May 21, 2025
By Dr Walid Phares
Last week President Donald Trump sanctioned the ANC Government of South Africa for oppressing and dispossessing members of the Afrikaner community who originate from Europe, and at the same time extended visas and residencies to the victims of Pretoria’s race-based policies. True, on the immediate scale, there are breaches of human rights by the ruling party in Pretoria against the Afrikaner community in South Africa and the Trump administration is right to raise the matter with Pretoria. But there are the larger and historical dimensions to address.
Why is it that the Western media and academia politically describe the Afrikaner population in the south of the continent as White European, period? It would be as if the ANC is describing their citizens immigrants from south Asia as Brown People! Or describing the people of Bosnia as White Slavic Muslim people! Or the Arab tribes that migrated from the Arab Peninsula as Deep Brown Arab. Those descriptions and skin-based phobias are historically over. Martin Luther King’s call to end the designation of people by their skin color should have ended that era of colored racism. This absurd narrative coming from the woke media and academia is damaging all progress made in the international community to end race-based politics, slavery, and irredentism.
It is now awkward to call ethnic communities by skin-colored descriptions as waves of ethnicities have moved in all directions worldwide. Though the Western term “Black Africans” is still being used for Sudan, Mauritania and Mali, to distinguish African ethnicities from Arab and Amazigh ones, in general trends, the communities now prefer to identify as ethnic or national. In South Sudan, people identify as Dinka-Nuer and, since independence, as “South Sudanese.” The terms black or white are still being used, but they are insufficient for describing an identity.
The Afrikaner population migrated mostly from the Netherlands centuries ago, joined by other European migrants, but also by migrants from India and Asia. Holland-emigrants formed an ethnic community in South Africa, a British colony, and yes, they established an apartheid system comparable to the United States’ Jim Crow laws. The ethnic-racial based system evolved and was condemned and removed in the early 1990s. Historians can discuss the mistakes made by European originated ethnic groups that migrated to Africa (Afrikaner, French Pieds-Noirs, Germans, others) or the expansion of Arab ethnic communities that moved to the same continent centuries earlier. Such a discussion will engulf academia and media for many decades to come and will connect with the global history of ethnic migrations, some of this is happening as we write these lines.
But one reality can’t be suppressed: Once a migration takes place, evolves into a new identifiable community, regardless of the political behavior of its elites, it should be recognized as such: an ethnic community with rights. The Afrikaners, like the South Sudanese, Darfuris, Amazigh, Zulus, and others, are an ethnic community and cannot be reduced to “white settlers” only. Otherwise, the whole Middle East and parts of Africa will have to be described similarly.
Back to 2025: The Trump administration is sanctioning the ruling party in South Africa for “persecution of the Afrikaners and seizing their property.” It is perceived as comparable to Jihadi persecution of Yazidis, Assyro-Chaldeans, or even Darfuris. The administration has also opened its immigration system to welcome the Afrikaners. Both policies are good in order to assist the community in terms of safety. But one principle has to be asserted: They should be recognized as Africans and thus given the choice for self-determination as was South Sudan. Their leaders’ ancestors preferred to rule over a gigantic South Africa not realizing that one day they would lose power instead of asserting their “self-determination” over a modest territory like the Kurds opted for in the Middle East. But past mistakes do not delegitimize the rights of a community. A drama that is lived out now by the Alawites of Syria.
In addition to sanctioning persecution and granting special visas, the Trump administration should add one more component to its policy regarding South Africa: Recognizing the identity and right to live as a community in their own homeland, South Africa, even in a territorial space that is proportional to their numbers, like Israel does.
A long discussion is coming our way on the Africaner people, which will impact communities around the world.
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Dr Walid Phares is a professor of political sciences and international relations, author of 15 books on geopolitics, TV analyst on foreign relations and advisor to members of Congress on terrorism. He is a co-President of the Educate America platform