The South African organization AfriForum is having a moment. The nearly 200,000-member-strong Afrikaner rights group has received considerable media attention for its campaign against “expropriation without compensation” (a land reform proposal that would address the concentration of land ownership by white owners), a campaign which Afriforum has started to take overseas.

Earlier this month, Kallie Kriel and Ernst Roest, the CEO and deputy CEO of AfriForum, undertook a trip to the United States to spread their message that land reform in South Africa must be stopped, while simultaneously raising the issue of violent crime against white farmers, which they claim to be linked. The tour was announced as the “the first leg of [AfriForum]’s international campaign” against expropriation without compensation, which the group claims has a “clear racist motive” against white landowners.

For all the fanfare (and its amplification in mainstream Afrikaans media back home), none of AfriForum’s meetings in the US appear to have been particularly high-profile. These included a meeting with officials from USAID, and with the office of Senator Ted Cruz (but likely without the presence of Cruz himself). By a stroke of luck, at one point Kriel and Roets apparently ran into John Bolton, national security advisor to US President Trump—he didn’t know who they were, but he was willing to let them take their picture with him. They also met with conservative think tanks the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute, organizations that during Apartheid had echoed Pretoria’s talking points and opposed campaigns for disinvestment and trade sanctions (and indeed, in an interview with the Huffington Post about their meeting, an analyst with Cato compared Apartheid to the current policies of the South African government). AfriForum’s biggest coup of the trip was to snag an interview with Tucker Carlson on Fox News, in a segment which was posted with the title: “White farmers are being brutally murdered in South Africa for their land. And no one is brave enough to talk about it.” Everywhere they went, Kriel and Roets left behind autographed copies of Roets’ forthcoming book Kill the Boer (to be published by AfriForum’s in-house imprint.)

If AfriForum’s tour can be considered a minor success, at least in terms of breaking into political elements associated with the Republican party, at home in South Africa they have been met with outrage and mockery. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa accused them of “mobilis[ing] the international community against their own country.” The Huffington Post’s editor Pieter du Toit (himself an Afrikaner) published sharply critical coverage of the tour, and Vice-Chancellor of Wits Adam Habib called AfriForum’s leaders “disgusting human beings,” which Kriel dismissed as “the hysterical reaction” from leftist anti-AfriForum activists “under the guise of being academics or journalists.”

Unforced errors by both Kriel and Roets further fueled the backlash in South Africa against them. When Elmien du Plessis, a law professor at North West University, criticized AfriForum on Twitter and on News24 (owned by Naspers, the media company that was the propaganda organ of Apartheid in a previous life), claiming that their “own statistics … do not support their claims of an ongoing genocide against white people, or even white farmers in South Africa,” Roets responded with a half-hour video monologue in which he quoted a line about hanging professors (but then said there was “no intention to harm”). Another blow-up came when Kriel told a black radio host that “I don’t think Apartheid was a crime against humanity.” He later tried to explain this away by saying that although “Apartheid was wrong,” it couldn’t be compared to the Holocaust or communism, as “there was not a mass killing of people.”

Kriel has also argued that the UN’s 1973 designation of “crime against humanity” was an initiative of the Soviet Union and should therefore be rejected, and that “it is unfair to not judge apartheid within the context of its time,” in light of the threat of the ANC’s communism. (AfriForum likes to claim that it is distinct from Apartheid, but its rationalizations are often borrowed wholesale from that regime: once its more vile racist justifications for Apartheid were no longer de rigueur, the National Party used red scare tactics to convince local whites and, crucially, Americans of the danger of Nelson Mandela and the ANC ever governing South Africa). Then there’s AfriForum’s defense of Apartheid symbols. AfriForum’s defense of the old apartheid-era flag against a proposed ban has forced them to try to explain—unconvincingly—that they “have no particular love for the flag or what it represents.”

These ongoing incidents pose a serious challenge to AfriForum’s ability to build its legitimacy on the international stage and at home. Its leaders are trying very hard to present themselves as “mainstream” (media in South African often describe them, erroneously as a “civil rights organization”). AfriForum also insists that they are not the far-right, racist, or Apartheid apologists as they are often made out to be, but rather that they are moderate voices fighting for the civil rights of a racial minority.

This distancing from the far-right is made difficult, however, by the fact that AfriForum is clearly trying to take advantage of a situation in which the far-right conservative media in Europe and North America is preoccupied with the plight of white South Africans, eagerly appropriating their stories to bolster their own white supremacist views. AfriForum may not want to admit it, but this is a situation that they helped to create, and it mutually benefits both parties. Just as the alt-right exploits an imaginary South Africa to pursue their own anti-immigration goals, AfriForum is happy to leverage global white nationalist sentiment to highlight their domestic campaign against land reform.