Afrikaners flee their homeland

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It:

South Africa under the global spotlight.

Last week, President Trump had a testy meeting in the Oval Office with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa. Trump played a video montage of South African elected officials calling for killing white farmers and seizing their land.

MALEMA: Shoot to kill, kill the boer, the farmer.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: The week before, a small group of white South Africans arrived in the US seeking asylum. President Trump told reporters.

TRUMP: It’s a genocide that’s taking place that you people don’t want to write about.

The South African government disputes the claim, though it admits that criminal violence is widespread. So, how bad are things in South Africa? WORLD Senior writer Emma Freire talked to several residents to find out.

EMMA FREIRE: With asylum programs on hold in the U.S., the arrival of white South Africans as refugees made news in America

PBS: Today, nearly 60 white South Africans were admitted into the United States

But it was possibly an even bigger story back in their homeland.

JOUBERT: I went to bed the night before with the airplane still having not departed.

Gideon Joubert is a private security consultant who lives in Cape Town.

JOUBERT: And then I opened up the news and there it was, right about just before work the next morning. And I thought, here we go.

Watching the news that morning reminded Joubert of 9/11 which happened when he was 15-years-old. He felt like the course of history was changing before his eyes.

JOUBERT: It is possibly one of the most significant, if not the most significant, but definitely one of the most significant events in Afrikaner history.

He hopes the shock of seeing South Africans as refugees finally jolts the government into undertaking reforms to make life better —for everyone.

Afrikaners, sometimes called boers, are white South Africans who began arriving from Holland, Germany, and France in the 1600s. They traditionally worked as farmers. Today, South Africa has a population of 60 million. About 5 million of those are white, and half of these are Afrikaners. Joubert is one of them.

JOUBERT: I can trace my family lineage here to 1681, when my ancestors arrived here as French Huguenots fleeing persecution from the French King and the Roman Catholic Church in France. At the time, it was that tumultuous era of the religious wars in France and elsewhere in Europe.

Afrikaners played a central role in establishing apartheid, the brutal system of institutional racial segregation and discrimination that was abolished in 1994.

Today, Afrikaners say they are the ones being discriminated against. And not just them, but other minority groups. Those include South Africans of Indian descent, which total about 1.5 million people.

Against the backdrop of racial tensions, Joubert says the country faces a dire economic situation.

JOUBERT: We have 28 million people on government welfare grants that they are dependent on to survive out of a total population of 60 million. And we only have about 7 million taxpayers.

He thinks his country is on the verge of becoming a failed state. But many South Africans are not ready to give up on their homeland. Anneke Van Der Walt is a wife and mother of four young children in Potchefstroom, a small city in the northwest of South Africa. She understands why some of her countrymen are seeking asylum in America, but she’s not planning to apply to join them.

ANNEKE: We hope that we can contribute to a better South Africa. We try to do good work and to help and spread the gospel.

Van Der Walt’s biggest concern is safety. Her neighborhood bands together to pay for private security. That’s a common arrangement for anyone in the lower middle class and upward and provides a small measure of safety from rampant crime. But the government has proposed new gun control legislation that would disarm most private security guards. Van Der Walt and her family are prepared to leave if they have to.

ANNEKE: If we have to give up our, our culture for safety of us, our children and the future of our children, we will probably have to do that. And we pray a lot that, that the Lord will bless this country rather than punish this country for, for excluding him in, in everything.

In his executive order pausing foreign aid, Trump zeroed in on a 2024 land expropriation law. That law allows the government to seize farm land, which is still largely in white hands. The South African Government says their policy is necessary to redress the injustices of Apartheid, but has not yet implemented it.

But the law empowers the government to seize other types of private property as well—without compensation. That has Joubert worried.

JOUBERT: This is any private property, including the contents of your bank account that the state can arbitrarily seize by just invoking an “it's in the public interest clause,” which is ill-defined and very open for abuse.

South Africa has one of the highest homicide rates in the world. And only a tiny number of those—estimates vary but don’t go higher than 60 a year—are murders of white farmers. Trump described the killings as “genocide.” Critics argued that the President was out of line to use the term. Joubert thinks Trump didn’t mean it literally.

JOUBERT: There is no actual genocide that meets the definition of what a genocide would be.

But he thinks Trump carefully selected that word to draw attention to the problems.

JOUBERT: I think if you look at previous historical genocides, a common thread and a common theme to them is that in the aftermath of them, for decades afterwards and sometimes centuries afterwards, a lot of people would say, you know, this was a great tragedy and a great atrocity. It could have been averted if more people just stood up and said something before it happened.

The Trump administration expects to welcome more South African refugees to America in months ahead.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Emma Freire.

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