Why South Africans are ditching Trump’s US to return home
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Despite the president’s claims of ‘white genocide’ and offer of asylum, expatriates are heading back to areas such as the Western Cape
Naomi Saphire with her husband, Danny, and their daughters, Silver, Remy and Luna
Richard Assheton, Johannesburg
Saturday May 02 2026, 9.55pm BST, The Sunday Times
With its white sandy beach and green hills, Plettenberg Bay on the Western Cape in South Africa is sometimes compared to California.
So Naomi Saphire’s decision to move her husband and three daughters there after 20 years in the United States was understandable. “I need the sun. I need the mountains,” the 46-year-old said.
She wanted her children to have a greater connection to their heritage — plus, schools and healthcare in South Africa were more affordable.
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But Saphire’s move may surprise President Trump, who announced last year that he would offer asylum to white South Africans, claiming they were suffering a “genocide” at the hands of the country’s black majority. President Ramaphosa of South Africa said he had told Trump in a phone call that this was not true.
Arrivals among the first group of white South Africans granted refugee status, at Dulles International Airport, Virginia, in May last year
KEVIN LAMARQUE/Reuters
Just under 4,500 South Africans have moved to the US since October, and Trump is reported to be planning to expand the programme. Saphire is one of an increasing number going the other way.
Recruiters have recorded an increase in enquiries from South Africans wanting to leave the US, and 12,000 people around the world have registered to reclaim their citizenship on a portal launched by the South African government in November for those who had lost it because of post-apartheid laws on dual nationality.
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Map: The Times and The Sunday Times
A significant chunk of these are thought to be US residents: about 156,000 people born in South Africa live in the US, according to the US Census Bureau’s most recent estimate, in 2024. That is the third largest community of South African expatriates, after just under 298,000 in the UK, according to the Office for National Statistics’ most recent estimate, in 2021, and 230,000 in Australia last year, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
Angel Jones, who runs a recruitment agency for returnees, HomecomingEx, based in Johannesburg, said: “A lot of it is related to Trump. This wide-open amazement at how the world can change … [people think], ‘actually, we’re not so bad at home after all’.”
On Facebook groups with tens of thousands of members, South Africans discuss their reasons for returning home. Some have cited shootings in the US, which make South Africa’s murder rates, some of the world’s highest, less terrifying. South Africa is also relatively isolated from geopolitical strife, despite the sour relationship with the Trump administration, which has put 30 per cent tariffs on South African imports.
Anton van Heerden, who runs DNA Employer of Record, an agency that puts returning South Africans in remote jobs for foreign companies, said: “You can’t walk around at night but at least you know there’s no threat of a missile hitting your building.” He has seen a 70 per cent rise in inquiries in the past six months, about a third of them from America.
After decades of emigration and talk of the country’s decline, for many South Africans, their home country is becoming an increasingly attractive place to live. Saphire grew up in Limpopo, near the border with Zimbabwe, but left 25 years ago to take a job on a cruise ship. She met her Swedish-born husband Danny, 52, an editor in Hollywood, while giving him a facial spa treatment.
They spent ten years in Los Angeles and ten years in Wake Forest, a small town in North Carolina, where Saphire owned a large spa and make-up academy, and the couple had three daughters born in the US, Silver, 15, Remy, 14, and Luna, 12.
But after taking her family to South Africa for the first time in 2022, Saphire realised what they were missing. “My kids were growing up without any family, without any true understanding of who they are and where they are from,” she said.
Silver recently came home from a hiking trip, the last leg of which was 26km along the beach. The family moved this year, for an initial trial of 18 months. “So far it’s going very, very well,” Saphire said.
Life is particularly sweet for those earning in dollars, pounds or euros and spending in the weaker rand. During the pandemic, Cape Town boomed with second homeowners and foreign digital nomads driving up prices. The cost of living is still much cheaper than in Europe or the US. Deloitte is among the companies that have enlisted Van Heerden’s services, recruiting South Africans to work remotely for Dutch clients.
In business circles there is cautious optimism the country may be turning a corner. The “load shedding” that caused power outages and has been a blight for years has largely been dealt with. The national power company, Eskom, announced last week that there would be no interruptions during the coming winter.
In October South Africa was removed from a key financial grey list by the intergovernmental Financial Action Task Force after implementing measures on money laundering.
Ramaphosa, whose African National Congress (ANC) is ruling in a coalition, has been credited with chipping away at the corrupt state architecture erected by his predecessor, Jacob Zuma. Crucial municipal elections in November will help to determine whether the most corrupt politicians have truly been sidelined.
Crime remains a glaring issue. Armed robbery is common in cities such as Johannesburg. Even in the safer Western Cape, the wealthy install heat cameras to scan the mountains for intruders. Many Afrikaners — white South Africans largely descended from Dutch settlers — believe the ANC has systematically shut them out of the nation’s wealth through its black empowerment laws.
Under the laws, companies are graded according to racial targets, and the government as well as many multinationals do business only with those under black ownership. There are companies that offer to buy shares to help others hit their quotas, at a large discount.
When I ask Saphire if she thinks there is a white genocide, her answer is surprising. “Yes,” she said. “Go and look at the leaders of some parties, who actually literally chant, ‘one bullet, one Boer’ [slang for an Afrikaner farmer]. They literally do that. They encourage the members of their party to go out of their way to annihilate a certain person with a certain colour skin.”
Julius Malema, the leader of the populist Economic Freedom Fighters party, which is not part of the ruling coalition, has regularly sung at rallies an anti-apartheid chant whose lyrics include the words “kill the Boer” repeated in Xhosa. In March Trump’s ambassador to South Africa, Brent Bozell, was forced to apologise to Ramaphosa’s government after criticising a court ruling that found the chant was not hate speech, because it was not meant to be taken literally. “I’m sorry, I don’t care what your courts say. It’s hate speech,” Bozell said. Zuma has chanted a version of it, Ramaphosa has not.
Claims of genocide by Trump and his former adviser Elon Musk, who was born in South Africa, focus on attacks on white farmers. During Ramaphosa’s visit to the Oval Office last year Trump had a lengthy video played which he said proved the claims, telling the South African president: “You’re taking people’s land and those people in many cases are being executed.” Trump also shared on social media video he said showed a mass funeral of Afrikaner farmers, which in fact showed white crosses lined up in a 2020 protest against decades of farm attacks.
President Ramaphosa and President Trump in the Oval Office of the White House in May last year
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Independent South African monitoring groups say attacks have declined since a wave of violence in the late 1990s, and represent a tiny fraction of the country’s murders (about 0.2 per cent). About 50 people are killed on South African farms each year, compared with 60 or 70 people every day in the country as a whole.
Most victims on farms are black. Between January and March last year, the latest period for which official data has been published, one white farm worker was murdered, compared with five non-white farmers. Ministers insist the attacks are motivated by robbery, not race. Those claiming asylum appear to come from rural communities that are more exposed to poverty and crime than the professional classes who are moving back to South Africa.
Saphire said there were safety risks in South Africa, but that there were in the US too. “[South Africa’s] a really nice place to be,” she said. “You know, and I always say to people, the US has many places that you would never go to. I would never go to Detroit and just walk around.”
She has, however, been following news of two recent murders near Plettenberg Bay. In January, Jane Luck, 71, a psychologist and art therapist, and her husband Rolf, 77, a geophysicist, were killed at their farmhouse in the Crags, outside the town. Also in January, the body of a former police detective, Nicky van Heerden, 54, was found on a sand dune in the bay. Van Heerden’s white boyfriend, a driftwood artist called Bevan van Druten, 53, has been arrested on suspicion of her murder. Christiaan Branders, 34, who was out on parole after murdering an elderly woman in 2009, has been charged with the murder of the Lucks.
Adele Van Rooyen, 57, a handywoman and holistic therapist, also from Limpopo, is moving to Cape Town after 13 years in Louisiana. Having broken up with her American wife, she is selling her house and hopes to move this year.
Adele Van Rooyen on a recent trip to Cape Town
Among many reasons, she misses the “warmth” of the people (“even the British are friendlier than the Americans in general”) and she has become jaded with US politics, she said. “Politics plays a huge role here. It’s almost like how soccer is in the UK.”
An Afrikaner, she is moving despite what she considers “reverse apartheid” under the black empowerment laws, which she says she will get around as she is self-employed.
An official survey from 2024 suggests white people still occupy as many as three in five management positions in South African companies, despite accounting for only 7 per cent of the population, according to the nation’s 2022 census.
Jones said her brother-in-law had just moved to Sydney as he could not go further than second-in-command at one of the big retailers. “So we lost him. We call them ‘pale males’,” she said.
Saphire is thinking about opening a new spa, and is converting her husband to his new life. He has made a video of the family featuring lions, 4x4s and beaches. She said: “I honestly think there’s just something magical about South Africa.”
Donald Trump World politics South Africa