I’m a South African writer and translator based in Cape Town. I am 42, White and an Afrikaner. As the United States has turned its attention to my country, it has revealed an old, ugly truth: The only thing most Americans know or want to know about South Africa is how it can be turned into fodder for your nation’s psychodramas.
Letters to the Editor
I’m an Afrikaner. Trump’s resettled South Africans don’t represent me.
South Africa is much more complicated than Americans of both political parties think.
Yesterday at 1:29 p.m. EDT
8 min
The romanticized vision of the African National Congress (ANC) as noble freedom fighters that still lingers in some Americans’ imaginations is an antiquated fantasy. That era effectively came to an end in 2008 when Thabo Mbeki, the last serious and competent president the party produced, was ousted after a brutal power struggle.
Since then, the ANC has presided over an unhindered hollowing-out of the state. Under Mbeki’s successor, Jacob Zuma, the state was systematically looted. Political assassinations became near-routine. Eskom, once a world-class electricity utility, has been gutted and the country plunged into chronic rolling blackouts, tanking the economy and eroding public trust. A staggering 81 percent of 10-year-olds struggle to understand what they read.
But let us not pretend that genuine concern is driving the spectacle President Donald Trump’s administration has engineered. Instead, the people who arrived at Dulles International Airport are being used as a cudgel to punish the ANC administration in our capital, Pretoria — but not for its failure to govern. Rather, Washington clearly views South Africa’s refusal to align with the U.S. on Ukraine, its growing ties with China and Russia, and, most recently, its decision to take Israel to the International Court of Justice on genocide charges, as hostility.
Just as South Africa’s domestic politics and international relationships are vastly more complicated than many American accounts even begin to acknowledge, so are Afrikaners ourselves. A farmer from Limpopo, one of the poorest and most dysfunctional provinces in the country, and a region where just 2.6 percent of residents are White, might have a very different experience than one from Hibberdene, a coastal community where a majority of the community is White. And both might have totally different worldviews from those of us who live in cities. A shared language or culture does not presuppose a shared perspective.
We South Africans have been appalled by this resettlement farce. Not just Black South Africans. Not just activists or academics, but average White South Africans, who are horrified, angry and embarrassed. Maybe that complexity would be clearer if the American media were more inclined to seek out Afrikaners such as Lourensa Eckard, Johan Fourie or Waldimar Pelser rather than extreme and unrepresentative figures.
It is also excruciating to see so many people get the critically important issue of land reform so completely wrong. Since the ANC’s victory in 1994, when South Africa held its first truly democratic election, a significant portion of the land that has been transferred is held in tribal and state-owned trusts. What’s more, the restitution program allows for financial compensation in lieu of land. Through March 2024, about $1.5 billion has been paid out. The actual lay of the land, as it were, is a lot more complicated than most of the coverage has acknowledged or adequately explained.
To clearly see South Africa would require Americans to abandon the fantasy that race alone explains everything, that historical victimhood guarantees present virtue, that oppression automatically bestows wisdom.
Postapartheid South Africa presents a messier, crueler and more confronting reality: The wronged can wrong. Skin color neither inoculates anyone from greed, arrogance or cruelty, nor infects people with those flaws. And liberation without accountability, competence and courage can curdle into something monstrous.
As troubled and fractious as modern South Africa is, our days are not marked by rage and recrimination and cruelty. Outside of certain militant corners, people are not actually spewing hate or sowing disunion. We are not forever at each other’s throats. We are together — at work, at school, at the game, at the bar, stuck in traffic, getting on with the basic, boring business of being a society, living our lives and doing the best we can.
Yet Americans do not see us as we are. You see us as a metaphor, one more mirror in which to study your own reflection.
Donovan Greeff, Cape Town
A prayer for the people who left
A prayer for Charl Kleinhaus and my other 58 countrymen, including Kleinhaus’s family, who are now in America.
We have no idea what you must have gone through where you stayed. We didn’t walk in your shoes. We can make no judgment. It isn’t ours to make anyway.
We pray that you will build America and its people up, and bless you with the hope that what you touch multiplies tenfold. You will be a blessing and not a curse for the United States. There are blessings that you carry with you that will bless all those around you, just as the rain falls on the neighbor of the righteous man also. We know that you take with you immense resilience, extremely high work ethic and “hande wat vir niks verkeerd staan nie” — or, in English, “willingness to do what is hard when the going gets tough.”
We bless you with wisdom and rejoice with you in the training you’ve had, like David had with the lion and the bear before he took out Goliath. We bless you to always make a plan. We bless you that you take kindheartedness with you and spread it in America. We bless you to know right from wrong and to always walk the straight and narrow, even if it gets difficult to do so.
Always remember where your strength comes from. As it is written in Psalm 121:
Ek slaan my oë op na die berge: waar sal my hulp vandaan kom?
My hulp is van die Here wat hemel en aarde gemaak het
Hy kan jou voet nie laat wankel nie; jou Bewaarder kan nie sluimer nie.
Kyk, die Bewaarder van Israel sluimer of slaap nie.
Die Here is jou Bewaarder; die Here is jou skaduwee aan jou regterhand.
Die son sal jou bedags nie steek nie, die maan ook nie by nag nie.
Die Here sal jou bewaar vir elke onheil; jou siel sal Hy bewaar.
Die Here sal jou uitgang en jou ingang bewaar, van nou af tot in ewigheid.
I lift up my eyes to the mountains: Where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and Earth.
He will not let your foot slip; he who watches over you will not slumber. Indeed, he who watches over Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.
The Lord watches over you; the Lord is your shade at your right hand. The sun will not harm you by day, nor the moon by night.
The Lord will keep you from all harm; he will watch over your life. The Lord will watch over your coming and going, both now and forevermore.
Be blessed and may you prosper in the United States of America.
Camrin Janse van Rensburg, Johannesburg
Farm murders are real
Regarding the May 13 article “White South Africans designated as refugees reach U.S.”:
The Post’s coverage of the arrival of White South African refugees in the United States took a remarkably skeptical tone regarding their claims of persecution and fear of violence.
The Post quotes the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, who wrote that “it has been painful to watch one group of refugees, selected in a highly unusual manner, receive preferential treatment over many others who have been waiting in refugee camps or dangerous conditions for years,” without questioning or contextualizing that statement. The article notes that none “of the arriving Afrikaners shared specific details of persecution” at a news conference. In fact, as The Post acknowledged in its article, at least one of the people who was resettling in the U.S. said that she had been told not to talk about her circumstances. It would be interesting to see the results if The Post brought the same skepticism to bear on the claims of millions of other people who took advantage of the Biden administration’s lax enforcement of immigration policy.
South Africans kill each other with tragic frequency. But the attacks on White farmers in the countryside are a long-established phenomenon that clearly falls within the definition of persecution that qualifies them as refugees. As the South African civil society organization ACCORD has written, the South African Human Rights Commission in 2014 “found that farm attacks thrive due to the existence of a ‘criminal environment of impunity’ consolidated by ineffective security arrangements. Furthermore, farm owners and farm dwellers are the victims of farm attacks, which constitutes a human rights violation of both parties.”
White farmers are being robbed and killed, and the government seems unwilling or unable to stop it.
Simon Hankinson, Washington
The writer is a fellow at the Heritage Foundation.