Why Trump Talks About a “Genocide” in South Africa
On his first day in office, Donald Trump suspended refugee admissions. This week, his government made an exception when it welcomed white families from South Africa. A report on a policy that one Democratic senator called “baffling.” Plus:
Robin Wright
Wright has written for The New Yorker since 1988.
On Monday, dozens of white Afrikaners arrived in Washington from Johannesburg, on a charter plane paid for by U.S. taxpayers. They were handed small American flags and greeted as refugees by the seconds-in-command from the Departments of State and Homeland Security, just hours after President Trump charged that South Africa was engaging in “genocide.” It’s a word he has refused to utter about other conflicts, present and past, including on anniversaries of the massacre of a million Armenians by the Ottoman Empire. Afrikaners, who are the descendants of seventeenth-century European settlers in South Africa, are the only exception to an executive order issued by Trump, on his first day in office, that suspended refugee admissions, including for Afghans who aided Americans during the longest war ever fought by the U.S. He even dispatched diplomatic teams to recruit Afrikaners.
Human-rights groups—and even other Afrikaners—have been aghast. Last month, Max du Preez, the founding editor of Vrye Weekblad, an Afrikaans-language weekly, scolded Trump and his South African-born “first buddy,” Elon Musk, in an opinion piece for the Guardian. “We are not victims, there is no genocide,” he wrote. Afrikaners are “generally better off today” than when they ceded power three decades ago, when apartheid ended. White people make up seven per cent of the country’s population of sixty-four million, he noted, but still dominate the economy, and own more than half the nation’s farmland. In January, President Cyril Ramaphosa signed a law that allows land expropriation without compensation when it is “just and equitable and in the public interest.” Trump accused South Africa of “terrible things, horrible things,” including a land grab. South Africa compared the law to U.S. policy on eminent domain. And, du Preez added, “Not one square inch of it has been confiscated from white owners.”
This week, I spoke to Antoinette Sithole, whose twelve-year-old brother Hector Pieterson died on the first day of peaceful protests by Black children in Soweto, in 1976, over the white government’s order to teach in Afrikaans, the Dutch-based language spoken by Afrikaners, in Black schools. I reported from South Africa in the course of seven years of anti-apartheid protests. I was in Soweto the day Hector was shot by security forces. The early uprising, which led to Nelson Mandela’s release, in 1990, and to a majority-rule government, in 1994, is commemorated by a museum named for Hector. “Heartbreaking,” Sithole told me, of the U.S. decision to subsidize expedited resettlement of Afrikaners. During apartheid, Black people and those of mixed race “lived like we were in prison. Now they are turning it around as if we are doing the same thing,” she said. “For me, it doesn’t make sense at all.”
Senator Jeanne Shaheen, of New Hampshire, the ranking member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called Trump’s quest for Afrikaner refugees “baffling” and politically motivated, especially since the U.N. had found no South Africans of any race eligible for refugee status last year. South Africa’s coalition government, formed a year ago, is a partnership with the white-led Democratic Alliance. Trump’s initiative is, nevertheless, ongoing. On Monday, the State Department announced it will welcome more Afrikaners in the coming months, “to protect victims of racial discrimination.”
For more: read Isaac Chotiner’s column on how South Africa’s post-apartheid politics may inform the world view of Musk and Trump.