Trump’s Racist Perspectives on South Africa

The white refugees from South Africa whom Trump recently welcomed are neither in need nor in danger. Those darker-skinned millions who are, and whom we should be helping to escape tyranny, now languish in distant and immiserated circumstances, scattered globally. In so many ways, this privileging of special interests is typical both of Trump’s prejudices and of his profound, inescapable, ignorance.

When the National (Afrikaner) Party imposed apartheid (extreme separation) on an already segregated South Africa in 1948 and proceeded until 1990 and 1994 cruelly to discriminate against the majority African, Indian, and Coloured communities of their shared country, white Afrikaners profited in every sense from newly gained consummate advantage. Increasingly discriminating against the 50 million or so South Africans who were not white-skinned, the apartheid regime pushed non-whites off their land, confined many to Bantustans or Homelands, pursued those who tried to gain employment in the cities, ousted long settled communities from living areas around the major urban centers, ended educational opportunity, and downgraded every kind of social and medical provision that had previously been available to darker-skinned South Africans.

The persons in South Africa who benefited overwhelmingly from the extreme forms of segregation that were visited by the National Party on non-Afrikaners were the dominant white group, the speakers of Afrikaans who were descended from seventeenth-century Dutch settlers who had come to what is now Cape Town to provide food, meat, and other provisions to Dutch sailing vessels making for Batavia — what is now Indonesia. Later, after Britain ousted the Dutch at the Cape during the Napoleonic wars and tried to end slavery and other attacks on the Indigenous residents of what had become the Cape Colony, a posse of the Dutch settlers trekked into the northern wilderness to escape British enlightened ideas and founded two outposts in the interior — the Orange River Colony and the Transvaal Republic.

A modified form of Dutch, together with African words and inflections, became Afrikaans in the nineteenth century and the speakers of this tongue — Afrikaners — fought wars against Britain in the 1880s and again from 1899 to 1902 — the epic Anglo-Boer War in which Winston Churchill first distinguished himself.

The fifty-nine Afrikaners who arrived this week from South Africa in Trump’s America are the descendants of those who lorded it over Africans and others from at least 1902, and decisively from 1948 to South Africa’s independence in 1994. Fundamental to President Nelson Mandela’s wise rule of South Africa was to prevent his supporters from victimizing whites, especially Afrikaners.He won enormous acclaim by embracing the widow of one of the key architects of apartheid and dining at the presidential mansion with his long time Robben Island jailor. Mandela was incarcerated for defending African rights on Robben Island, South Africa’s Alcatraz; he spent twenty-seven years in jail, along with hundreds of other members of the African National Congress (ANC).

Mandela’s successors as president of South Africa certainly gave new opportunities to Africans and created a class of wealthy entrepreneurs who are now Black, Indian, and Coloured. But from Mandela’s day (the 1990s) to now, South African whites are still among very wealthiest of South Africans. None has been denied housing, kept from schooling, kicked off their inherited land, compelled to carry identity documents to prove that they could work in the cities, refused passports, or kept from speaking their minds. Freedom of expression is sacrosanct, now. So is the freedom to assemble, to protest, and to use every kind of public facility in South Africa.

Thus, it is an absolutely Musk-perpetrated falsehood to suggest that this emigrant group of fifty-nine Afrikaners (or anyone else) is discriminated against by the current majority rulers of South Africa. Yes, it is true that over the last five years about fifty-three white farmers have been murdered on their farms by thieves who are likely Black. But it is also true that many more Black farmers have been killed on their farms by Black thieves (101).

Crime is a major issue in South Africa; it is the second most deadly place in the world, with a annual rate of 45 homicides per 100,000 people; seventy-five persons die daily. Burglaries are rife, along with carjackings, kidnappings, and the rest. But the vast majority of victims are Black. (There are now 64 million South Africans, of whom 4.6 million are white and of those, 2.6 million who are Afrikaners.)

“White farmers are being brutally killed and the[ir] land is being confiscated,” says our ignorant president. No lands are being confiscated despite recent South African legislation that does make it possible, legally, to use a process similar to our own eminent domain for the state, subject to judicial approval, to acquire farms. Trump claimed on no evidence that Afrikaners were being subjected to genocide, a nonsensical allegation. Real genocide is occurring now in Darfur, western Sudan, against Africans being killed by Arabs.

Robin Wright, in the New Yorker, quotes my friend Max du Preez, an Afrikaner and the editor of an Afrikaans weekly newspaper: “We are not victims, there is no genocide,” he says. “Afrikaners are generally better off today than three decades ago, when apartheid ended. Not one square inch of [South Africa] has been confiscated from white owners.”

Or to quote a columnist in yesterday’s Boston Globe, “Trump is parroting far-right lies”— and not for the first time.

For several years on social media there has been a vigorous campaign to demonstrate that the South African (Black) government was in cahoots with Black desperadoes to attack white-owned farms. Musk was aware of the social media campaign. But two weeks ago one of South Africa’s major television broadcasters outed an Afrikaner who had been promoting such social media falsehoods. News24 found out the he had fabricated all of the tales of abuse of Afrikaner farmers. There was never a campaign against anyone, much less Afrikaners. News24’s invetigative expose is “X-Boer Unmasked.” And Musk got his information from X-Boer, who has now been identified as a one-time farmer living in a fancy coastal resort near Cape Town. He made up his allegations, completely. But bought into the hoax.

Trump has therefore allowed white refugees into the U.S. in place of far more needy and persecuted real refugees from Haiti, Afghanistan, and so on.Once again, Trump’s hatred of anything Black, and his willingness to act on rumor and hyperbole before investigating real circumstances, brings an unworthy contingent to our shores. The Statue of Liberty is meant to welcome those who are truly at risk. There are millions out there who want and deserve our embrace.