast as executioner. What a grotesque, rancid truckload of rubbish — a fantasy so far removed from reality it could only fester in minds still shackled to apartheid’s ghost.
And this fixation on “racial exclusion”? Where, exactly? In which South Africa do they live? Because in the one the rest of us inhabit, white South Africans are everywhere: in sports, business, academia, the military, the arts, parliament, media, pulpits, boardrooms, crime, corruption, squatter camps, gated estates, malls, schools, beaches, indigenous languages — in everything.
Exclusion? Please. It’s an insult to the intelligence of a nation that is still trying to heal. What AfriForum and Solidarity fear isn’t exclusion — it’s equality. It’s no longer being at the centre of everything. They mistake shared space for invasion, fairness for hostility.
And so they perform. They travel the world rehearsing lines about “oppression of Afrikaners,” painting themselves as noble, besieged martyrs. They stage a theatre of pity, conveniently omitting that they profit from the very structures that continue to disadvantage the majority. They manipulate foreign sympathies, casting themselves as victims — when in truth, they are merchants of division.
Let’s call it what it is: treason by deceit. They didn’t only whisper their falsehoods abroad, they weaponised them. They knew exactly which strings to pull — racial, political, sentimental — to lure Trump and his cabal into action. They crafted the narrative, and Trump — predictable as thunder after lightning — swallowed it whole.
And in doing so, they handed the world’s most powerful government the perfect excuse to humiliate South Africa on the global stage. A first-ever G20 Summit hosted on African soil, reduced to a political circus — because two white Afrikaner supremacist groups couldn’t stand a South Africa that no longer orbits their privilege.
President Ramaphosa was right to condemn their antics. His words — that AfriForum and Solidarity undermined the country’s standing — were not political posturing. They were the truth. What patriot defends their country by desecrating it before foreigners? What kind of “civil society” builds its mission on slander and self-loathing?
And yet, they posture as moral crusaders — filing court papers, issuing press releases, clutching pearls about “freedom of expression.” Freedom of expression does not mean freedom to lie without consequence. It does not mean freedom to destabilise a nation with disinformation.
This boycott — this American insult — is their masterpiece. They lobbied for it in all but name. They provoked it. They celebrated it quietly. And now, as South Africa faces global embarrassment, they wash their hands and claim innocence.
But history will remember. It will remember who sharpened the blade. It will remember who marked the spot.
The tragedy isn’t that America betrayed us. That was predictable. America acts in its own interest; it always has. The real disgrace is that the betrayal was brewed in our own backyards, by those who cannot stand a black-led democracy succeeding. For all their talk of patriotism, AfriForum and Solidarity have proven one thing beyond doubt — they are patriots only when the story centres them. When it doesn’t, they’ll burn the house and call it justice. Their politics is not about protection — it’s about preservation. Not of people, but of power. Not of culture, but of control.
So yes, the United States has disgraced itself. But South Africa’s greater shame lies in its own Judas class — those white Afrikaner supremacists who would sell the truth for a headline, who’d rather kneel before a foreign populist than stand beside their fellow citizens in dignity.
Let them have their lies. Let them dine on their delusion of persecution. But let it be known — they did not speak for South Africa. They spoke against it. And when history writes this chapter, it won’t call them defenders of rights. It will call them what they are: traitors in tailored suits — the smiling faces of homegrown treachery.
Yet out of this humiliation, there must come renewal. South Africa must not meet lies with silence. The nation must speak — calmly, firmly, truthfully — of its progress, its flaws, and its unbreakable desire for unity. Our story cannot be left to the bitter and the backwards.
For every flag waved in nostalgia, every lie whispered abroad, there are millions of hands building forward. No boycott — not from Washington, nor from our own Judas class — will silence the truth of a country still determined to rise.
* The writer, Themba Khumalo, is an independent publisher and journalist
