The news that a group of “Afrikaners” (Afrikaans-speaking white people from South Africa) have shown up in the United States, invited by the Trump administration as “refugees,” shouldn’t come as a surprise. Donald Trump is obsessed with South Africa; he has been for years.
Back in the 1990s, when an adviser told him that non-white people could someday become the majority population in the United States, he reportedly said that would spark a revolution: “This isn’t going to become South Africa.”
During his first round in the White House, he ordered the State Department to study what he called “the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large-scale killing of farmers.” The same fantasy is again being used to justify aggressive policies against the Black-majority nation in his second term.
In February, he issued an executive order terminating all aid to South Africa, citing “unjust racial discrimination” against white citizens. Then, in March, he expelled the country’s ambassador to the U.S., Ebrahim Rasool, whom Secretary of State Marco Rubio branded (without evidence) a “race-baiting politician who hates America and POTUS.”
And now, we have the official welcoming of white Afrikaner “refugees” while simultaneously the largest deportation operation ever is being executed against immigrants of color.
Destabilization the goal
The arrival of these supposedly persecuted Afrikaners is part political performance for his domestic MAGA audience, but it’s also a tactic in a larger strategy of destabilization against South Africa.
The Trump administration is working to undermine the South African government for various reasons. Among these is the fact that South Africa has taken the Israeli government to the International Criminal Court in The Hague for genocide and crimes against humanity in Gaza.
South Africa has also maintained cordial relations with countries the U.S. government does not like, such as Cuba and the People’s Republic of China. South Africa is a member of BRICS, and thus part of a serious challenge to U.S. worldwide financial dominance.
And there is no escaping the fact that the right in the United States has never forgiven the South African government for putting an end to the racist apartheid regime, which ruled that country from 1948 (and under other names, before) until 1994. Finally, the personal racism of Trump and his clique surely enters into this ugly picture.
Trump and his right-wing allies now think they have found the perfect opportunity to attack South Africa. In the 2024 elections, the long-ruling African National Congress (ANC) lost its parliamentary majority for the first time since 1994. Thus, the ANC was forced into an unwieldy and extremely uncomfortable coalition arrangement with some parties who, if they could, would reverse many of the advances achieved since the end of apartheid.
Some of these right-wing pro-apartheid leftovers have been in direct contact with the Trump administration, through Rubio and other government officials, and very likely through U.S. techno-fascists like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, both of whom grew up in white-ruled South Africa.
There is emerging a multi-pronged attack against the unity of South Africa, which contains the following elements, with perhaps more to come:* A campaign of lies and exaggerations, e.g. that a very moderate new law on the expropriation and redistribution of abandoned or unused land constitutes a “racist” attack on white people, and that white farmers, especially Afrikaners, are being “massacred” in South Africa.
* A campaign, led among others by a British citizen living in South Africa, to break off the country’s Western Cape Province (where the picturesque city of Cape Town is) and make it into a new independent state. The point seems to be that Western Cape Province has a larger proportion of white Afrikaans and English-speaking people than any of the country’s other eight provinces. Western Cape’s population is 42.1% “Coloured,” referring to people of a mixed racial background, most of whom speak Afrikaans, 38.8% Black, 16.45% “white,” and 1.1% “Indian/Asian,” while the nation’s overall population is 81.4% Black, 8.2% Coloured, 7.3% white, and 2.7% Asian/Indian. It was a longstanding trick of the white governments to try to play off the Black and Coloured populations against each other politically, and this may be continuing.
* An effort to split off the small town of “Orania” from the rest of the country. Orania is a bizarre and anachronistic phenomenon in the Northern Cape Province. Founded by Carel Boshoff, the son-in-law of apartheid-era South African President Hendrik Verwoerd, Orania is noted for not allowing any non-white people to live and work within its town limits (having kicked out all local non-whites at the time of its founding). The town was specifically created to keep non-whites out, so as to preserve the “heritage” of its white Afrikaner inhabitants. The South African government, from Mandela on, evidently decided to tolerate this bizarre state of affairs, perhaps to calm race relations. But Orania has been an organizing center for all sorts of far-right projects, including Afriforum and a bogus labor union called “Solidariteit,” or “Solidarity.” Now, there is a move by some on the right in South Africa to declare Orania to be a sovereign entity not answerable to the national government. And unsurprisingly, the leaders of Orania are also in touch with the Trump administration to get U.S. support for a possible secession from South Africa.
Rude awakening
The 49 new Afrikaner “refugees” who arrived at Dulles Airport outside Washington, D.C., are probably in for a big disappointment. They will soon find that they have to do their own cooking, gardening, and house cleaning, because ordinary people here do not have a handy source of super-cheap labor to do those things for them. There are no Afrikaans language schools here for their kids. The churches are either Roman Catholic, non-Calvinistic liberal protestant, or equally non-Calvinistic Evangelical Christian churches, far from the Calvinist Dutch Reformed churches the “refugees” are used to in South Africa.
And almost anywhere they go in this country, they will have to deal with non-white people on the basis of equality, in spite of the U.S.’s own racism issues.
The arrival of these “refugees” in the United States has been met with a hostile reaction by many people in both countries. The head of the African National Congress, the biggest party in South Africa’s ruling coalition, Gwede Mantashe, essentially said “good riddance.” South African President Cyril Ramaphosa called them “cowards” who cut and run rather than helping to deal with South Africa’s problems. In the United States, there is simply rage, especially since it seems the airfare for the “refugees” was paid for by U.S. taxpayers. Trump has suggested that he will give the new arrivals instant U.S. citizenship. The latter would be completely illegal: To become a U.S. citizen, one first of all has to get permanent resident status, then, in most cases, wait five years, pass an English and civics test, be interviewed by an immigration agent, and pay a hefty fee.
Further, Trump has announced the end of Temporary Protected Status for some of the most vulnerable and endangered refugees in the country, including Haitians and Afghans who are very likely to be killed if returned to their countries of origin.He is persecuting dark-skinned, non-European people while opening the gates to privileged and wealthy European-origin whites. Not a good look, Mr. President.
As with all news analysis and op-ed articles published by People’s World, the views reflected here are those of the author.
C.J. Atkins contributed to this article.
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