“Our path to America is wide open!” That was my cousin’s joking response to the news that she could claim refugee status in the United States. She lives on a farm in Gauteng, South Africa, where her husband grows vegetables for restaurants and supermarkets. They are Afrikaners, descendants of Dutch, French and German settlers who arrived in the 17th century. This is my background, too, though I grew up in Britain. Last month, the Trump administration made a dramatic intervention in South African politics by claiming that the government had “blatantly discriminated against ethnic minority Afrikaners,” and promised families like my cousin’s the chance to resettle in America.
The White House was responding, most obviously, to the passage through South Africa’s parliament of the Expropriation Act, a bill allowing the state to confiscate land for reasons of public interest. This includes the pursuit of racial equity, and in some circumstances it will now be legal to seize land without compensation. Though my cousin’s comment was ironic, it also conveyed a hint of nervousness. As her husband put it, somewhere at the back of their minds there does lurk the possibility that one day the state will simply confiscate their land. Prominent politicians have been threatening to do so for years — and not just firebrands such as Julius Malema of the Economic Freedom Fighters party. In 2017, to give one example, then-President Jacob Zuma promised to strip white landowners of their property.
Understandably, then, many Afrikaners will feel relieved to have Trump’s support. And yet, by singling them out as victims, the American President is effectively claiming them as members of a Western civilisation that he is now the guardian of. This doesn’t do justice to the subtleties of the Afrikaans identity, and nor is it likely to win them many friends in the country where they reside.
Indeed, in South Africa as elsewhere, Trump’s comments were immediately mocked. The rebuttal was obvious: the country’s white minority, which includes English-speakers as well as Afrikaners, still enjoy a vastly higher standard of living than their black and coloured compatriots. It has been widely reported that white South Africans, despite making up just 7% of the population, own over 70% of the country’s private land, though the import of these figures is not primarily about economic justice; in England, for comparison, half the land belongs to less than 1% of the population.
The issue, rather, is historical and cultural. Apartheid, the system of white minority rule that ended three decades ago, is still regularly invoked in political discourse. Though often dressed up in Marxist jargon, land redistribution is both promised and demanded as restitution for historical dispossession. At the same time, land carries a special significance for many Afrikaners as well, since farming is a profession and way of life with which they identify to a unique extent. “Boer” — the colloquial term for Afrikaner — literally means farmer.
More importantly, I’m not sure that people in the West citing ownership statistics genuinely understand the situation of South Africa’s white farmers. Take my cousin again. In some ways, she and her family enjoy a very high quality of life. But 15 years ago, her first husband was murdered during a robbery at their farm, and she was dumped in the wilderness with her six week-old infant. Then she married a man whose first wife had also been murdered, on the same farm where they live now. The actual business of agriculture entails a constant struggle against a corrupt, disintegrating and ideologically hostile state. A few years ago, an illegal settlement sprang up in their area, consisting of improvised housing and such basic services as the inhabitants can provide for themselves. It now numbers thousands of people and will, they fear, soon spread onto their land.
These experiences are far from unusual: South Africa regularly sees the murder of 50 farmers each year. Over the past decade, such crimes have invited wider interest in the Afrikaner question. In particular, Western conservatives who suspect mainstream institutions of anti-white bias claim that the attacks are being ignored or downplayed. Elon Musk — himself born and raised in South Africa — has referred to the farm murders as genocide. The issue is inherently muddy due to the inconsistent nature of the crimes, and the very high levels of violence in South Africa more generally. But there are certainly many Afrikaners who resent their own government’s failure to even recognise the problem. “White farmers are regularly characterised as ‘criminals,’ ‘land thieves,’ ‘rapists,’ ‘oppressors,’ by high-ranking politicians,” Ernst van Zyl, spokesperson for the Afrikaner interest group Afriforum, tells me. “Farm murders are often characterised by incredibly brutal levels of torture. In many cases nothing is stolen.”
Arguably, though, Trump’s concern with Afrikaners has less to do with their daily lives than their status as symbols. According to the framework of post-Seventies liberal thought, Afrikaners were the archetypal villains: white invaders who subjugated the indigenous people of a foreign land. It is on this basis that it became unthinkable to express sympathy for them as a group. Trumpism is all about attacking such taboos, and overturning the moral hierarchies they imply. In this case, he is turning the logic of progressive liberalism against itself: are Afrikaners not also an ethnic minority, with all the protections that is said to entail? Can they not also suffer discrimination, and be granted the sacred status of refugees?
This tendency of outsiders to view the Afrikaners in terms of political symbolism, though reductive, is nonetheless made possible by their peculiar history and identity as a group. For centuries, they have inhabited a position of existential ambiguity, understanding themselves by turns or even simultaneously as an endangered minority and divinely sanctioned masters; as humble land-dwellers and custodians of a higher civilisation; as fundamentally both African and European. This is one of the paradoxes of the Afrikaners: their situation is singular and unclear, yet they have become a common point of reference for the expansive and passionate convictions of others.
“Afrikaners have become a common point of reference for the expansive and passionate convictions of others.
As the historian Hermann Giliomee has written, South Africa was “unique in the world of European colonisation”. White settlers didn’t form their own self-sufficient society (as in North America or Australia), nor did they remain a small administrative and commercial elite (as in India). Rather, they dominated only in certain places, often only precariously, and even there were dependent on African labour. This last point cannot be stressed enough. The relations between Afrikaners and the peoples they encountered in Africa, whether the Khoisan inhabitants of the Western Cape region or the Bantu-speaking tribes inland, were extremely varied. Yet they were usually defined, at least in part, by the contradictory dynamic of trying to remain socially distinct while also needing these groups to serve as workers and fighting auxiliaries. This meant that Afrikaners frequently engineered situations — including, arguably, Apartheid itself — in which they exploited other populations while seeing themselves as an endangered minority.
No less important, the Afrikaners were not the only people of European descent in southern Africa. From the early 19th century, when the region began to be incorporated into the British Empire, they endured an uneasy coexistence with British settlers, numerically fewer but in most other respects much more powerful. Supremely confident in the superiority of their customs, manners and laws, the Victorians in southern Africa often looked down on the Afrikaners as primitive and backwards, and sometimes even as an inferior race. The English South African writer Olive Schreiner remarked that, as a child in the 1860s, it would have been unthinkable for her to eat food or sleep in a bed that an Afrikaner had previously touched. As late as 1946, the average Afrikaner’s income was less than half that of an English-speaking South African’s.
The British had their own bitter conflicts with African peoples, and much of their involvement in southern Africa was driven by land speculation and the mining of gold and diamonds. Yet the British at this time were also a liberal superpower. Inspired by Evangelical Christianity, they were radically committed to the welfare and basic rights, as they saw them, of non-Europeans in their empire. A major source of friction with the Afrikaners was the British insistence on protecting their workers, who included Khoisan peons and, until 1838, slaves of South Asian and African origin. In a foreshadowing of more recent events, some Afrikaners felt they were unfairly discriminated against. One of their leading figures, Piet Retief, complained in the 1830s of the “prejudice” stirred against them by “dishonest persons, under the cloak of religion, whose testimony is believed in England, to the exclusion of all evidence in our favour”.
The struggle for independence from Britain would provide crucial moments in the Afrikaner nationalist mythology. One of these was the Great Trek, when groups of Afrikaner pioneers fled the Cape Colony in their wagons through the 1830s. Some of these were wiped out by disease and battle, but others managed to establish a pair of Boer Republics beyond British grasp. Another milestone was the Boer War, fought 1898-1902, in which these states fought unsuccessfully to maintain their sovereignty from the British Empire. The people who would later become the world’s most famous oppressors were, ironically, also the first anti-imperialist freedom fighters of the 20th century.
Yet Afrikaner identity was late in finding a definite shape, and its eventual contours were far from inevitable. Even in the late 19th century, the word “Afrikaner” was used loosely and inconsistently. Few regarded Afrikaans — essentially a simplified and creolised version of Dutch — as a distinct language. In the Cape, many Afrikaans elites were loyal subjects of the British crown. As one leader put it: “I am, I hope, a patriotic Dutch-Afrikaner, but if anyone dares to touch the English flag I shall shoot him point blank.” An influential proponent of the Afrikaans language, S. J. du Toit (no relation), ended up supporting the British in the Boer War. Today, Afrikaners are not even the largest group of Afrikaans speakers. That would be the coloureds, whose mixed ancestry includes the Khoisan people of the Cape and Asian slaves from the early colonial period.
Likewise, Afrikaners are far from homogenous today. Besides the gruff farmers of popular imagination, there are cohorts of Johannesburg hipsters, artists in the Karoo Desert and suburban white-collar professionals. The South African diaspora in places like the UK and Australia numbers in the hundreds of thousands, of which a significant proportion are Afrikaners like myself. The members of this far-flung tribe certainly do not think alike, as I discovered when I canvassed opinions on Trump’s intervention. Some regard the American president almost as divine, others as Mussolini with a toupee.
Still, I get the sense that the challenges of adapting to South Africa’s crumbling state are bringing parts of the Afrikaans community closer together. At AfriForum, for instance, van Zyl talks about the twin principles of staatsbestand and selfdoen: “state-proof” and “autonomous”. These are clear in the efforts of neighbourhoods and community groups to plug gaps in basic services and infrastructure, from police patrols to road repairs. Such cooperation, together with Afrikaans schools, historical commemorations, religious belief, sports fixtures, and the all-important ritual of the braai or barbecue, have produced a kind of thick identity I’m not sure I’ve encountered in Britain.
I’ve spoken to numerous Afrikaners who have tried Europe or the United States and found life under the care of a more structured “first world” state to be suffocating and infantilising. I remember asking one such man if South Africa’s violence didn’t bother him, to which he shrugged and said that everyone dies eventually. Others, of course, are less glib. My cousin’s husband told me that he’s still excited about the country, that there is so much to enjoy — but for his children’s and grandchildren’s sake, he worries about the volatility of South African politics and the on-going deterioration of the country’s institutions.
The backing of Trump and his supporters may also turn out to be a mixed blessing. To an important degree, his gesture relies on an image of the Afrikaners as an embattled outpost of Western civilisation, about to be swallowed by the chaos of the African continent — a metaphor for the perceived threat to traditional ideals within the West itself. Insofar as this implies that somehow, after 350 years, Afrikaners still do not fully belong in Africa, it risks deepening the longstanding ambiguity of their situation, and playing into the hands of those who really would like to turf them out.
