“Let’s not call these Afrikaners refugees – they’re background extras in Maga’s noisy scam

By Richard Poplak
13 May 2025

[…]

According to the UN, almost 304 million humans are on the run from the horrors of a decaying planet — be it the unkindness of their neighbours, the caprice of their rulers, or the fury of the weather itself.

I’ve seen people inhabiting white tents in DRC, in CAR, in Syria, in South Sudan, in Ethiopia, in Afghanistan and, once or twice, here at home — in filthy church basements, where they hide from the violence of this country, the wounds on their flesh and in their minds suppurating slowly in front of the cameras.

One thing that all these disparate people have in common? A distinct lack of luggage.

On Sunday evening, at Johannesburg’s OR Tambo International airport, a cluster of 50 or so Afrikaners (and their bags) were spirited on to an aircraft chartered by the United States government. These were the first in a tranche of local white, supposedly farmers granted refugee status by the Trump regime, who allege that this minority is targeted for persecution by the South African state.

Worse, the local government, insist the Americans, is a ghastly amalgam of DEI initiatives, intersectional politics, wokeness and anti-white racism. Bathing these Boers in the language of victimhood, Trump has fast-tracked their exodus through an executive order and welcomed them in. Others in need have been told not to bother. They are the anointed. The blessed.

[…]

Make no mistake: South Africa is a violent place. […] The statistics are widely available: a disproportionate number of the victims are black and poor. The rule is simple: The less you have, the more harm you will suffer.

[…] The government of the democratic dispensation, itself birthed in bloodshed, adopted the tenets of liberalisation so enthusiastically that it ceded the state’s monopoly of violence to millions of aspirants. The cops stand by while vigilante groups police the townships, or they scrape away the corpses of those killed by private security groups in wealthy neighbourhoods.

[…]

But what the state has not done is single out a minority group for violent persecution. To allege as much — to even suggest that the government has targeted white Afrikaners — is an unforgivable libel. The game is obvious: to invert the harms visited on black South Africans during apartheid, and to claim the mantle of righteous victimhood for themselves. In this narrative, the real victims of South African history are those families awaiting their chartered flight to the United States.

White Afrikaans South Africans.

To be sure, life is hard for everyone. It is demonstrably, statistically and economically less hard for whites in this country. That being said, we cannot know, at this point, what the faux refugee families have suffered. No doubt some among them have stories that would sear the soul.

But what we do know is that they are just a handful among 304 million who have packed up their belongings and looked for safety and opportunity elsewhere. […] Their lobby groups whined on X, and six months later they were on a private plane to the US.

[…]

Whether they know it or not, the people who boarded that chartered flight are props in a grand performance of white supremacy, conducted by the president of the United States and his henchfolk.

[…]

The white “refugees” who slunk on to that private plane and left a country where their rights were protected by a Constitution, are on their way to another violent place, steeped in racial hatreds. What really bothers their lobbyists is not that they have the same rights as their neighbours. It’s that they don’t have more rights.

Under Trump, they will have more rights. The Boers are moving to an America in which the president insists that it’s time to take back the country from hordes of dusky marauders and Mexican berry pickers. Blacks and other minorities were canned from government positions, and it’s now DEI for drunks with Nazi tattoos. […]

And don’t fool yourself — what Trump and his lackeys, several of whom are ex-South Africans, are trying to build is apartheid. That’s the aim. So it stands to reason that these Afrikaners will feel right at home.

They’ve not moved through geography, but through time — backwards to the Valhalla they lost when apartheid hit the skids.

The louder they bitch, the closer they come to the promised land. But let’s not call them refugees. They’re background extras in Maga’s noisy scam. They’re tools. They’re the sum total of the colour of their skins. DM”

• Full opinion piece ‘Let’s not call these Afrikaners refugees – they’re background extras in Maga’s noisy scam’ on the website of the Daily Maverick (last checked in July 2025)