When US President Donald Trump declared that South Africa “should not even be” in the G20 and then took to Truth Social on November 7 to announce that no American official would attend this year’s summit in Johannesburg on account of a so-called “genocide” of white farmers in the country, I was not surprised. His outburst was not an exception but the latest expression of a long Western tradition of disciplining African sovereignty. Western leaders have long tried to shut down African agency through mischaracterisations, from branding Congolese nationalist Patrice Lumumba a “Soviet puppet” to calling anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela a “terrorist”, and Trump’s assault on South Africa falls squarely into that pattern.
As Africa pushes for a stronger voice in global governance, the Trump administration has intensified efforts to isolate Pretoria. South Africa’s growing diplomatic assertiveness, from BRICS expansion to climate finance negotiations, has challenged conservative assumptions that global leadership belongs exclusively to the West.
On February 7, Trump signed an executive order halting US aid to South Africa. He alleged that the government’s land expropriation policy discriminates against white farmers and amounts to uncompensated confiscation. Nothing could be further from the truth. South African law permits expropriation only through due process and compensation, with limited exceptions set out in the Constitution. Trump’s claims ignore this legal reality, revealing a deliberate preference for distortion over fact.
Soon after, the administration amplified its rollout of a refugee admissions policy that privileged Afrikaners, citing once again discredited claims of government persecution. What is clear is that Washington has deliberately heightened tensions with Pretoria, searching for any pretext to cast South Africa as an adversary. This selective compassion, extended only to white South Africans, exposes a racialised hierarchy of concern that has long shaped conservative engagement with the continent.
Yet, for months, South African officials have firmly rejected these claims, pointing to judicial rulings, official statistics, and constitutional safeguards that show no evidence of systematic persecution, let alone a “genocide” of white farmers. Indeed, as independent experts repeatedly confirmed, there is no credible evidence whatsoever to support the claim that white farmers in South Africa are being systematically targeted as part of a campaign of genocide. Their rebuttals highlight a basic imbalance: Pretoria is operating through verifiable data and institutional process, while Washington relies on exaggeration and ideological grievance.
At the same time, as host of this year’s G20 Summit, Pretoria is using the platform to champion a more cooperative and equitable global order. For South Africa, chairing the G20 is not only symbolic, but strategic, an attempt to expand the influence of countries long excluded from shaping the rules of global governance.
Trump’s G20 boycott embodies a transnational crusade shaped by Christian righteousness. Trump’s rhetoric reduces South Africa to a moral backdrop for American authority rather than recognising it as a sovereign partner with legitimate aspirations. The boycott also mirrors a wider effort to discredit multilateral institutions that dilute American exceptionalism.
This stance is rooted in a long evangelical-imperial tradition, one that fused theology with empire and cast Western dominance as divinely sanctioned. The belief that Africa required Western moral rescue emerged in the nineteenth century, when European missionaries declared it a Christian duty to civilise and redeem the continent. The wording has changed, but the logic endures, recasting African political agency as a civilisational error rather than a legitimate expression of sovereignty. This moralised paternalism did not disappear with decolonisation. It simply adapted, resurfacing whenever African nations assert themselves on the world stage.
American evangelical and conservative Christian networks wield significant influence inside the Republican Party. Their political and media ecosystem, featuring Fox News and the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), routinely frames multilateral institutions, global aid, and international law as subordinate to American sovereignty and Christian civilisation. These networks shape not only rhetoric but policy, turning fringe narratives into foreign policy priorities.
They also amplify unproven claims of Christian persecution abroad, particularly in countries such as Nigeria and Ethiopia, to legitimise American political and military interference. Trump’s fixation with South Africa follows the same script: a fabricated crisis crafted to thrill, galvanise, and reassure a conservative Christian base. South Africa becomes another stage for this performance.
In this distorted narrative, South Africa is not a constitutional democracy acting through strong, independent courts and institutions. Instead, Africa’s most developed country is stripped of its standing and portrayed as a flawed civilisation in need of Western correction. For conservative Christian nationalists, African decision-making is not autonomous agency but a supervised privilege granted only when African decisions align with Western priorities.
By casting South Africa as illegitimate in the G20, invoking false claims of genocide and land seizures, and penalising Pretoria’s ICJ case with aid cuts, Trump asserts that only the West can define global legitimacy and moral authority, a worldview anchored in Christian-nationalist authority. Trump’s crusade is punishment, not principle, and it seeks to deter African autonomy itself.
On many occasions, I have walked the streets of Alexandra, a Johannesburg township shaped by apartheid’s spatial design, where inequality remains brutally vivid. Alexandra squeezes more than one million residents into barely 800 hectares (about 2,000 acres). A significant portion of its informal housing sits on the floodplain of the Jukskei River, where settlements crowd narrow pathways and fragile infrastructure. Here, the consequences of structural inequality are unmistakable, yet they vanish entirely within Trump’s constructed crisis.
These communities sit only a few kilometres from Sandton, a spacious, leafy, and affluent suburb that is home to some of the country’s most expensive properties. The vast and entrenched gulf between these adjacent lands is essentially a living symbol of the profound inequality Trump is willing to overlook and legitimise as a global norm, built on selective moral outrage and racialised indifference.
In Alexandra, the struggle for dignity, equality, and inclusion is not a religious American fantasy, but a practical quest for the rights that apartheid and wider global injustice sought to deny. Their struggle mirrors the wider global fight against structures that concentrate wealth and power in a few hands. They, too, deserve better.
This is the human condition Trump’s pseudo-morality refuses to acknowledge. This is why South Africa’s global leadership matters.
Earlier this year, South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa commissioned a landmark G20 Global Inequality Report, chaired by Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz. It found that the world’s richest 1 percent have captured more than 40 percent of new wealth since 2000 and that more than 80 percent of humanity now lives in conditions the World Bank classifies as high inequality.
The Johannesburg G20 Summit seeks to reform multilateral development banks, such as the World Bank, to confront a global financial system that sidelines developing countries and perpetuates economic injustice. While South Africa turns to recognised multilateral tools such as the ICJ and G20 reform, the US has moved in the opposite direction.
Under Trump, Washington has sanctioned the International Criminal Court, abandoned key UN bodies, and rejected scrutiny from UN human rights experts, reflecting a Christian-nationalist doctrine that treats American power as inherently absolute and answerable to no one.
South Africa offers an alternative vision rooted in global cooperation, shared responsibility, equality, and adherence to international law, a vision that unsettles those invested in unilateral power. The US recasts decolonisation as sin, African equality as disruption, and American dominance as divinely ordained. Trump’s attacks reveal how deeply this worldview still shapes American foreign policy.
Yet the world has moved beyond colonial binaries. African self-determination can no longer be framed as immoral. Human rights are universal, and dignity belongs to us all.
The views expressed in this article are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.
