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On May 12, 2025, United States Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau welcomed the first group of Afrikaner ‘refugees’ to the United States, as per a statement by the White House.
“This tremendous accomplishment, at the direction of Secretary Rubio, responds to President Trump’s call to prioritize U.S. refugee resettlement of this vulnerable group facing unjust racial discrimination in South Africa,” the statement read.
“Today, the United States sends a clear message, in alignment with the administration’s America First foreign policy agenda, that America will take action to protect victims of racial discrimination. We stand with these refugees as they build a better future for themselves and their children in the United States,” it added.
The statement concluded: “No one should have to fear having their property seized without compensation or becoming the victim of violent attacks because of their ethnicity. In the coming months, we will continue to welcome more Afrikaner refugees and help them rebuild their lives in our great country.”
The Trump Administration’s stance to welcome Afrikaners has sparked accusations of racial bias, with critics alleging that the US, under Donald Trump, is being selective in choosing the migrants, refugees and asylum seekers it wants to allow in.
The development has also sparked interest about the Afrikaners, a community formed by ethnogenesis on the African continent, which has often been called ‘Africa’s white tribe’.
The late 1400s saw Europeans reaching out into far corners of the world, areas they had not yet ventured into. In 1488, Portuguese sailor Bartolomeu Diaz finally reached the southern tip of the African continent and named the headland he landed on as the ‘Cape of Storms’, today known as the Cape of Good Hope.
In 1498, Vasco da Gama, also from Portugal, rounded the Cape and travelled east to finally land on Kappad beach in Calicut (Kozhikode), southern India. Ships from Europe could now travel to South and Southeast Asia for trade by rounding off the Cape.
But these voyages were long and dangerous, especially around the Cape itself. Finally, the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie in Dutch) decided to build a halfway station at the Cape that would restock and supply ships travelling east to the ‘Indies’.
In 1652, Jan van Riebeeck landed on the Cape and founded exactly such a settlement. At first, the settlers were primarily Dutch from the Netherlands. The country surrounding the station was populated by the Khoikhoi with whom the Dutch at first traded but later took to killing to acquire their land.
The tiny colony grew in 1685 after King Louis XIV of France outlawed Protestantism through The Edict of Fontainebleau, resulting in Huguenot (French Protestants) refugees seeking asylum in the colony (the Dutch were a mostly Protestant people).
Journalist Kajsa Norman, in her 2016 book Bridge over Blood River, notes that the Company also got slaves imported from Indonesia, India, Madagascar and Eastern Africa into the colony. Between 1652 and 1808, approximately 63,000 slaves had been imported.
From the Dutch, French, German, Khoikhoi and slave members of the colony arose the first Afrikaner (‘African’) populations. The settler-colonists ‘pseudo-integrated’ the slaves into their families through a practice called ‘paternalism’, writes Norman, where their social rights, obligations and transfer to other masters were tightly controlled. The reference to slaves from India is interesting as the Dutch were trading at ports in the subcontinent at the time. Francois Wilhelm de Klerk, the last president of Apartheid South Africa, noted a ‘Diana from Bengal’ as one of his ancestors.
By 1710, the Dutch Cape Colony was witnessing a rebellion of sorts as the colonists, especially the less well-heeled ones, grew tired of the high-handedness of Company officials. Many decided that it was time to leave the colony and seek out a new life out on the vast frontier.
This first wave of Afrikaner migrants was called the Trekboers, ‘Boer’ being the Dutch and Afrikaans term for ‘farmer’. Those who remained at the Cape came to be subsequently known as the Cape Dutch.
Norman describes how the African frontier changed the very character of those venturing into it. She quotes journalist Rian Malan, who said his ‘ancestors lived by the gun, and according to the Old Testament. Its tales of tribes wandering the desert appealed to them’.
Malan, writes Norman, noted how “all that time spent in isolation on the frontier” had transformed his ancestors into “a people the British regarded as white barbarians—ignorant, unkempt and violent”. “In the words of Malan: they had become Afrikaners, the white tribe of Africa, arrogant, xenophobic, and ‘full of blood’, as the Zulus say of tyrants,” Norman writes.
Meanwhile, back at the Cape, other developments were taking place. In 1795, the colony began to collapse under debt. The British, Protestant rivals to the Dutch, waged war and won the Cape that same year.
The British colonisation had consequences. The British outlawed slavery in 1834, something that did not go down well with the Afrikaner colonists. They also hit out linguistically, making English the colony’s sole official language.
A second wave of migration, The Great Trek, began. The Voortrekkers (‘pioneers’) would trek over the South African veld in their wagon trains, often clashing with indigenous people in battles like Blood River in 1838, and ultimately founding republics like the Transvaal, Natalia and Orange Free State.
In the late 1800s, gold was discovered in the Boer Republics, resulting in wars with Britain. While the First Boer War (1880-1881) ended in a Boer victory, the British defeated the Boers in the Second Boer War (1899-1902) and annexed their republics.
The second war was disastrous for the Boers as the British adopted scorched earth policies and burnt Boer farmsteads, exiling the inhabitants in concentration camps where many died.
In 1910, the Union of South Africa was formed.
In 1948, the National Party (a largely Afrikaner group) under DF Malan started a policy of apartheid in the country which ended in 1994 after Nelson Mandela became the first black president of a multicultural South Africa.
According to the international academic journal the Review of Political Economy, whites still own three-quarters of private land and have about 20 times the wealth of the Black majority, three decades after the fall of apartheid.
Less than 10 per cent of white South Africans are out of work, compared with more than a third of their black counterparts.
While the alleged persecution of Afrikaners in South Africa will continue to play out in the weeks and months ahead, what is clear is that the community is unique. As one man told Norman, “We are the white tribe of Africa and I want my people to understand that we have just as much right to be here. Once Africa gets under your skin, nothing can replace it.”