Toverview team
To the surprise of many (including, seemingly, the SA government), the Trump administration is reportedly in the process of bringing the first group of Afrikaners classified as ‘refugees’ to the US.
According to the New York Times, which broke the story on two days ago (Friday 9 May), the first group of 45 ‘refugees’ were due to leave South Africa on a chartered flight today (Sunday 11 May), and arrive at Washington International Airport tomorrow, where they were due to be met by US officials and address a media conference.
This follows the shock decision by President Donald Trump in February this year to halt all US assistance to South Africa and to promote the ‘resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored, race-based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation’.
This last phrase was a reference to the Expropriation Act of 2024, which, according to the statement, enables the SA government to ‘seize ethnic minority Afrikaners’ agricultural property without compensation’.
This, the statement said, followed ‘countless government policies designed to dismantle equal opportunity in employment, education and business, and hateful rhetoric and government actions fuelling disproportionate violence against racially disfavoured land owners’.
All of this appeared in a White House statement titled ‘Addressing Egregious Actions of the Republic of South Africa’. As is often the case, the original is worth reading.
According to the NYT, within weeks of announcing that Afrikaners were eligible for refugee status, the US administration deployed teams to Pretoria to screen candidates. They studied more than 8 000 requests, and identified 100 Afrikaners who could be approved. (Apparently, they were directed to focus on white Afrikaner farmers.)
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More things happened thick and fast. Also in March, the SA Ambassador to the US, Ebrahim Rasool, was summarily expelled after describing Trump as a ‘white supremacist’ during a webinar in South Africa. (A transcript of the proceedings was ‘leaked’ to the right-wing American news agency Breibart, which published extracts verbatim on its website.)
Ramaphosa described the decision as ‘regrettable’, but said SA remained ‘committed to building a mutually beneficial relationship with the US’.
In April, Ramaphosa appointed Mcebisi Jonas, a former deputy minister of finance — who played a major role in exposing the Guptas and ‘state capture’ — as a special envoy to the US, tasked with ‘advancing South Africa’s diplomatic, trade and bilateral priorities’. What he is really meant to do is to mend SA’s fences with the Trump administration.
Not surprisingly, Friday’s news triggered a flurry in the diplomatic dovecote. According to the NYT, US officials informed SA officials about their plans on Friday. Later the same day, the Ministry of International Relations and Cooperation (our DIRCO ministry) announced that the SA government had ‘expressed its concern’ about this development, and that the deputy minister, Alvin Botes, had discussed it with his American counterpart, Christopher Landau.
It went on to say that the allegations of discrimination were ‘unfounded’, and did not meet the threshold of persecution required under domestic and international refugee law. Regrettably, it said, the resettlement of South Africans in the US under the guise of being ‘refugees’ seemed ‘politically motivated and designed to question South Africa’s constitutional democracy’ and the rights entrenched in its constitution, and ignored the state’s ‘principled commitment to protect minorities and vulnerable groups’.
However, it added that, while SA challenged the US assessments of alleged refugee status, it would not block citizens who wanted to leave the country from doing so, as it ‘also observes their right of freedom of movement and freedom of choice, specifically the right to leave the country’.
Jonas is believed to be in the US at the moment and starting to conduct highloy sensitive conversations — an added reason why US administration’s decision to go ahead with the ‘resettlements’ may have come as a surprise.
We await further developments with interest. The stakes are high, as the US is – or used to be – SA’s second largest trading partner after the European Union, and a significant source of aid, among others for maintaining HIV/AIDS programmes.
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Underpinning Trump’s executive order is the trope of ‘white genocide’ – the long-standing allegation that white South Africans – and especially Afrikaners — are subject to a slow and gradual programme of racial genocide.
Trump has never used this term, but his buddy, Elon Musk, has. On 31 July 2023, Musk aimed the following tweet at Ramaphosa: ‘They [presumablhy the EFF] are openly pushing for genocide of white people in South Africa. Why do you say nothing?’
As for Trump himself, on 23 August 2018, during his previous presidency, he tweeted: ‘I have asked Secretary of State Pompeo to closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large-scale killing of farmers.’
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We aim to unpack this emotive and controversial issue in the coming months. In the meantime, we have come across an extraordinary article in the prestigious American magazine Harper’s Bazaar, written by the American journalist James Pogue. Titled ‘The Myth of White Genocide’, it was published in February 2019, while the Expropriation Act was still being debated.
It’s a long but fascinating read. It embodies fine-grained grass-roots research which South African journalists increasingly seem unwilling or incapable to undertake. Judging by the title, Pogue dismissed ‘white genocide’ as a myth. But does he? Read to the end, and tell us what you think …
FEATURED IMAGE: the Witkruis Monument in Limpopo, which commemorates lives lost in South African farm attacks, photographed in 2014. Wikimedia Commons,