They arrived in the early afternoon at Washington Dulles International Airport in Virginia on May 12 — 49 white South Africans, mostly families. Some pushed strollers, while others dragged suitcases. A few toddlers clung to their toys as their parents waved the American flag. They had come to seek refuge in the United States. On paper, they were fleeing racial discrimination. Yet for much of the 20th century, Afrikaners — as many of them are known — were the architects and enforcers of apartheid, a brutal regime built on racial domination. They wrote its laws, upheld its violence and benefited from it. Now, three decades after that racist system officially ended, some of them are asking for international protection, casting themselves as victims in postapartheid South Africa. They describe their country as a failed state in which farm murders are rampant, democracy is crumbling and white people are under siege.
In February, President Donald Trump instructed his government to allow white South Africans, mainly Afrikaners, to be resettled in the U.S., making them the first beneficiaries of refugee status after he halted the arrival of all refugees coming into the U.S. and ended federal funding for refugee settlement programs.
The arrival of this small group of white Afrikaners in the U.S. has raised uncomfortable questions about race, memory and who gets to be seen as truly vulnerable. These are people whose ancestors helped to build and enforce apartheid. They have, by and large, remained economically and culturally strong since its fall. Afrikaans music, literature and media have flourished; many have seen their wealth grow. Yet some now portray themselves as targets in South Africa’s postapartheid era. That tension between historic power and present-day claims of persecution sits at the heart of what it means to be an Afrikaner today. The identity has long been contested, shaped by a complicated past. And while not all Afrikaners are white — some mixed-race South Africans identify as Afrikaners too — and not all white Afrikaners see themselves as victims, the version of the story that travels tends to center on those who do. This exposes the contradictions within Afrikaner identity.
The Afrikaner story begins in 1652, when the Dutch East India Company (VOC) set up a refreshment station at the Cape of Good Hope. It wasn’t originally meant to be a colony, but over time foreign nationals — mostly Dutch, later joined by Germans and French Huguenots — settled down there. To meet the growing demand for labor, the VOC brought enslaved people from East Africa, Madagascar, India, Indonesia and Malaysia.
Among the first to be displaced at the Cape of Good Hope were the Khoi and San, the Indigenous peoples of the area. The Khoi were herders; the San hunter-gatherers. They traded and got along with the newcomers. Some even married them.
The Afrikaans language emerged from a blend of enslaved Asians and Africans, Europeans and the Khoi and San — its vocabulary shaped by Dutch, Malay, Portuguese, Arabic and Khoi. The language became central to the Cape Malay community, which still exists today.
Meanwhile, the settler community began seeing itself differently. Calvinist Christianity gave it a sense of mission. With Europe so far away, the settlers were left to fend for themselves, growing fiercely self-reliant and wary of anyone outside their tight-knit community.
They started calling themselves “Boers” (“farmers”) and, later, “Afrikaners,” which means “African” in Dutch. Distinct from both the imperial powers above and the Black Africans around them, they built an identity based on war, displacement and survival. What they called the “Great Trek” inland only deepened that.
This Great Trek was the migration of thousands of Dutch-speaking settlers, who left the British-controlled Cape Colony seeking independence and farmland from 1835 to the 1840s. They faced tough terrain and violent clashes with groups such as the Zulu. The trek led to the formation of Boer republics but also caused major displacement and suffering for other communities.
By the late 19th century, Afrikaner nationalism was in full force, driven by a belief in divine destiny and a sense of having been chosen; myths that became the foundation of modern Afrikaner identity.
Today, Afrikaner identity is evolving. It is no longer defined solely by race but increasingly by language and culture. Much as Arab identity is understood by many as being primarily held together by language, while also being shaped by history, religion and geography, so Afrikaner identity today can mean different things to different people.
But Afrikaner identity has not stood still. For people like Marlene le Roux, it has taken on new meanings.
Le Roux was born in 1967 in Wellington, a farming town in South Africa’s Western Cape province. She grew up under apartheid, a mixed-race girl in a segregated country, raised by a mother who worked as a house helper for white families. Le Roux contracted polio at the age of 3 months, after the Black clinic she went to did not administer polio drops because they had none available. Today, she is a disability rights activist, a curator and the CEO of Cape Town’s Artscape Theatre Centre. She describes herself as an unapologetic Afrikaans speaker who refuses to surrender the language to those who once used it as a weapon when it became a symbol and tool of oppression during apartheid.
“I always say I was born into the wrong family with the right language,” she tells New Lines. “Because I’m a brown woman who speaks Afrikaans, I confuse people. But Afrikaans belongs to all of us.”
For le Roux, identity isn’t just personal, it’s political. She understands that Afrikaans was the language of the apartheid state. But she also knows that it holds the prayers, lullabies and memories of people who weren’t part of that system: people like her mother, like her, like generations of brown Afrikaans-speaking South Africans whose stories rarely make it into the headlines.
“The first people to speak Afrikaans weren’t white,” she says. “The first Afrikaans came from the mouths of the enslaved, from brown people. From Malays, from Khoi, from slaves brought to the Cape. That’s our language too. Our inheritance.”
So, when news broke earlier this year that a group of white South African Afrikaners had arrived in the U.S. as refugees, claiming they were fleeing racial persecution, le Roux was furious.
“I was angry, but not surprised,” she says. “What made me even angrier was how the South African government handled it. When Trump’s administration said there was a genocide happening against white farmers, our government rushed to calm fears by speaking only to white Afrikaners. It was as if they’re the only Afrikaners who matter.”
Her voice quivers on the phone call. “They didn’t speak to people like me. To Afrikaans speakers who are brown, who’ve lived with marginalization long before apartheid and after it. We didn’t get a say. We never do.” She added that the government talks covered a wide range of issues affecting not just white Afrikaners but all Afrikaners in general.
The irony is not lost on le Roux, she says, that the very people whose ancestors built and upheld a regime of racial terror are now claiming to be its victims — and that part of the world seems eager to believe them.
“When they say they’re being persecuted because they’re Afrikaner, what they really mean is because they’re white,” she says. “But the rest of us who also speak Afrikaans, who’ve carried the trauma, who’ve had to make peace with a language we didn’t choose, where do we fit into that story?”
Le Roux’s question points to a deeper one: Who gets to call themselves Afrikaner, and who gets left out? For some, the identity is still tightly wrapped up in whiteness and a sense of grievance. But not everyone sees it that way.
Thenus Eloff, who is white, says that he doesn’t shy away from contradictions and knows Afrikaner identity is full of them. As a former university rector with a background in law and theology, for him, being Afrikaner has never just been about race, though he knows that’s how the world tends to see it.
“It’s a self-identifier,” he says. “You can be an Afrikaans speaker and not claim the identity. Or you can be deeply rooted in the culture, the history and the language — and choose to claim it, regardless of skin color.”
This highlights how Afrikaner identity is more complex than many realize.
Eloff explains that Afrikaner history is built on wars, land theft and apartheid. However, he stresses that there is a version of Afrikaner identity that exists in South Africa today that is not about retreat or nostalgia but reckoning and contribution.
This version sits next to another, rooted in loss and grievance. Since 1994, that tension has shaped how white Afrikaners see themselves: politically out of power, yet still holding economic and cultural visibility.
Despite the fall of apartheid, many white Afrikaners retained their economic footing. Unemployment among white South Africans has hovered at around 7%, in sharp contrast to the more than 35% faced by Black South Africans. In boardrooms, too, they remain overrepresented, making up more than 60% of senior management, despite comprising less than 10% of the population.
Land is key to their resilience. Nearly three decades after the introduction of democracy, about 72% of privately owned rural land remains in white hands. Land reform has moved slowly, and while some land has shifted through government programs, most commercial farms, especially the productive ones, are still owned by white South Africans.
But Afrikaner resilience has not only been economic. Culturally, they adapted quickly after the state withdrew support for Afrikaans media and institutions. Private Afrikaans TV, radio, newspapers and online platforms flourished. Afrikaans literature still exists and continues to grow.
The drive for cultural survival also led to the creation of Orania, a whites-only enclave in South Africa’s Northern Cape. With around 3,000 Afrikaans-speaking residents, the town bars non-Afrikaners from living or working there. Orania presents itself as a model of cultural self-governance rather than racial exclusion, insisting it doesn’t rely on Black labor.
“In the South African Constitution, Article 235 very clearly stipulates that cultures in South Africa have the right to preserve their culture and build out cultural self-determination, but someone has to uphold that right, and that’s what we’ve done here. We’ve started the process of upholding our rights,” the town spokesperson, Joost Strydon, told Anadolu in a recent interview.
Orania leans heavily on Article 235 to justify its existence. This clause was essentially meant to protect the cultural rights of South Africa’s diverse communities. But while the provision was originally designed with the idea of giving historically oppressed Black communities space to reclaim and preserve their identities, Orania has turned it into a legal shield for a whites-only town. This use of the law raises questions about how a racially exclusive settlement continues to exist, decades after the end of apartheid, under the banner of cultural autonomy.
Yet for many, this reflects a deeper nostalgia. “Many of them are nostalgic for the apartheid era. They see themselves as losing status in the current era and have now a victim narrative. Communities like Orania are exactly the kind of racially exclusive society they idealize,” says Christi van der Westhuizen, an associate professor at the Centre for the Advancement of Non-Racialism and Democracy at Nelson Mandela University, in Gqeberha.
This sense of grievance, of losing out in the new South Africa, goes beyond small towns like Orania. It surfaces in more visible places, too, like Elon Musk’s recent clash with the South African government over Black economic empowerment laws.
Musk’s Starlink had been looking to expand its satellite internet services into South Africa but ran into regulatory roadblocks. Under the country’s telecom laws, any company applying for a license must ensure that at least 30% of ownership is held by historically disadvantaged South Africans — part of broader Black economic empowerment policies aimed at addressing apartheid’s legacy.
“There are 140 laws in South Africa that give strong preference to Black South Africans and not otherwise. I am in a certain situation where I was born in South Africa and can’t get a license to operate in South Africa because I am not Black,” Musk stated in an interview at the Qatar Economic Forum.
Musk’s remarks echo a broader sentiment among some white South Africans who feel sidelined by postapartheid policies. Groups such as AfriForum have stepped in and presented themselves as fighting for an equal footing and cultural autonomy for Afrikaners in their home country, rather than supporting or encouraging asylum abroad.
“We are not going to ask our children to move to another country. The fact is, our ancestors worked hard to make sure that we as a people formed on the southern tip of Africa, we are not going to disrespect that. We also have the interest of future generations in mind. We also have to make sure that our culture is transferred to future generations,” Afriforum CEO Kallie Kriel told a media briefing in Johannesburg in March.
Still, while some Afrikaners focus on securing their place within South Africa, the way they are seen from outside the country is often shaped by a very different story.
On the global stage, Afrikaners are often seen as the architects and beneficiaries of apartheid. This image is reinforced by their language, the history of landownership and the old symbols to which some of them still cling, such as the apartheid-era flag that surfaces in some pockets of their communities.
In some circles abroad, particularly in the U.S. and Europe, Afrikaners have been rebranded as victims; white farmers supposedly under siege in a Black-led country.
These narratives often flatten South Africa’s complex history, replacing it with simplified, racially charged versions that serve outside interests. It’s a strange and uneasy dynamic — Afrikaners cast as villains of the past or victims of the present, depending on who’s doing the telling.
“Right-wing Afrikaners have long maintained global networks, particularly with white supremacist groups in the Global North. For the far right in the U.S. and Europe, Afrikaners have become ‘poster children’ for white victimhood — symbols of what happens when white people lose power,” van der Westhuizen says. “Their asylum claims exaggerate farm attacks and frame them as racially motivated to align with this narrative. This isn’t about genuine concern for Afrikaners. It’s about advancing white supremacist projects in places like the U.S. and Europe.”
At the heart of it all is a deeper struggle over meaning — what it means to be Afrikaner in a country that’s changed, and who gets to define that identity going forward.
Afrikaner identity today is shaped by a mix of history, fear and a search for belonging in a country their ancestors once ruled. For some, that means holding on to the past. For others, it means finding new ways to exist within a democratic South Africa.
What’s clear is that this identity is still in flux, pulled between nostalgia and change, isolation and engagement. The challenge ahead isn’t just about cultural survival. It’s about whether Afrikaners can take part in a future that doesn’t always revolve around them.
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