The BBC recently published an article titled “Do white people have a future in South Africa?” by veteran foreign correspondent John Simpson. The piece, along with an accompanying documentary aired in the UK on Sunday night, makes several claims: that around 400,000 white South Africans—roughly 10% of the white population—live in poverty; that there are 80 “white squatter camps” near Pretoria; and that the post-apartheid government is deliberately neglecting white citizens. As with similar reports, the article also references alleged targeted attacks on white farmers, implying a connection between these events and broader socioeconomic trends.

This narrative mirrors the talking points long pushed by Afriforum and its affiliates, such as Solidarity, and eagerly picked up by foreign journalists seeking a sensational angle. In most of these pieces, white poverty is portrayed as exceptional and unnatural—something shocking and newsworthy—while black poverty, despite its overwhelming scale and historical roots, is treated as normal or unremarkable.

At its core, this is propaganda. It feeds into an emerging victimhood discourse among certain white South Africans, one that seeks to rewrite history, recast the privileged as persecuted, or overstate their roles in the struggle to end apartheid. International media outlets, including the BBC, have shown a troubling willingness to amplify these distortions.

What’s increasingly apparent is the repetitiveness of these reports: they rely on the same set of photographs, revisit the same “white squatter camps,” and often imply that black South Africans are now uniformly middle-class. This is a dangerous misrepresentation. The real crisis in South Africa remains the persistent poverty, inequality, and violent crime disproportionately affecting black citizens. There is no shortage of credible data and analysis the BBC could have drawn on—but it chose instead to give a platform to a narrative that distorts reality for the sake of provocation.

It’s striking that white South Africans have fared remarkably well—actually, far better than many expected—since the end of apartheid. The most recent study confirms this from the South African Institute of Race Relations, an organization hardly known for sympathizing with the liberation struggle, thinking from the perspective of black people, or expressing support for the current ruling party. Today, CEOs and senior managers in South Africa remain predominantly white.

Meanwhile, conditions on many farms remain deeply troubling. White farm owners often still subject black farmworkers to low wages, various forms of deprivation, and in some cases, violence.

Africa Check, a South African fact-checking organization, has debunked the widely circulated claim—amplified by Simpson’s article—that 400,000 white South Africans live in squatter camps. According to their analysis, “The claim that 400,000 whites are living in squatter camps is grossly inaccurate. If that were the case, it would mean that roughly 10% of South Africa’s 4.59 million whites were living in abject poverty. Census figures suggest that only a tiny fraction of the white population—as few as 7,754 households—are affected.”

The spectacle of Ernst Roets, a leader of AfriForum, and a representative from one of its partner organizations, Solidarity, suddenly claiming they can’t identify the source of these statistics is something to behold. Word is Roets is currently preparing a reply—likely consisting of yet more fabricated numbers.

There’s a certain irony in the fact that it took a BBC report to prompt Africa Check to systematically debunk the misleading statistics that AfriForum, Afrikaner Genocide campaigners, and other white-apocalypse organizations have been using to poison the public discourse for over a decade.

But back to the BBC, which generally offers contextual and well-researched reporting on South Africa: they do, however, occasionally slip up. Just recently, the BBC presented FW de Klerk—the last white president of South Africa, who as recently as last year defended the moral foundations of apartheid—as an “analyst” of post-apartheid South Africa. (And after watching it, I’m still left wondering whether Peter Hain’s recent “documentary” is really about the people of Marikana, as it’s marketed, or more about Peter Hain himself.)

It’s unlikely the BBC will issue an apology, and there seems little chance of public pressure forcing one—judging by the online comments on the piece and the uncritical way it was circulated across platforms. Outlets like Huffington Post republished the story without commentary, and it was widely shared on Twitter and Facebook as fact.

And it’s not just the BBC. Other “global news” outlets also regularly turn to Afriforum and its allies for research or analysis. At the outset of the Marikana mine massacre in August last year—when police killed 34 miners in cold blood—Al Jazeera sought commentary and analysis from Solidarity.