How I Survived White Genocide in South Africa

[justaprogressive]

Donald Trump and Elon Musk recently met with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in the White House. Trump dimmed the lights and showed a video consisting of various right-wing propaganda products purporting to prove that white South Africans are being singled out for their race and killed en masse. It’s a “genocide,” Trump insisted. “They’re being executed, and they happen to be white, and most of them happen to be farmers. I don’t know how you explain that.”

“Death, death, death,” he added.

I can speak to the reality of the situation. I lived for two years in South Africa, right in the teeth of the terror, as a Peace Corps volunteer from 2009 to 2011. I made it through my two years of service through an astute and considered strategy of taking no precautions whatsoever against roving genocidal murder squads. To quote Peregrin Took from The Lord of the Rings: “The closer we are to danger, the further we are from harm.”

Accordingly, I lived with a Black host family in a remote village about 100 kilometers north of the city of Kuruman (where the famous Dr. Livingstone did missionary work in the 19th century) in Northern Cape province, and about 100 kilometers south of the border with Botswana. This was part of the former apartheid bantustan of Bophuthatswana, and as a result, I was the only white person in the entire village, and to my knowledge no other white people than other Peace Corps volunteers lived in an 80-kilometer radius. I would routinely go on hours-long runs down the local gravel roads, or hours-long walks up and down the neighboring creek bed, which was usually dry—all by myself.

This cunning strategy of hiding in plain sight and constantly wandering around in remote locations by myself where I could have been easily dispatched and left for the vultures worked brilliantly. The fact that every person in the village—indeed, probably most of the people in neighboring villages too—knew who I was and where I lived only added to my protection.

https://prospect.org/world/2025-05-26-how-i-survived-white-genocide-in-south-africa/