After slashing funding for programs that documented atrocities and protected human rights abroad, President Donald Trump’s State Department is now granting one of its first new human rights awards to a controversial South African organization that promotes the disputed notion that white farmers are a violently targeted, persecuted group, according to multiple sources knowledgeable about the funding.

The group expected to receive the nearly $1 million award, AfriForum, is a nonprofit that advocates on behalf of Afrikaners, a subset of South Africa’s white population. The organization says its members, who have a “God-given calling,” fight for Afrikaner interests and self-governance. The money will be used to “document hateful rhetoric and violent acts” against Afrikaners and other minority populations in the country.

The new award comes from a State Department bureau tasked with promoting democracy and human rights internationally. Until last year, those funds were mainly spent in poor and authoritarian nations — to fight corruption in the Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, or combat child exploitation and sexual abuse in Afghanistan. Since Trump returned to office, his appointees have transformed the bureau, gutting its staff, canceling programs and reorienting some of its funding toward conservative causes in Europe.

Samuel Samson, who was appointed as a deputy assistant secretary to the State Department bureau by Trump, has claimed the U.S. has a “civilizational” connection to Afrikaners, who descend primarily from Dutch migrants and predominantly speak Afrikaans. Samson, who has met with far-right leaders in Europe since joining the administration last year, has framed the U.S. government’s financial support for Afrikaners as grounded in “a common heritage, a common culture, a common way of life, shared history and ultimately a common anthropology.”

Samuel Samson Speaks at Lex Libertas Event

There’s a long shared political history between Afrikaner groups and white nationalists in the U.S., said Audie Klotz, a political science professor at Syracuse University who has studied those connections. But, she said, “There’s no heritage connection here. It’s pure scientific racism. In the history of U.S. immigration, there’s no direct connection between South Africa and the United States.”

AfriForum met with the Trump administration in February 2025 to plead for help. The group told officials that Afrikaners are subject to racial discrimination and murders that are more frequent and asked the administration to “act strongly against hate speech that incites violence” against them, according to a statement.

South Africa is plagued by high rates of violence, and some Afrikaners have been tortured and murdered. But independent researchers have found those killings represent a tiny fraction of murders across the country, whose victims are disproportionately people living in poor urban areas, where........

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