If you paid any attention, there was a lot we learnt about white South Africans from the saga of the so-called Afrikaner refugees trekking to America.
For a country that is hypersensitive to the mere mention of the R word, we discovered what our white brothers and sisters really think about race and restitution 30 years into our democracy. For this I would like to thank Donald Trump.
We discovered that there is a hard core of racists, English and Afrikaans speaking, who simply have not got over themselves.
With a straight face, Eric Langton, one of the ‘refugees’ informs the Washington Post immigration reporter, Silvia Foster-Frau, that “it was white people who voted to end apartheid in a referendum” but that “nobody wants to tell that story”. Yes, whites ended apartheid.
The fact that black people could not vote on this little matter of their oppression is irrelevant to Langton.
Nor is there any reference to decades of struggle and sacrifice on the part of black South Africans, and some heroic whites, which helped bring apartheid to its knees.
Nevertheless, Langston’s self-serving, myopic account offers a reassuring story for white supremacists despite the ignominious defeat of race laws around the 1990s.
Yes, but he left the country, I can hear you saying, so the ‘refugee’ will utter such gibberish.
Well, let me bring you right back home. In a memorable interview with the English journalist Piers Morgan, the father of Oscar Pistorius is asked whether white genocide is real.
No doubt, says Henk Pretorius, there is a genocide against white farmers. “You just have to look at the figures.”
Morgan then points out SAPS figures that of 26,200 murders in 2024, 44 were in the farming community with only eight of those being farmers.
“Police figures are policy figures,” says Henk and the numbers are suspect because “they [SAPS] have an agenda to protect”.
This is how racism works when the facts get in the way.
More alarming was that this man’s white son murdered an innocent white Afrikaans woman but no, let’s talk about a nonexistent genocide against white farmers. The mind boggles.
Racism does not, however, always wear this kind of ugliness on its sleeves.
Last week, I wrote about Bill Schroder, a former principal of Pretoria Boys who recently passed.
Well, in a tribute posted on the school website to the man, one of his deputies at the time, John Illsley, made this astounding declaration: Schroder “firmly believed” that Boys High had a “moral obligation” to contribute to the new SA by opening its doors to blacks “but he was equally adamant that this should not result in the compromising of standards”.
My jaw dropped. This was English racism at its best. Polite even as it drives in the dagger.
First, whites had the singular power to make the decision to enrol blacks in a public school; the arrogance of it all.
As perturbingly, black enrolments threatened the standard. That, by the way, is what I heard in the corridors of the University of Pretoria and the University of the Free State when I became the first black dean and vice-chancellor, respectively. Until the standards rose dramatically once whiteness was exposed for its pretentious lies, and then everyone complained.
But Illsley was not done for he added justification: “township primary schools ... provided a less-than-ideal grounding”.
By inference, white schools with their entrenched racism, provided that ‘ideal grounding’ even as his callous statement makes no reference to centuries of underdevelopment of black education in favour of whites.
Now if Illsley, a nice bloke in leadership at a prestigious English public school could dispense such nonsense on a public platform, imagine what ordinary white teachers say about black children (and teachers) behind closed doors.
The ‘refugee’ crisis, however, revealed another side to white SA.
Decent people, educated citizens, could see through the racism of the departing whites and the dangerous genocide myth that led to the recent ambush of SA’s president in Trump’s White House.
It was left to media personality Dan Corder on the Piers Morgan programme to demolish the genocide narrative in the imaginations of race rabble rousers like the execrable Ernst Roets who also claimed there were 142 race laws against whites.
Corder exposed Roets’ “level of hilarious lying” by saying the obvious: the laws were about meaningful representation for blacks, women and those with disabilities.
When Roets tried to interrupt, not used to this kind of dressing down by another white South African, Corder let rip with a line for the decolonial ages: “Settle down, brother.”
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