Upturned beer crates serve as stepping stones through the muddy walkways of Masiphumelele, a densely packed slum outside Cape Town. At the door of a tin shack, Irene Jubeju stands watch as her three-year-old grandson, Lucobo, lies on a bed beneath a single hanging bulb.
“It’s not nice to live here. I would go to America very happily if President Trump would take us,” she said, motioning to her only possessions: a white plastic chair, a bed, and a cupboard holding rice and two tins of pilchards.
A few alleys away, Patricia, a mother of six, waits at a communal tap to fill plastic bottles. “At night there’s shooting and screaming. You can’t go out. We’re not safe.” She added, “You must call Mr Donald Trump and tell him to invite me and my family to America.”
Their hopes, however desperate, are grounded in reality: dozens of white South African farmers have been granted U.S. refugee status under Trump’s administration, citing targeted violence. To the township’s residents, that gesture seemed to favour one side of a broken nation.
“My daughter said to me, ‘Mum, maybe God has his favourites,’” Patricia recalled. “Those white farmers are probably right to be afraid, but I think our case is just as deserving.”
As originally reported in The Times UK, South Africa — nearly three decades after Nelson Mandela’s presidency — remains among the most unequal countries in the world. In Masiphumelele, 65,000 people are squeezed into less than a quarter of a square mile. A wall separates their makeshift homes from a neighboring world of manicured lawns and swimming pools.
“People were separate before,” said Jeremy Mathers, a retired naval engineer who lives in the gated Lake Michelle estate nearby. “Thirty years later they still are.”
Mathers’s community is protected by cameras and armed patrols. His neighbours, mostly white, know they live in a bubble. “They probably feel a little guilty,” he said, “but security of family and property trumps all other considerations.”
Meanwhile, outside the estate walls, township residents sift through garbage, compete with baboons, and hand out job-seeking notes at traffic lights. In a country wracked by corruption, unemployment, and violent crime, predictions of national breakdown feel less like political rhetoric and more like lived experience.
Recently, Donald Trump confronted South African President Cyril Ramaphosa over what he called “white genocide” — echoing unverified claims that white farmers were being systematically targeted. Trump even screened a video in the Oval Office featuring far-left leader Julius Malema singing a struggle song, “Kill the Boer.”
At that Oval Office meeting — covered extensively by The Times UK — South Africa’s agriculture minister, John Steenhuisen, pushed back. “Claims of genocide are completely false,” he said. Farm attacks, while tragic, affect both white and black South Africans. Police data showed that in early 2025, six people were murdered on farms: five were black, one was white.
Still, white emigration continues. Billionaire Rob Hersov, who left South Africa decades ago, accused Mandela’s successors of “stealing the country to death.” He’s one of many who say the government has failed to address violence or inequality.
Others, however, stress the complexity. Hannes de Waal, head of Sundays River Citrus Company, dismissed the “white genocide” narrative as nonsense, blaming common criminality instead. “Proper Afrikaners are tough and resilient,” he said. “Going to another country as a refugee is crazy.”
But fear still simmers. “The only question — always in the back of your mind — is when is it going to happen to you?” said Hennie Ehlers, a citrus grower in the Eastern Cape.
Ehlers, like many farmers, locks his doors tight at night and lives behind layers of security. But sitting beside him is his business partner, Khaya Katoo, a black farmer who echoes the same concerns. “Farm murders cut across race,” Katoo said. “Everyone is affected. Everyone is a potential victim.”
He blames systemic failure, not racial politics. “The government has failed to deal with unemployment. There’s a huge gap between the black elite and the poor. The rich got richer without pulling the poor up with them.”
For township residents like Patricia and Irene, it’s less about race or politics and more about survival. “Mandela wanted us to love each other,” Patricia said quietly. “He’d be rotating in his grave. He’d cry if he could see what’s happening to us.”
