President Donald Trump’s executive order offering refugee status and other forms of protection to Afrikaners is by far the most courageous step by any American president since Ronald Reagan’s presidential veto of sanctions against South Africa on September 26, 1986. In an open letter to President Trump, I have likened his order to the Balfour Declaration by the British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour in 1917, in which he acknowledged the need for a “national home for the Jewish people”.
Since the leftist regime change that engulfed South Africa since the early 1990s, culminating in a quasi-Marxist revolution of the South African Communist Party and the ANC, the word “Afrikaner” has been carefully excised from political discourse in this country. The “A-word” has become almost as proscribed as the “K-word” [“Kaffir” — once a common term but now considered the South African version of ni**er] for which one may be arrested and jailed, as a jobless white man just found out.
So when Mr. Trump, arguably the world’s most famous politician, used the word in his executive order, it was a seismic shift. It was a kind of de facto recognition of the small nation at the southern tip of Africa, often derided as a “white tribe” by the BBC and Time magazine, and by academics the world over who see in our “whiteness” as a disease that must be cured.
TIME magazine, November 21, 1977
Most Americans probably do not realize that the social engineering going on in South Africa — Afrikaners are legislated out of existence, property seized, language extirpated — could be their fate in the not too distant future. Not that English is in danger of being sidelined like Afrikaans in South Africa, but Democrats already see the ANC’s form of “race-based communism” as a way of marginalizing the white voter.
It is not widely known, but in August 2006, then-Senator Barack Obama of Illinois toured South Africa to study its anti-white system. Did he want to adopt it in America? Democrat America, alongside the ex-Soviet Union, East Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands have always played a major role in undermining the Afrikaner project of survival. We also know now that Democrats wanted to use immigration — legal and illegal — to swamp the US with voters susceptible to an anti-white message.
When Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that he would not attend the recent G20 summit of foreign ministers in Johannesburg, he correctly stated on X that the ANC regime is anti-American and wants only to advance the woke agenda.
Of course, the ANC has only ratcheted up DEI. According to some analysts, there are now more than 140 race laws targeting whites, aiming to reduce them to impoverished beggars in slums — as some already are.
The ANC is justifying its totalitarian system in the name of “equality,” or its contemporary incarnation, DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion). Imagine if America’s racial majority applied rigid DEI preferences only to itself; there would be riots, and denunciations in the UN General Assembly. But on planet ANC, “diversity” means a perfect black world, in which whites disappear or are assimilated.
The extreme forms of affirmative action in South Africa have had a more devastating effect on Afrikaners than on English-speaking whites. This is because of intimate Afrikaner ties to the state, the countryside, local and national government, education, universities, high culture, and even sport. English-speakers are more invested in the big cities and the private economy. I know of Afrikaners with postgraduate degrees, even PhDs, who do not have enough money for food and necessities. In any other country, they would have thrived in the service economy or in R&D, driving efficiency and productivity. In South Africa, they have been replaced by affirmative-action hires.
Even in the private business, which has been a refuge for whites excluded from the public sector, the ANC insists on “majority black ownership” as well as racial headcounts for employees and executives. Only 12 percent of engineering graduates in South Africa are black, but there are no jobs for the other 88 percent, who go to work abroad. In Germany, the Netherlands, and Flanders, there are many Afrikaans-speaking engineers who quickly adapt to their new language environment. South Africa’s loss is Europe’s gain.
Many people see Mr. Trump as wayward and unpredictable, but some think of him as a political genius. Against all odds, he won a second term. Certainly, his decision to start intervening in South Africa has the hallmarks of an intuitive, bold insight into a potential threat to America and to the Western world.
If the South African system were exported to America and Europe, combined with the demographic rise of Africa — which will soon boast more than two billion people — it would lead to the complete downfall of the West. There are already more Nigerians than white Americans, and the US and Canada are their favorite emigration destinations. Imagine a DEI law in America providing for expropriation without compensation of land and other property from whites, as in South Africa.
Our President Cyril Ramaphosa is the Stalin and Mao of DEI. Not only is he determined to destroy almost 400 years of Afrikaner presence in South Africa, he aims to export his “color revolution” to all corners of the globe.
A (white) South African leftist and former minister of trade and industry in South Africa, Rob Davies, already sees the battle for Afrikaner survival as part of a wider resistance against “progressive forces: “[I]f something like [the pro-Afrikaans group] Afriforum prevails in its lobbying on action against South Africa, that’s also going to mean that the hand of the most racist forces in the US . . . is going to be strengthened as well, so it’s not disconnected.”
In that sense, South Africa now symbolizes the clash of “progressive” and “reactionary forces,” much as the Berlin Wall did during the Cold War. Many South African communists, among them Mandela’s private secretary, Jakes Gerwel, wept when the wall came down.
In a recent comment after a meeting of the African Union, Mr. Ramaphosa reiterated South Africa’s insistence on reparations for slavery and accused President Trump of “taking a stance based on false information” about land expropriation in South Africa.
Short on the heels of the Expropriation Act of 2024 comes a new Equitable Access to Land bill to be passed this year that will “redistribute” land according to race, so that blacks would end up with 80 percent. White ownership would dwindle to 7 percent or less, along with the shrinking white percentage of the population.
All of these progressive dreams could die on the altar of a Zimbabwean-style economic collapse and famine that followed after that country’s white farmers were expropriated, but for the moment, nothing seems to be dampening Mr. Ramaphosa’s zeal for radical measures.
What the US should do
Despite the vicious farm murders, or plaasmoorde in South Africa, in which whites are tortured to death, mainstream Afrikaner organizations have been reticent to use the term “genocide.” The leftist mainstream media, both inside and outside the country, call use of the term “racist propaganda.” However, in the long semantic war that has been waged against Afrikaners and South African whites, in which their “separate but equal” development policies are now called a “crime against humanity,” we should no longer flinch from fighting black.
Article III of that Genocide Convention of 1948 forbids the following:
(a) Genocide;
(b) Conspiracy to commit genocide;
(c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide; (my emphasis)
(d) Attempt to commit genocide;
(e) Complicity in genocide.
Although Julius Malema of the EFF party is no longer a member of the ANC, while he was in the ANC Youth League, he was know for saying “cut the throat of whiteness,” and for singing the “Kill the Boer” song before large crowds of blacks. This has continued as leader of his own party.
A radicalized British-South African Supreme Court Judge Raylene Keightley legalized public singing of “Kill the Boer:”
Understood in its full context, it [“Kill the Boer”] was a form of political speech. Even if Mr Malema’s performance of Dubula ibhunu [Xhosa for “kill the Boer”] may be regarded by some people to be shocking or even disturbing, the Constitution required a measure of tolerance. The Court held that what Mr Malema was doing was no more than exercising his right to freedom of expression . . . .
So, when whites use the “K-word,” they go to prison, but Mr. Malema can call for killing white farmers. During the court case, Mr. Malema was cross-examined and it is interesting to hear his answers. He refused to say that he would never call for the slaughter of whites. At the very least, the United States should immediately put Julius Malema, as well as Raylene Keightley, on a blacklist against travel to the United States.
Raphael Lemkin, the Polish lawyer who coined the term “genocide” in the early 1940s, spoke also about “cultural genocide.” Historian John Hargreaves wrote that in Francoist Spain “a policy of cultural genocide was implemented: the Catalan language and key symbols of Catalan independent identity and nationhood, such as the flag (the senyera), the national hymn (‘Els Segadors’) and the national dance (the sardana), were proscribed.”
The ANC regime is pursuing precisely such a policy against Afrikaners. Our flag, the “orange white and blue” that dates from 1572 and was first used during the Dutch War of Independence against Spain, has been banned in South Africa. Showing it is a crime under hate-speech laws. Singing the former national anthem, “Die Stem,” although not illegal in itself, has been suppressed in all official or sporting contexts. Afrikaner statues, monuments, graves, book collections, art collections and so on have been desecrated, damaged, neglected, or stolen.
The campaign against the Confederacy has a perfect parallel in the “Rhodes Must Fall” movement. Black students at the University of Cape Town tore down the statue of the famous British imperialist (who bequeathed millions of pounds to the university) and burned books and paintings from the university library.
The leader of the ANC in Gauteng Province, Panyaza Lesufi, has launched a campaign against mother-tongue education in Afrikaans, and the ANC has passed the Basic Education Laws Amendment Act, 2024, which takes away the rights of parent committees or School Governing Bodies to decide a school’s language policy. This Act is meant to snuff out Afrikaans schools. Afrikaans universities have all been anglicized since 1994. Panyaza Lesufi and others involved in the discriminatory campaign against Afrikaans and Afrikaans schools should likewise be subject to sanctions.
Reversing quasi-communist regime change
The goal of the ANC and South African Communist Party in the late 1980s was to set up a one-party communist dictatorship. Only the collapse of the Soviet Union stopped this. Under the cloak of liberal democracy, the ANC is now pursuing a “two-stage revolution” that must culminate in Afro-Marxism. The state or state-connected actors — especially politicians and their family members — would own most assets, especially land.
Winnie Mandela, Nelson Mandela, and Yossel (Joe) Slovo, head of the South African Communist Party.
Foreign nations supported and financed urban terrorism, propaganda, and violence against apartheid-era South Africa. The Trump administration could demand an accounting from Sweden, East (now unified) Germany, Canada, the Netherlands, and others on our behalf. The perpetrators have been amnestied by the farcical Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, but they committed international crimes for which there is no statute of limitations. The United States has many laws providing for extra-territorial jurisdiction for terrorism, money laundering, and the like.
Members of the ANC regime have engaged in cross-border racketeering and corruption for decades. The so-called “Zondo Commission of Inquiry into State Capture” gathered tens of thousands of pages of evidence, and released a devastating report in 2022 that implicated more than 1,400 individuals and entities in corruption, fraud, and state capture, but there have been hardly any consequences. The Trump administration could insist that all parties be charged in South Africa or even prosecuted in US courts, in order to free South Africa from institutionalized corruption.
The ANC regime is fundamentally corrupt and its race laws are partly or wholly a mechanism for self-enrichment and looting. The regime would not survive a serious investigation into its myriad crooked and criminal activities.
Swedes have often boasted of the critical role their country’s hundreds of millions of dollars in aid played in bringing down white rule. The story of Sweden’s role in the downfall of South Africa is beyond the scope of this article, but when the Vietnam War came to an end in 1975, the Swedish Left had to find a new target for activism and chose South Africa.
Unlike the Trump regime, the European Union sides with the corrupt ANC government, as expressed in this February 10 message from European Council President António Costa.
The EU has never condemned ANC corruption, farm murders, or the widespread discrimination against whites in South Africa.
I recently visited a forgotten monument in northern France, the Delville Wood Memorial, to the 3,150 South African troops who suffered a staggering 75 percent casualty rate in brutal fighting against the Germans in July 1916.
The memorial was designed by Sir Herbert Baker, the architect who designed the Union Buildings in Pretoria, seat of South Africa’s government. The figures atop the dome are the mythical twins Pollux and Castor, symbolizing the two white nations — Afrikaner and English — of South Africa. In 1986, then-South African President P.W. Botha came to France to unveil a museum built at the site, only to be humiliated by France’s Socialist government under François Mitterand, which declined to send a single French representative to the ceremony. Mitterand’s wife Danielle, together with George Soros, played a pivotal role in financing ANC propaganda, and French Socialists and Communists supported the ANC and South African Communist Party.
During the Second World War, we used North American Aviation T-6 “Texans” to train more than 33,000 allied aircrew right here in South Africa. South African soldiers fought for the West in the Korean war.
In 1975, before our troops crossed the border into Angola in 1975 to fight the MPLA, Cuba, and the Soviet Union, a CIA official addressed them, saying that they were “fighting for the Western world” — the same Western world that would come to betray us.
Could this sorry history be coming to an end with Mr. Trump? His administration has the potential to initiate a Western renewal. South Africa is — or used to be — by far the strongest country on the African continent. After Russia, we probably have more minerals than any other country. The Cape Route is regaining importance as the Suez canal suffers from problems and Houthis attack cargo ships.
With the help of America, the quasi-communist, anti-American, and anti-Western regime change of 1994 could be reversed in favor of a democratic federation or confederation of Southern African peoples. In fact, such a movement had started in the early 1990’s, but the mainstream media ignored it and South Africans were duped into accepting ANC-Communist Party hegemony, leading to 30 years of looting, violence, and oppression.
A new land could rise from the ashes and reflect the reality of South Africa as a multinational state, not Jesse Jackson’s absurd “rainbow nation.” If order and the rule of law were restored, South Africa — or at least the Afrikaner part of it — could become a powerful ally of the United States. Afrikaner activist Koos Reyneke calculated the demographic distribution of South Africa from census figures in 1993 and drew up a just and equitable division of the country. It largely resembles the division of Europe after the First World War according to Woodrow Wilson’s “fourteen points,” embodying the principle of self-determination.
The Afrikaans test reads: “A solution. A proposal for peace. This proposal to divide SA into the following regions may lead to peace and stability which in turn would lead to economic progress.” “Kaaps” is roughly the current Northern Cape Province, and the rest of the country is divided by language groups.
The only province now not under ANC rule, the Western Cape, has shown that it is possible to have clean, well-maintained roads, functioning cites, honest government, and mutual respect for different languages and cultures. As a confederation, the whole of South Africa could resemble the Western Cape. There would be no single center of power from which a criminal cabal could control most of the country, as the ANC does today.
Even Russia might support such a proposal; it resembles their system of regional ethnic republics. In fact, in the late 1950s, the Soviet Academy of Sciences told the South African Communist Party that the country should be divided into “independent farmers’ and workers’ republics.” The SACP rejected the idea because it would diminish its power after a possible revolution.
Unlike American Democrats and left-wing West Europeans, Russians harbor no animus against Afrikaners. Recently in Belgrade, I saw a poster that said, “Stop black genocide against Boers. Boer lives matter.”
Many countries have federal systems: the United States, of course, but also Canada, Mexico, Russia, Australia, Brazil, Ethiopia, Germany, India, Malaysia, Nigeria, Venezuela, and Belgium, among others. We need not be a one-party banana republic ruled by a clique of anti-white “comrades.” We could be a confederation of free peoples each managing its own affairs education, culture, health, security, etc.
Jan Smuts was a brilliant Afrikaner statesman, fêted by Winston Churchill, the British parliament, and even the Windsors. He once said: “The fate of South Africa will always be decided beyond her own borders.” That was true during the years of the Swedish-Soviet hate campaign known as the “Anti-Apartheid Movement.” Perhaps it could be true for a worldwide Western campaign against the ANC, led by Trump’s victory and the rise of patriotic parties in Europe.
The need for U.S. sanctions against South Africa
As a commodity and agricultural exporter, South Africa has a very open economy dependent on trade and, especially, the US dollar for international transactions. If the Trump administration imposed financial sanctions, the ANC regime would capitulate in days. Terminating all USAID payments to South Africa was a good first step. We also need targeted sanctions against genocidal individuals and institutions. This would hurt our farmers and other exporters but we should take the pain in order to free ourselves from an oppressive, evil regime.
Trump has given us hope, and the Afrikaner nation is awakening from its slumber, sensing that at last the wheel may be starting to turn and we can dream of freedom again. Apart from “progressive leftists” such as Rob Davies and tenured Marxists at the universities specializing in feminism and whiteness studies, many English-speaking whites identify as Afrikaners, too, having lost their British identity 50 or 100 years ago.
If we stand together, we could save large parts of South Africa and make it the great country it once was, when many Europeans eagerly immigrated here to enjoy our great weather, beautiful beaches, affordable cost of living and can-do business culture. Not to mention the wildlife, the food, wine, and our famous hospitality, which regularly saw Cape Town voted the world’s most sought-after tourist destination.
Between billionaire Elon Musk who grew up in Pretoria, and Donald Trump who survived a hate campaign rivalling the one against South Africa in the 1980s, this is possible. Word has it that Donald Trump has spent a lot of time on the golf course with some of our great South African golfers, such as Gary Player and Ernie Els. Only Swedes prefer AK-47-wielding Marxist terrorists over civilized golfers from a sunny country.
Americans know better.
