I’m Over It

Trump has opened his borders to the Afrikaners in South Africa who feel they are being racially persecuted and ethnically cleansed and it has snowballed into a political storm in South Africa and on the internet.

If things are really so bad for their community, a special provision has been made for them to arrive in the ‘land of the free’ as refugees.

I’ve seen hordes of Americans encouraging them to pack. I actually thought it was a great idea for them to leave if they want, because no one should be forced to stay in a country where they feel they are being racially persecuted.

When Trump made the offer, however, I predicted that they would backtrack on their request for assistance, and I was proven right less than a day later.

Apparently, they want to stay in “their” country where their heritage is despite the alleged persecution, but they’re open to other forms of assistance such as aid. The reason I knew they would not leave is because there is no way they would sacrifice the advantages they have as white people in South Africa to be asylum seekers somewhere else.

They are the first refugees in the world who are privileged enough to say “no thanks” to an offer from the mighty West, while millions of people around the world are rejected and vilified by their new countries but unable to return home due to war, famine, genocide – the list goes on.

Without meaning to, Trump called their bluff, and embarrassed himself in the process. I wonder if his new best friend, the tech billionaire I dislike too much to name in my column, is the one feeding him lies about the realities of South Africa and the legacy of apartheid, and if this will affect their relationship.

I actually think it verges on treason to lobby a foreign power to overthrow your government, but the real issue I think we should pay attention to, is the proposal for an Afrikaner ethnostate in South Africa’s Northern Cape, just below Namibia. Now, I don’t want to sound paranoid and alarmist, and it’s most likely never going to come to fruition, but I think it’s necessary for me to go on record as vehemently rejecting the idea.

As a SADC citizen I think this particular suggestion is a direct threat to the region’s national security. A western-backed white ethnostate sounds, to me, like a recipe for a Gaza 2.0. We already know most of the West supports the destruction of that country and believes their coloniser is justified in its actions, but anyone who does even just five minutes of reading can tell you how unjust the situation is. Give this new southern African ethnostate 30 years and they’ll be bombing the rest of us, assassinating our leaders, funding rebel groups and leaving with the uranium.

Before you go on and call me racist, let’s unpack the idea of racial persecution in South Africa. Per my research, farm murders make up a small percentage of general murder in South Africa. The country is rife with crime that everybody is subjected to, and farms are isolated, easy targets. Yes, the deaths are harrowing and gruesome and I hope the victims rest in peace, but no, there is no racially motivated mass murder plot. If there were, trust me, we would know and it would be an issue.

White people are literally the precious darlings of the world. A single scratch on their heads would have everyone up in arms. Let’s be honest with each other today about the owners of wealth in South Africa. It is the same in Namibia.

The funniest thing I have seen is all the westerners who keep threatening Africans with the collapse of our continent if all white people leave, then adding threats of sanctions, bombings and flattening. If we are all really so incompetent, then why would they also need to cripple us? Why not just let us destroy ourselves?

It’s been truly interesting to see the true cruelty of some of these people. Their mask is constantly slipping and at this point, I am so over it. Racist Europeans should take their roads and medicine and development with them and voetsek if they want. I’d rather go back to being a hunter-gatherer barbarian if it means we’d be free of the condescension, the neocolonialism, the racism, the afrophobia and the pure evilheartedness of some western “saviours”.

It’s been sad to see this argument play out, knowing how colonialism (yes Germany, I have not forgotten you) and apartheid robbed our parents, our grandparents, our aunts and our uncles of their dreams, their chance to own hectares of land, to self-actualise, to self-determine, to generate wealth, to not live in a white supremacist world, and to preserve their own culture.

And after all that, no one cares about how it has affected us all. We’re supposed to just forgive, forget and co-exist with the people who beat and whipped and tortured our ancestors, and then also be called racist when an attempt is made at the tiniest bit of restorative justice.

I’m over it.

– Anne Hambuda is a writer, social commentator and poet. Follow her online or email her at annehambuda@gmail.com for more.

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