YAOUNDÉ, Cameroon – Catholic leaders in South Africa have blasted the Trump administration over claims of an ongoing genocide against white South Africans.

U.S. President Donald Trump recently claimed that “genocide” was taking place in South Africa. He said white farmers were being “brutally killed” and their “land is being confiscated.”

Trump’s claim is apparently based on the fact that in January, President Cyril Ramaphosa signed a bill intended to address the land dispossession that black people faced during white-minority rule.

White farmers, most being Afrikaans-speaking South Africans, are descendants of Europeans who settled at the southern tip of Africa in the mid-17th century. Over time, they developed a distinct cultural identity, but their expansion also led to the dispossession of African communities from their ancestral lands. In 1948, the Afrikaner-led government of South Africa instituted apartheid—an extreme system of racial segregation that entrenched inequality on a national scale.

This included laws which banned marriages across racial lines, reserved many skilled and semi-skilled jobs for white people, and forced black people to live in what were called townships and homelands.

They were also denied a decent education, with Afrikaner leader Hendrik Verwoerd infamously remarking in the 1950s that “blacks should never be shown the greener pastures of education. They should know their station in life is to be hewers of wood and drawers of water.”

That system also dispossessed land from Black people so that they, with about 85 percent of the population, had access to only 12 percent of the land.

Afrikaner dominance of South Africa ended in 1994, when black people were allowed to vote for the first time in a nationwide election, bringing Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress (ANC) to power. The legacy of apartheid lived on.

The government of South Africa has therefore engaged in affirmative action, which aims to bridge the gap between black and white South Africans. That policy – which also includes land appropriation – has irked Trump, who now claims white farmers are being discriminated against, and has granted them asylum statues.

Recently, a group of 59 white South Africans arrived in the U.S. as refugees.

Johan Viljoen, Director of the Denis Hurley Peace Institute of the South African Bishops’ Conference, dismissed the claim as baseless, telling Crux that there is “absolutely no evidence” to support allegations of genocide against whites or Afrikaans people in South Africa.

Viljoen, himself an Afrikaner, argued that such statements reflect President Trump’s fundamental misunderstanding — either of the concept of genocide or of South Africa’s complex 400-year history.

“I think even to speak about it as genocide is belittling and insulting the whole idea, the whole concept of genocide,” Viljoen told Crux.

“They [the Afrikaans] might feel aggrieved because there is maybe affirmative action in government employment and other employment, but other than this, there is no evidence [of discrimination against whites],” he said.

“This country has a 400-year history of institutionalized racism where people were dispossessed of their land, where you ended up with 12 percent of the population owning 85% of all the land,” Viljoen said as a way of explaining that it was just a matter of justice for the government to seek to right the wrongs that apartheid created.

“Things have to be corrected. The imbalance has to be righted. Black South Africans will never escape from poverty unless this is achieved,” he told Crux.

“Until that happens, there will not be any peace in this country. That is the historical context and everybody knows it. Clearly, Donald Trump does not know it because when they speak about land discriminatory legislation, he is speaking about the expropriation act.  He clearly knows nothing about the history that preceded it, that Black South Africans were systematically deprived. It was land theft. That is what it was,” Viljoen said.

He said that even with the expropriation act, the government has not expropriated any land at all.

“Not a single white farm has been expropriated to date. It has all been done on a willing buyer, willing seller principle,” he told Crux.

Viljoen further noted that by granting white South African refugee status, Trump is putting on display his ignorance of who a refugee is, suggesting that he should have been granting such status to the Rohingyas from Myanmar and the refugees and the displaced in Gaza and in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

“The only group of people who he selects to give refugee status to in the United States are a group of white Afrikaans farmers who are known for their extremely right-wing political viewpoints,” he noted.

Chris Chatteris of the Jesuit institute of Southern Africa told Crux that most Afrikaners “are doing just fine.”

He however explained that some feel insecure, as many minorities do in many places.

“Some of their ancestors were the architects of apartheid and so they probably worry that revenge will be taken upon them. However, the black population in South Africa has shown extraordinary forgiveness towards them and the white population generally,” Chatteris told Crux.

He said Trump and the MAGA movement obviously prefer white immigrants to immigrants of color, citing African countries such as DR Congo and Sudan “where many people can credibly claim to be persecuted.”

He explained that in South Africa itself, an immigrant from Zimbabwe or Mozambique is much more likely to suffer a xenophobic attack or even be murdered than a white person.

“But Trump is not interested in these darker-skinned Africans in the same way that he’s not interested in darker-skinned people from Latin America and the Caribbean,” he said – a veiled suggestion that Trump could be acting on racism.