Queuing in Crocs for a private plane doesn’t have quite the same ring as walking barefoot over the Drakensberg, but still, as 49 self-identified Afrikaners who also self-identify as persecuted head into self-imposed exiled in the US, national myths still echo around OR Tambo International Airport.
Needless to say, the micro-exodus has sent parts of social media into frenzies of self-righteousness, with some critics denouncing the so-called refugees as inveterate racists while some supporters praise them as frontier homesteaders sensibly fleeing a hellscape.
This sort of stuff, however, helps nobody, and when I read it a part of me thinks we should reserve judgment until we know more.
After all, we don’t know the personal circumstances of those who fled with only the K-Way on their backs plus all the suitcases wrapped in plastic. We don’t even know if they’re all Afrikaners: the website of the US embassy in SA states that the offer is open to anyone who is “of Afrikaner ethnicity” or “a member of a racial minority” in SA, though I don’t imagine that local Muslims need to bother applying.
In fact, in the absence of so many facts, it might be safest to assume that most are simply economic migrants, taking a gap opened by perverted politics to get a toe in the door of the world’s biggest economy as ours crumbles.
It is also true that there will be some personal cost to these exiles, who will never be able to return home except, obviously, for cousin Chantelle’s wedding in November, and perhaps for the high school reunion next year, or when they discover they can’t get a domestic worker for $10 a day. Such a return will be fraught with danger, not least because of the journalists lurking in the arrivals hall asking how things are going over in Idaho.
It’s entirely possible that every one of those who left believes in their heart of hearts that they were in more danger than the millions of poor, mostly black South Africans who bear the overwhelming brunt of violent crime.
Whatever their motives for leaving, however, it’s not a great look, signing up to be the poster children of white nationalist grievance mythology just as the Trump administration halts every other programme for actual refugees.
Certainly, the double standards couldn’t be more stark: if you’re being starved in Gaza or bombed in Sudan, sorry, kids, you’re plumb out of luck, but if you’re a white South African feeling poefies, they’ll send one of their rendition planes and whisk you off to Virginia faster than you can say: “Swart gevaar.”
It’s also difficult to overlook what our departed compatriots have broadcast to the world by formally accepting the status of refugees and thereby signing their names under a lie about this country, its history, the forms of violence and inequality that persist in it, and who the real victims of that violence and inequality are.
One questionnaire they had to fill in asked them if they “believed” they had faced or were likely to face “persecution”. No definition of persecution was provided but since the whole thing was premised on applicants’ subjective beliefs, empirical evidence was never going to play a big part anyway.
In other words, it’s entirely possible that every one of those who left believes in their heart of hearts that they were in more danger than the millions of poor, mostly black South Africans who bear the overwhelming brunt of violent crime.
But believing something doesn’t make it true, and now the lie has been formalised, both in the US legal system and in white nationalist communities around the world, as our first “refugees” trundle their creaking luggage trolleys over a history of colonialism and apartheid; a history whose real victims don’t have to “believe” anything because they live the proof.
• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.
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