South Africa slams planned US visa curbs over alleged racism

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In a statement on Wednesday, South African Minister for International Relations and Co-operation Ronald Lamola said: “We remain committed to addressing these challenges through our constitutional institutions, democratic processes and the rule of law, with the objective of building a more equal and inclusive society for all South Africans.”

Mr Lamola was responding to an announcement made on Tuesday by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio that Washington would be enacting a new policy aimed at South Africans involved in what he called “race-based” discrimination against white Afrikaners.

Mr Rubio said the US would restrict visas for individuals “responsible for, or complicit in the enactment or implementation of laws or policies that enable uncompensated land seizures, race-based discrimination, and/or the incitement of imminent violence against members of minority ethnic or racial groups in South Africa.”

Afrikaners are a minority in South Africa who mostly descend from Dutch colonial settlers, who created and ran the racist apartheid regime in the country which persisted until 1994, when the African National Congress won the country’s first democratic elections.

A 2017 South African government report found that whites, who make up about 7 per cent of the population, owned around 72 per cent of individually owned farmland.

South Africa has undertaken programmes to buy land and redistribute it, and in 2025 passed a law that would allow expropriation of land, including in some cases without compensating owners.

Some Afrikaner groups have lobbied US President Donald Trump against the law they claim is government-backed discrimination, which the South African government describes as “misinformation.”

South Africa has also been targeted by Mr Trump for its filing of a case in the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza.

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