US President Donald Trump confronted South African counterpart Cyril Ramaphosa on Wednesday over widely discredited claims that genocide is being committed against white people.
A week after the US rankled South Africa by granting asylum to nearly 60 Afrikaners, Ramaphosa visited the White House to reset the countries’ relations.
Instead Trump put his counterpart on the defensive with claims that white farmers in his nation were being killed and “persecuted”.
The South African government allowed the US embassy to consider the asylum applications inside the country, and let the group board a chartered flight from the main international airport in Johannesburg – not scenes normally associated with refugees fleeing persecution.
Who are the Afrikaners?
South African History Online sums up their identity by pointing out that “the modern Afrikaner is descended mainly from Western Europeans who settled on the southern tip of Africa during the middle of the 17th Century”.
A mixture of Dutch (34.8%), German (33.7%) and French (13.2%) settlers, they formed a “unique cultural group” which identified itself “completely with African soil”, South African History Online noted.
Their language, Afrikaans, is quite similar to Dutch.
But as they planted their roots in Africa, Afrikaners, as well as other white communities, forced black people to leave their land.
Afrikaners are also known as Boers, which actually means farmer, and the group is still closely associated with farming.
In 1948, South Africa’s Afrikaner-led government introduced apartheid, or apartness, taking racial segregation to a more extreme level.
This included laws which banned marriages across racial lines, reserved many skilled and semi-skilled jobs for white people, and forced black people to live in what were called townships and homelands.
They were also denied a decent education, with Afrikaner leader Hendrik Verwoerd infamously remarking in the 1950s that “blacks should never be shown the greener pastures of education. They should know their station in life is to be hewers of wood and drawers of water”.
Afrikaner dominance of South Africa ended in 1994, when black people were allowed to vote for the first time in a nationwide election, bringing Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress (ANC) to power.
Afrikaners currently number more than 2.5 million out of a population of more than 60 million – about 4%.