Trump alleges ‘genocide’ in South Africa. At an agricultural fair, even Afrikaner farmers scoff

By Mogomotsi Magome

Days before South Africa’s president meets with U.S. President Donald Trump at the White House this week, Afrikaner farmers at the center of an extraordinary new U.S. refugee policy roamed a memorial to farm attacks in their country’s agricultural heartland, some touching the names of the dead — both Black and white.

Here in Bothaville, where thousands of farmers gathered for a lively agricultural fair with everything from grains to guns on display, even some conservative white Afrikaner groups debunked the Trump administration’s “genocide” and land seizure claims that led it to cut all financial aid to South Africa.

The bustling scene was business as usual, with milkshakes and burgers and tow-headed children pulled in wagons.

The late President Nelson Mandela — South Africa’s first Black leader — stood in Bothaville over a quarter-century ago and acknowledged the increasing violent attacks on farmers in the first years following the decades-long racial system of apartheid. “But the