US President Donald Trump's recent executive order inviting “the ethnic minority descendants of settler groups” to that country has sparked an unprecedented debate about race in South Africa. Trump and South African-born billionaire Elon Musk have offered refugee status to the “disfavoured minorities” whose “properties are being seized without compensation”. This bizarre offer is assumed to target white Afrikaner people though the order does not specifically mention Afrikaners.
It is, however, encouraging that many prominent leaders of this community have rejected the offer. At the heart of the land question in South Africa is the history of dispossession by white Europeans from the black African majority.
Today the majority of the most productive land in South Africa still remains in the hands of a minority white population. There is no evidence of any properties belonging to the so-called descendants of settlers being confiscated. The South African constitution and the laws that have been passed guarantee security of tenure and land is only expropriated through market value compensation, after a lengthy process, which can at any stage be challenged and arbitrated in and by South Africa’s courts, which are known to be credible and fair in their dispensation of justice. It is ironic that the architects of apartheid colonialism today cry foul for being discriminated against because of their race.
The Afrikaners trotting the globe and telling the world they are victims of racial discrimination are disingenuous and shortsighted and their campaign has backfired. Their business interests are bound to suffer more if the Trump administration imposes tariffs on South Africa, especially on the country’s agricultural produce, fruit and wine. Also, if Trump decides to kick South Africa out of the US's preferential trade agreement known as the African Growth and Opportunity Act (Agoa) it may block the US's access to the entire continent and push many African countries closer to China.
Today if the more than two-million white Afrikaners can come together with the four million coloured people who speak Afrikaans and have overlaps in cultural practices, they could be a significant portion of the population in South Africa
The descendants of the settlers in South Africa have been in this part of Africa much longer than the Trump ancestors have been in America and yet they are being identified as refugees. Afrikaners are ethnic South Africans; they belong nowhere else except in this part of the continent. There are more than four-million white South Africans here and more than 50% of this grouping call themselves Afrikaners. It is a fact that the majority of farmers who work the most productive agricultural properties are Afrikaners. Perhaps Trump wants these Afrikaners to come to the US to bolster that country’s fledgling agricultural produce as farmers and labourers replacing the repatriated Mexicans.
In South Africa, the most productive land is in the hands of a population grouping that makes up 7% of the population of nearly 60-million citizens. Trump’s order is misinformed because the private property rights of the white population, like all South African citizens, are protected. Contextually, if we are to digest the issues perhaps it is important to revisit the history of the Afrikaners in South Africa. The majority of Johan Anthoniszoon “Jan” van Riebeeck and his two ships that docked in the Cape in 1652 (employed by the Dutch East India Company) were mainly of Dutch origins.
In 1688 the French Huguenots arrived in the Cape Colony as refugees escaping from religious persecution by the Catholic monarchy in France. In 1836 the Cape Dutch and the Trekboer together with the Huguenots made up the majority of the Boer Voortrekkers who trekked away from British rule in the Cape Colony in search of greener pastures northwards. Though many of the Great Trek leaders who led the movement like Hendrik Potgieter, Piet Retief, Piet Uys, Johannes Jacobus Janse van Rensburg, Louis Tregardt died in numerous battles with the native Africans, nevertheless, their offspring consolidated their political power and formed what was internationally recognised as the Boer republics — the ZAR (Transvaal) and the Orange Free State.
The French Huguenots for their part settled in the Cape Colony, established the wine farms and built a lucrative wine industry. The French Huguenots as part of the Afrikaner political elite also used their administrative skills to run the country after the 1910 Union of South Africa. Many of the political elite in the last hundred years of apartheid rule were all descendants of the French Huguenots. Names of notable Afrikaner leaders such as De Klerk, Du Plessis, Cronje, De Villiers, du Toit are all descendants of the French Huguenots.
They came to Africa as refugees and settled here, and it is unthinkable that they will migrate again as refugees to the US, now seemingly the land of Trump. It was only after the Anglo-Boer War and the birth of the Union of South Africa that a language called Afrikaans was used in schools and in the Dutch Reformed Church. The language itself is a creole, a fusion of many languages. Though the word Afrikaner was used historically to refer to different peoples of the British/Dutch Cape Colony, race was prefaced to the Afrikaner after the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910. It was only after the 1910 whites-only administration that the Afrikaner was reborn as a whites-only descriptor.
Today if the more than two-million white Afrikaners can come together with the four million coloured people who speak Afrikaans and have overlaps in cultural practices, they could be a significant portion of the population in South Africa. But because “the pure race” white identity dilutes the potential for the coloured population to be Afrikaner, the descendants of the Cape Dutch, Trekboer and the Huguenots form a small cultural bloc that is being courted by the likes of Musk and Trump. We need to remove the veil of ignorance on the Afrikaners and apartheid racial classification. It was indeed the Apartheid Nationalist Party who in the 1940s twisted history to suit their racist “own affairs” apartheid policies.
The “Afrikaners” have evolved over many years and it has to be nurtured to accommodate the true history of its evolution. Is it not absurd that descendants of Simon van der Stel, the first governor of the Cape Colony, who may reside in Stellenbosch, are perhaps today also talking about the “pure white race”? Simon was the son of Adriaan van der Stel, an official of the Dutch East India Company and his mother Maria Lievens was a Malay mixed-race descendant. Simon van der Stel would be categorised as a Cape coloured. Stellenbosch and Simon’s Town are named after him.
Today his farm Constantia is one of the wealthiest land masses in Cape Town. The history of the coloureds is coupled with European colonialism, indigenous Khoisan and Malay slave influences. This mixed ethnicity forged a new identity and cultural practices that are strongly tied to the history of South Africa. The Afrikaners of colour have as much claim to Afrikaans as a language and the Afrikaner as a distinct identity community. One day in the not so distant future the children of the “regte Afrikaners” (apart from those who might once again be refugees in the Americas) and those of the Afrikaners of colour or Afrikaap may come together to acknowledge their common African ancestry.
We must move beyond the teachings of the racist propaganda and the twisted history books of the Apartheid National Party ideologues and embrace the true meaning of Afrikaners. The Afrikaners are as ethnic as all other ethnicities in South Africa. They are part of a South African nation with its rich diversity and history. The land belongs to all who are willing to work it and no particular racial group must disproportionately own the land in South Africa.
Nkenke Kekana is a former ANC MP.
For opinion and analysis consideration, email Opinions@timeslive.co.za
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