Afrikaners 101: Just who are America’s Newest Refugees?

Now that Donald Trump and Elon Musk have brought the “plight” of white Afrikaner farmers from South Africa into U.S. political awareness and news, it may be useful to provide a history and understanding of who these new refugees to U.S. soil actually are, and more important, how they became that way. So, here we go: “Afrikaners 101.”

The social and political history of South Africa is essentially a history of tribes, White as well as Black. Until apartheid became a formal government policy in the 1948 and sparked a nascent “Black consciousness” in the country, the Black tribes were fierce rivals and often violent enemies of one another. In fact, some Black tribes largely remained that way until (and even after) apartheid officially ended in 1994 with the fall of the white government and the return of Nelson Mandela from imprisonment on Robbin Island.

One Black tribe, the warlike Zulus, had pushed the other tribes south and west in a relentless southward expansion long before whites arrived. The Zulus’ principal enemies, the Xhosa people, were more peaceful but equally numerous, and they bitterly resented the Zulu dominance. The classic Shaka Zulu (1955) by E.A. Ritter, a white author who grew up among the Zulus, remains a fascinating if somewhat fanciful biography of the Zulus’ greatest warrior leader and his bloody times.

The first white tribe to settle permanently at the southern tip of Africa were the Dutch, who established their trading post at Cape Town in 1652. They soon began growing crops, became farmers, and eventually evolved into today’s Afrikaners. Afrikaners speak Afrikaans, a West Germanic language that evolved from Dutch and still shares a large vocabulary with Dutch, but little else. In grammar and pronunciation, Afrikaans is very different from Dutch. In 1971, on a tour of a historic Cape Town fortress, I heard the Afrikaans-speaking guide having to translate everything she said not only into English for people like me, but into Dutch for the visitors from Holland.

There are almost 3 million Afrikaners still living in South Africa, so any notion that, with apartheid gone, they should “return” to the Netherlands is both ahistorical — the Afrikaners have created their own culture as well as language over the past 400 years — and entirely fanciful. They’ve become a numerous and completely different people from the Dutch.

The other major White tribe began as British settlers, but it was and remains an entirely English-speaking group. This White tribe arrived much more recently, with the first wave of English immigrants landing in 1820, almost 200 years after the Dutch. In the centuries since, many Afrikaners have learned English, but relatively few English speakers have returned the favor.

It’s safe to say that English speakers have for centuries generally looked down their noses at Afrikaners, and that Afrikaners bitterly resented it and still do, although the post-apartheid era has sparked something of an uncomfortably shared “white consciousness” between the two White tribes. That being said, an easy, oversimplified way of thinking about South African history (up to the apartheid era), is that, just as the Zulus drove other Black tribes south and west, the English drove the Afrikaners north and east.

As the English did in other nations they colonized, they had no hesitancy in slaughtering as well as educating the indigenous people of South Africa. The Afrikaners, on the other hand, generally just wanted to take the natives’ land and employ them paternalistically as laborers. You might fairly say the Afrikaners generally treated “their” Blacks as well as George Washington treated his. Neither they nor George Washington had any thought of offering them full equality, however.

The Afrikaners’ origin myth, to which they’ve erected enormous monuments, is that they became “voortrekkers” (Afrikaans for “early migrants”) who left the Cape Colony of the English in the 1830s and 1840s, pushed east across the Orange and Vaal Rivers, and established the largely agrarian and wholly Afrikaner republics of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. The English continued to dominate the coastal Cape Colony and a new province, Natal, as far as white people were concerned.

Some sort of uneasy boundary and modus vivendi — an effective line of demarcation along the course of the two great rivers — might have remained between the Afrikaners and the English, both of these white tribes having to fight, separately, against the Zulus and other tribes as whites colonized Zulu and Xhosa territory. This might have happened, had not diamonds been discovered at Kimberly in the Orange Free State in 1867 and gold in the Transvaal in 1886.

The British weren’t going to leave all that treasure to a bunch of Afrikaner farmers. Fast forward to the incredibly brutal Boer War between the British and the Afrikaners (then called the Boers), which ended with the defeat of the Boers in 1902.

The Afrikaner loss of the Boer War became the most salient historical factor in South Africa for nearly a century – and not just for Whites. The English took over the entire country, united the four entities (Cape Colony, Natal, the Transvaal, and the Orange Free State) into the Union of South Africa, and took their new nation into the British Commonwealth.

South Africans fought alongside the British in both World Wars, despite strong internal opposition from the largely under-educated and agrarian Afrikaners. Already bitter about the British before the Boer War and further embittered by that loss, the Afrikaners never forgot how the British treated Afrikaner women and children during the War itself.

It was in that conflict, which the young Winston Churchill relished as a 25-year-old captive of and then escapee from the Boers, that the British invented that terrible bane of our times, the concentration camp. The British imprisoned more than 150,000 Afrikaner women and children in appalling, unsanitary, and food-deprived conditions. More than 25,000 died. Nearly as many Black South Africans died at British hands as well. They were put in other concentration camps to prevent their re-supplying the Afrikaners, whom the Blacks tended to favor in the conflict.

Despite the enmity that the Boer War lastingly occasioned, for decades the most effective tie that loosely bound the two white tribes was the person of General Jan Smuts (1870-1950), an Afrikaner born and educated in the English Cape Colony, who rose not only to become Prime Minister but also one of the most high-respected Western military leaders and statesmen of the first half of the twentieth century. Yet Smuts made one terribly fateful bad decision: even though he was Prime Minister, he neglected to come home right away when World War II ended, since he was busy in San Francisco working to create the United Nations.

The 1948 election was the second great discontinuity in twentieth-century South Africa. The first was creation of the Union of South Africa after the Boer War, and the third was the end of the Afrikaner-dominated white regime and apartheid in 1994. It was at this 1948 national election that Smuts was ousted as prime minister (even losing his national legislative seat). A National government of Afrikaners under D.F. Malan took power for the first time, and the national policy of apartheid (Afrikaans for “apartness” or, what was to prove more important in policy terms, “separateness”) was formally enacted by the National Party majority.

The 1948 South African election is often analogized to the post-war British election of 1945, in which Winston Churchill, like Jan Smuts, was ousted from power. A far better analogy is to the US elections of 2016 and 2024, because Smuts and his United Party, although by no means integrationists, favored far more mild forms of racial discrimination than the virulently racist National Party of Malan. The NP was able to capitalize on this by exploiting racial fear among South Africa’s whites.

A vote for Smuts and the UP became a vote for Black power, communism, and socialism — then as now, words thrown around without need for further explication among those susceptible, particularly the uneducated. The NP’s narrow margin in the gerrymandered contest (Smuts and the UP actually won the popular vote by 11 percent), hence the analogy to our 2016 election. That narrow margin can be attributed entirely to the NP campaign of furious and almost exclusive focus on race. Since Blacks couldn’t vote, there was no need for racist “dog whistles.” Out-and-out racism could do the trick.

One of the few times the NP actually won a majority of white voters was in 1977, when Prime Minister John Vorster called immediate national elections after U.S. Vice President Walter Mondale, on behalf of the Carter Administration, demanded that South Africa institute universal suffrage, one person/one vote, in a nation whose population was only 20 percent white. Even the remnant United Party, led by whites who opposed apartheid in every other form, wasn’t arguing to go that far, instead favoring universal suffrage but in different racial blocks temporarily, as a steppingstone toward eventual majority rule.

The National Party not only instituted apartheid but managed to remain in power for almost 50 years, until apartheid fell in 1994, and the NP relied on racial fears the whole time. The minority NP, like many other such ruling cabals — from the British in their colonies, white Southerners during the Jim Crow era, and white planters in pre-WW II Hawai’i — were able to hang onto power through “divide and conquer” policies and tactics that fragmented their opposition. This is where the “separateness” feature of apartheid particularly came in.

In power, the NP not only established apartheid in the sense of racial segregation. Apartheid was never just about white versus non-white discrimination. The NP also put members of all the major Black tribes into semi-autonomous “homelands” specific to each tribe. We might analogize these to reservations for Native Americans in the U.S., especially in the striking lack of the material resources and opportunities each homeland would possess.

One key difference was that the homelands were expected to (and did) continue to supply almost the entire manual labor force of the country. This meant most workers were and always would be separated from their families most of the time, while those families would be separated from white society — the homelands’ real purpose. The homelands would basically become remittance economies, pools of blackness within a landscape of white.

All the good stuff in South Africa — including fertile farmland and irrigation — was basically retained by and for the whites. This was intolerable for Black South Africans, despite the simmering tribal hatreds between say, the Zulus and the Xhosas. With the fall of apartheid in 1994, the Transkei (homeland of the Xhosas), and KwaZulu (homeland of the Zulus) were quickly abolished under the new African National Congress government of Nelson Mandela. Universal suffrage and majority rule were quickly established, and since by this time only about 8 percent of the voting population was white, Black control of the nation was immediately assured.

But nearly 5 million white people remained in South Africa, and there was no other “home” for the whites to return to. Somehow a new modus vivendi needed to be established. Much of what whites had held for themselves, including all the best farmland, would somehow need to be shared.

The white farmers, many of them (the contemporary descendants by ancestry and landholding of the Afrikaner voortrekkers, the resentful Boers, and the key political supporters of the National Party and apartheid) became obvious targets. A great many, probably the majority, accepted reality and cooperated. Many remain safe, prosperous, and evidently on good terms with Blacks both locally and in government.

But some farmers are different from that, or perceived to be different, the identifiably Afrikaner farmers among them most obviously. Old hatreds and resentments die hard. Who knows better than the Afrikaners, most of whom will never forgive the concentration camps of Boer War?

So despite the incredible healing efforts of Mandela, Bishop Tutu, and others, the various outrages of apartheid (many sickeningly ruthless and violent) as well as the remaining vast economic inequality between white and Black South Africans — all these factors still engender hatreds. Hatreds of this magnitude and intensity tend to spawn violence.

Afrikaner farmers (among too many others in today’s South Africa ) have been murdered. That part is true. If I were an Afrikaner farmer on a vast and remote tract, still dependent on Black laborers who could easily see the difference between how they and I live, I could certainly feel uneasy myself. So, in fairness, we should have sympathy with this now vulnerable-feeling and by no means tiny population group, no matter how guilty we believe they and other white South Africans may be for having created this situation.

The end of apartheid has had its excesses, too. But are the Afrikaner farmers, as Trump and Musk claim, victims of “genocide,” warranting the U.S. to treat them so vastly differently from, say, Palestinians in Gaza or other people fearing for their lives daily under actual wartime conditions? You be the judge. I’d say, “C’mon, give me a break.”

As a footnote: the best novel about a white South African farmer living among “his” Blacks in the apartheid era (in fact one of the best novels ever) is The Conservationist (1974) by the Nobel Prize winning white South African, anti-apartheid crusader Nadine Gordimer. Having to listen to Trump plead sympathy for Afrikaner farmers is almost worth it, assuming it results in more people discovering the wonders of this Gordimer novel.