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A small group of white South Africans is set to arrive in the US on Monday as refugees under Donald Trump’s push to resettle the “victims of unjust racial discrimination”, even as his administration imposes a hard line on asylum seekers from other countries.
Forty-nine Afrikaners, each carrying six suitcases, left Johannesburg on Sunday night on a privately chartered aircraft and will land in Washington’s Dulles International Airport on Monday, the first to take up the controversial offer made by Trump in January.
Trump and his South African-born adviser Elon Musk have seized on fringe allegations that Afrikaners have been oppressed under the democratic, multiracial government that began in 1994 after decades of white nationalist rule.
The asylum offer has hit a nerve in Africa’s biggest economy, whose government has repeatedly clashed with the Trump administration. Trump has accused South Africa of taking “aggressive positions” against the US and its allies, including by accusing Israel of genocide in The Hague.
South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa said those on the flight had not been persecuted.
“They are not being hounded, they are not being treated badly and they are leaving ostensibly because they don’t want to embrace the changes that are taking place in our country,” he said on Monday.
White South Africans remain by far the country’s most privileged group in metrics ranging from employment levels to wealth and land ownership. Afrikaners, who constitute about 5 per cent of the population, had led the apartheid regime.
Trump says Afrikaners face discrimination in the form of laws intended to empower the Black majority by offering them preferential access to government contracts. He has also claimed, without offering evidence, that many face eviction from their farms.
While Trump said white farmers were being disproportionately attacked on the country’s farms, Ronald Lamola, the foreign minister, said it was disinformation to suggest any one ethnic group has been targeted. Those departing did not legally qualify as refugees, he argued.
“They can’t provide any proof of any persecution, because there is none,” he said, adding that even Afrikaner groups had denied it was taking place.
The Transvaal Agricultural Union’s figures show farm murders have fallen in recent years, from a peak in the early 2000s. There were 32 murders and 139 attacks on farms last year — roughly a third of the 2017 level — against both Black and white people, the data show.
Last month, US State department officials began turning empty office space in the capital of Pretoria into temporary housing for Afrikaners it deemed to be refugees.
The US has threatened to boycott the G20 summit due to be held in South Africa in November, but Ramaphosa said he hoped they could patch up relations before then. “There’s still a long way to go,” he said.
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