Victims of a “genocide” according to Donald Trump, colonizers for others, Afrikaners are now welcome in the United States. In May, around fifty of them were welcomed as refugees on American soil, the Republican leader considering them “despoiled and persecuted”. Who are they? Afrikaners make up the majority of South Africa’s white population – around 7% of the country’s inhabitants – and are descended from Dutch and French settlers who settled there as early as the 17th century.
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In 1650, an East India Company ship, traveling back and forth between Amsterdam and the Indonesian colonies, was forced to stop at the Cape after a damage – at the time, the Suez Canal did not exist, ships had to pass through South Africa. Seduced by the place, the merchants settled there and were joined, two years later, by around a hundred Dutch Calvinist Protestants. In 1688, more than 200 Huguenots, driven out of France by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, landed in the colony.
Calling themselves the “Boers”, meaning “breeders” or “peasants” in Dutch, these white pioneers cohabited with the British settlers until the climate deteriorated in the 19th century. Two Boer Wars broke out (1880-1881 and 1899-1902). The English victory and the terrible human toll exacerbated Boer nationalism. The surrender in 1902 of the Boer Republics was followed by the creation, in a federal form, of the Union of South Africa, voted by the British Parliament.
Racial tensions still high
The desire to preserve their hegemony ends up bringing together the former enemy brothers. Emerging from this segment of the population were the political leaders behind apartheid, a system of racial segregation which, from 1948 to the early 1990s, deprived the black majority of most of their rights. For the Afrikaners, it was then a matter of protecting themselves from “swart gevaar” (“black peril”, in Afrikaans, a creolized Dutch language).
An image that Afrikaners have difficulty getting rid of, even if it was ultimately one of them, President Frederik de Klerk, who put an end to the apartheid system in 1991. While the South African government is still trying to repair this legacy today, the question of land redistribution remains explosive. In 2017, white people still owned 72% of agricultural land, according to official figures, even though they represent only a minority of the population. According to a World Bank report published in 2022, South Africa is the most unequal country in the world, with “race” playing a determining factor in a society where 10% of the population owns more than 80% of the wealth.
Why then is Donald Trump concerned about the fate of the Afrikaners? In recent years, many white farmers have been brutally killed. The Afrikaner identity group AfriForum has recorded 49 murders of farmers in 2023 and 50 the previous year. Chilling figures which have propagated the idea of a “white genocide”, but must be put into perspective with the 75 murders recorded per day on average in South Africa, which has one of the highest homicide rates on the planet.
