View / South Africa is a crime scene

At about 5am on Monday, 23-year-old Boitumelo Nhlanzi left home in Thembisa for work. She never arrived. She was shot dead in what police call an apparent robbery, the 12th woman found dead in Ekurhuleni, east of Johannesburg, since July. The night before, gunmen attacked two drinking venues near Johannesburg and Cape Town, killing at least 27 people. By one count, this year’s mass shooting toll now stands at 196.

None of these victims fit the story Washington tells about South Africa. Since 2025, the Trump administration has run a fast-tracked refugee program for Afrikaners on the claim that white South Africans, farmers above all, face racial persecution. The implication is that farm murders are the country’s defining crime.

To be sure, farm attacks are real, often savage, and rural communities deserve better policing than they get. But the numbers point elsewhere: Of the nearly 24,000 murders recorded last year, police counted 29 farmers. The police do not record victims by race, but in a majority Black country with violence clustered in the townships, the map tells you who is dying. South Africa is a crime scene. Its victims are Black, mostly poor, and rarely on farms.

The threat to Black South Africans is being laid out, week after week, in a Pretoria public hearing room. The Madlanga Commission, a judicial inquiry set up after a senior police commander alleged last year that criminality and political interference had penetrated the justice system, has now sat for more than 180 days.

This is also an economic emergency. It may sound crude to put it this way, but investors do not price the murder rate in isolation. They price the state’s capacity to enforce contracts, protect supply routes, and keep a worker alive on her morning commute.

Washington, for its part, could continue to focus on a small subset of victims whose plight carries political resonance at home, or simply look at the data. A government genuinely moved by South Africans dying violently would build a very different program from the one it has. That the Trump administration has not, tells you the program was never about the dead.