As the majority government of South Africa passes new laws discriminating against Afrikaners, the white population descended from Europeans, many of them are weighing their next moves.
President Donald Trump offered them the ability to enter the United States with an executive order this month, which allows Afrikaners “who are victims of unjust racial discrimination” the chance to resettle in America through the United States Refugee Admissions Program.
In a series of interviews with The Sentinel, Afrikaners said some of their fellow countrymen are likely to take advantage of the opportunity, especially as government discrimination worsens.
Afrikaners, who are primarily of Dutch descent, along with some French Huguenot and German influences, arrived in the colony known today as South Africa during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. After the end of the apartheid system and a new national constitution drafted in 1993, followed by the first multiracial election in 1994, the nation has been governed by the African National Congress, currently led by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa.
But critics of the regime which followed apartheid observed that the country has suffered under poor economic growth, elevated crime rates, and rampant corruption since the end of the white minority government. Those trends have corresponded with discrimination toward Afrikaners, especially as the African National Congress approves statutes meant to redistribute land.
The executive order from Trump observed that the recent Expropriation Act indeed enables “the government of South Africa to seize ethnic minority descendants of settler groups’ agricultural property without compensation,” while the majority government has pursued policies “designed to dismantle equal opportunity in employment, education, and business, and hateful rhetoric and government actions fueling disproportionate violence against racially disfavored landowners.”
Rory Duncan, a white resident of South Africa who was born in Rhodesia, now known as Zimbabwe, noted to The Sentinel that another bill, entitled the Equitable Access to Land Act, is now under consideration. The intention of the measure is to require that “land ownership across the length and breadth of South Africa must reflect the racial demographics of the country.”
