Africanaries, white residents of South Africa, run away from a badly managed state, crime and chaos, not persecution – believes Tadeusz Michrowski from the Polish African Studies Center.
59 Africans came to the USA on Monday – descendants of Dutch settlers who began to appear in today's South Africa in the 17th century. The whole group received refugee status, although at the same time the administration of President Trump practically suspended the resettlement program for refugees from war and hunger countries, such as Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, for example.
However, President Trump told journalists in the White House that in South Africa “there is genocide”. The South African Ministry of Foreign Affairs denied that persecution took place in the country due to the white color of the skin.
According to the American media, the surgery of African resettlement to the US is also to be a response to the right adopted by the South Africa government, allowing the takeover of private land for public land, in some cases without compensation. In the opinion of the presidential administration, this right can be used to attack the white African minority in South Africa.
“We are talking only about 59 people. So I would avoid narrative that the whites want to escape from southern Africa because of their persecution. The vast majority of them do not want to leave,” said Tadeusz Michrowski from PAP in an interview with PAP from the Polish Center for African Studies and added that the narrative that President Trump used in the 1980s both sides – among both white and black residents of South Africa.
In his opinion, this is a very extreme narrative, which even in South Africa is not popular among whites. “Afriforum (South African non -governmental organization focusing on the interests of Africans – PAP) often called an extreme right organization, sometimes even racist, cuts off from the opinion that in South Africa there is white genocide,” Michrowski noted and added that Afriforum rather promotes the thesis that this state does not protect sufficiently white farmers.
In the expert's opinion, it is still unknown who exactly South African refugees are. “Africans are not bad in South Africa. It is still whites who have most of the property there,” emphasized Michrowski and explained that Africanians perceive themselves as a group living from land cultivation “in the opposition to the English living in cities”. “To this day, there are about 70 percent of arable land in the hands of white or white companies, and when Apartheid collapsed, the Africans were never taken,” the expert emphasized.
In his opinion, the white residents of South Africa, who found themselves in the USA, not so much escaped from persecution but – if you can talk about escape at all – they react to chaos and crime, which after the fall of Apartheid today threatens not only black, but also white residents of South Africa.
“The fear of a falling country and war is among Africans in South Africa universal. Hence, they may feel that they will be safer. Everyone complains about their government, both black and white,” said the expert.
According to Michrowski, the Americans probably invited poorer representatives of the African community, which in total in South Africa currently has about 3 million people, less than three quarters of the white population of this country. Michrowski cited in an interview with PAP the opinion of Yossabel Chetty from the Center for Information Integrity in Africa at the University of Stellenbosh. Also in her opinion, a group of Africans who came to the USA are rather worse positioned people and having nothing to do with a more elite and rich African community, whose complaints about attacks on African farms have reached the world media so far.
In his opinion, attacks on African farms are indeed a problem, but it is difficult to assess their real scale. Afriforum accuses the South African police in this matter and has so far been brought by 177 neighboring guards guarding African farms in front of attacks.
Michrowski reminded, however, that 19,000 people were murdered between January and September 2024 in South Africa. It was not given to how many people were killed because of the attacks on the farms. It is known for the fact that about 40 people were killed on the farms a year earlier. “This is a country of huge crime, whose victims, however, are primarily black because they are less wealthy and live in less safe districts,” Michrowski admitted. “We are talking about a country that has the greatest inequalities in the world, in addition colliding in very small spaces. A person driving Ferrari through Cape Town or Johannesburg is usually only a few kilometers from the place where people have a problem finding money for food,” added the expert.
Africans are white residents of South Africa. They began to settle in South Africa in the mid -seventeenth century, when the Dutch Eastern Indian company was looking for a place where its ships sailing to India could supplement the supplies. Faktoria was created on the Cape of Good Hope and the first colonizers began to appear. “This is the founding myth of Africans. They came there for hundreds of years, until at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries the English took over at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries,” Michrowski reminded and added that Huguenots and Germans must also include Africans. “It was therefore various European nations with a definite advantage of the Dutch. Their language, Afrikaans, is a derivative of the Dutch language, although he is not the same as it,” said the expert.
Michrowski emphasized that in South Africa there is another group of white inhabitants, they are descendants of the English who at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries began to take over these areas. “Africans during the wars of the Burski British enclosed in concentration camps. Although they were not death camps, it was a great Zadra and the myth among Africanists who remember that they were persecuted at that time,” Michrowski reminded and emphasized that Africaclers have a very strong identity, a sense of separateness, based mainly on the experiences of war with English. Africanaries also fought from the 18th century with African peoples: Hotentots and bushmen, as well as Banty tribes.
In the expert's opinion, however, it should be remembered that the so -called The African element was behind a policy, which eventually led to the introduction of an apartment. “They wanted to begin to introduce laws as soon as possible as soon as possible to limit the political rights of the black people. The national party, which in the 1940s formalized Apartheid, came to power mainly with the voices of Africans,” reminded Michrowski. In his opinion, the history of Apartheid also had a class dimension. “The poor white was told that they had to vote to introduce racial segregation, because it was the only thing that would give them a chance to be better than black people,” he said.
Anna Gwozdowska (PAP)
AG/ MHR/
