White South Africans en route to ‘da ‘hood’: Welcome

Several of my friends and family here in the United States (US) have asked me for my opinion on president Donald Trump’s latest unfounded and ridiculous proclamations about white South Africans as refugees and genocide in South Africa.

I didn’t answer immediately because I needed time to stop laughing and formulate a concise response with a straight face. I failed.

White South Africans, please call yourselves refugees and come to the ‘hood. I welcome you. You won’t last a year.

To those contemplating becoming a ‘white refugee in the US’, rather go get dental surgery with no lidocaine.

With whimsy in my mind, let me muse about several points.

First, it takes R18 to equal only one US dollar.

White South Africans who would dream of living in wealthy white neighborhoods in the US, forget it. You can’t afford it. US utilities, taxes, food, petrol (we call it ‘gas’), ground transportation, or entertainment are above your pay grade.

I live in Delaware, which has a lower cost of living than many other states. To see a movie at the Cineplex costs you the equivalent of R288 per person!

White South Africans living in gated communities enjoy swimming pools and have large manicured ‘gardens’ (we call them backyards), and the only blacks near you are those working in your kitchen; you will have the shock of your life when you arrive in the good ‘ol US!

Google says the median salary for a legal US housekeeper is R602 100. Unless you have at least a half million US dollars per year as disposable income, you will be middle class or less, and you are totally unprepared for it.

Your white skin will not be body armour in the US in all circumstances. If you think so, you have been listening to right-wing US news networks for too long.

You will not be a minority oyinbo or mzungu in the US; you will be one of 212 million white faces; no big deal.

The kind of majority white private boarding schools you are used to in dear ol’ South Africa could cost you the equivalent of R400 000 per year per child in the US, depending on location and other factors.

UNAFFORDABLE

You won’t be able to afford it. So, your children will face a part of the US jungle where the predators walk on two legs and come in all colours, shapes, and sizes: local public schools. Aside from the mass shootings that take place, these schools valiantly fight for funding, parents who give a damn, and they struggle to retain motivated teachers.

Some high schools even have metal detectors at every entrance. Good luck with that.

By the way, private medical insurance can cost up to R18 000 per month, depending on how many people are in your family.

In the US, quality healthcare is not guaranteed. People who cannot pay for healthcare are usually on some sort of public assistance and usually suffer long lines for service, substandard, impolite, or delayed care.

In US healthcare, white or black doesn’t matter, a private insurance card with full coverage does. You’d better have comprehensive healthcare with a low deductible in place before you arrive.

CRIME

In South Africa, you have serious crime. But get ready for more than you can imagine. There are 340 million Americans, and broadly speaking, I’d say at least half of them are criminals on some level (even Donald Trump!).

Far too many have either been convicted of something, served time, have friends/family members who are negatively tangled in the criminal justice system, or benefit from drug money in some way (knowingly or not!). And new arrivals like you are fresh chum in the water.

On top of that, the Eastern European criminal gangs (Trump makes no move to deport those incredibly violent foreign-born men locked in US prisons) thrive in several parts of the US. They specialise in kidnapping girls and women to sell them all over the world as sex slaves.

They salivate for young, naive white girls. And those fresh off the boat (an Americanism you will have to learn) who run around without a clue, like the women in your families, are prey.

No worries, my dear potential white refugees; children are adaptable. Your teenaged darlings will be hangin’ with the homies (white, LatinX or black) in no time.

Brace yourselves – “Yo’ Ma, whassup” will replace “Goeiemôre ma, hoe gaan dit met jou?”.

And they should be prepared to switch from listening to Bok van Blerk to jammin’ with Kendrick Lamar for their music choices, though Burna Boy can stay on the playlist.

Socially, the barriers will be significant. Most Americans despise foreigners who come to “take their jobs” or “benefit from tax-payer-funded programmes”.

The news media would have you believe that the visceral xenophobia in the US is only for brown and black people, and there is some truth in that. America is a race-conscious country. But what you do not see in the media is that in unenlightened areas of the US, anyone with an accent will catch serious attitude.

You could find it a challenge to get a job equal to your skills and experience, be treated as an ‘alien’, and assumed to be stupid. I recall the heavy Afrikaans-tainted tones used by many non-English speaking whites in South Africa.

As soon as you open your mouth and speak in the US, imagine a gong at a boxing match and the punches that get thrown instantly.

Remember, foreign degrees are not accepted in many places in the US. Doctors, lawyers, and engineers with South African credentials, prepare to start over again or become a Walmart cashier or an Uber driver.

Whites wishing to find the non-melanin ‘Promised Land’ in the US, your best bet is to settle in a red state (but they hate foreigners even worse there!).

Oh, and if you don’t know what a red state is, do your research. You could settle in racist parts of former Confederate States or places like Idaho or Utah.

Try to find rural and under-educated, predominantly white areas with lower costs of living, very few who attend college, poor access to grocery stores, hospitals, and services, dicey law enforcement, methamphetamine and Oxycodone infestation, malls with most of the stores closed, and people with country accents you will struggle to understand.

You want to find areas where people gulp sugary soda pop, live for reality TV shows, and collect welfare checks to subsidise their multiple children (think ‘baby daddy’, but white people saying it). In my experience, some in those areas think fast food is fine dining, they drink the cheapest beer they can find, and they can’t name the vice president of the US (which, in this case, is not so bad). Again, I am over-generalising, but it’s funny nonetheless.

Most of all, I am laughing at the mention of this latest Trump nonsense, because he couldn’t care less about white South Africans or anyone in Africa. This whole nonsense is the Afrikaner side of Elon Musk talking, not Trump. His presidential pronouncements have nothing to do with the facts on the ground in South Africa.

From what I read, Musk went too far, stole more headlines than Trump, outraged significant Republicans in Congress, and is going down in political flames. This entire white South African claptrap is a Trump bone to the fading Musk so that Republicans can maintain access to the Tesla man’s money.

ORDER CAN BE REVERSED

People abroad have no idea how the US political system works and why should you? The wildest Trump proclamations are via an executive order (EO). He dare not take any of this to the Congress for a vote; he’d lose. An EO can be reversed as soon as someone else is in the White House. And Trump knows it.

So, any EO to favour white South Africans as refugees can be (and probably will be) rescinded when Trump is out of office or if Congress shifts parties and passes veto-proof legislation after the mid-term elections in 2026.

Trump’s current rule by fiat violates the constitution, and he knows that, too. Lower courts around the country are blasting his actions. Even his Supreme Court is squirming as their legacy as a ‘Trump Rubber Stamp Court’ is not how the majority of them want history to brand them.

Some in Trump’s own party are running for cover, others are running to keep their constituents’ support, and there are more who are shying away from standing too close to Trump’s illegal defiance of court orders and his cranky old man’s bluster.

Remember, he’s nearly 80.

I believe Trump is not crazy, which many hysterical people on the left keep saying. He knows the game he is playing, even if he is losing. He made a tonne of promises he never had any intention of fulfilling.

But he can loudly give his ardent supporters a façade that he is ‘their guy’, because he knows his actions will not survive the constitutional tests that are happening. Trump is all about bait and switch. If he gets his opponents angry and demonstrating over something like offering apartheid’s beneficiaries favoured refugee status, then (he thinks) the voting public are distracted from seeing the devastation he is causing.

Trump and his good ol’ boys and girls think the American people will focus on white South Africans instead of how the Trump tariffs have caused an avoidable trade war, pissed off solid allies (like Canada), and slammed a torpedo into the US economy.

Trump does not want articles and speeches about the continued flow of illegal immigrants, rising food prices, unemployment woes, and the fact that there is still no complete border wall.

He wants to distract as many of his non-diehard supporters from how his and Musk’s rash of shutdowns are being reversed in the courts, one by one. The hilarious part is that Musk’s cuts were supposed to save money and probably haven’t in the long run! The government is (or will be) shovelling out even more hundreds of millions in lost lawsuits, and the majority of those fired by Musk are now quietly being rehired after being paid to stay home! I can’t wait until the court costs and damage award tally is published.

WATCH YOUR ATTITUDE

Incoming white South Africans, beware: Watch your negative attitudes about people of colour. You might be assumed to be ‘Mandela haters’.

If you value your health, never use the word ‘coloured’.

That is a putdown over here with roots in an entirely different cultural history than yours. Google it and learn. You should practise never calling black people ‘monkeys’ (you’ll get stomped for that), though you may get away with ‘kaff*r’ because most folks over here don’t know the word (until they look it up on their phones, and then you should run.) God help you if you use the N-word – you’ll die on the spot.

White South Africans, Trump cares nothing about you. You are a publicity stunt. You have no votes to gather, you are not in his electoral base, you cannot give him an airplane, you cannot give copious amounts to his campaign; you are political cannon fodder. You could all disappear tomorrow, and he wouldn’t lose a night’s sleep.

Musk and someone with white South African lobbyists’ money in their pockets wrote his statements, and he repeated it with no knowledgeable background whatsoever, which, sadly, Trump tends to do on many issues.

‘WEAK-KNEED’ RAMAPHOSA

And finally, can someone please slap weak-kneed South African president Cyril Ramaphosa for me?

He should have been like the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who pushed back openly and verbally in front of the world when Trump tried to dog him and his people.

More than two decades ago, I cheered our beloved late founding president Sam Nujoma, when he pulled Tony Blair up by his bootstraps back in 2002. So many people, supposedly supporters of Namibia, whined, moaned and pulled their hair out when our leader, a black man, defended his point of view in front of a European!

Ramaphosa has obviously dismissed Nujoma’s bodacious historic example and said “Ja, Meneer, baas” when Trump insulted him. When will our African leaders stop being so flattered by an invitation from anyone they perceive as a powerful white man that they sell out and smile like simpletons when they are being put down?

South Africa does not need Donald Trump or the US to exist. The US actively worked to prevent an end to apartheid! Look at the trade levels, banking business, political priorities . . . there is no US dominance over the South African economy. China is the political big dog in Africa and the US is just a toothless cougar in the corner, especially with the demise of the United States Agency for International Development.

South Africa is the biggest and potentially baddest nation on the continent (Nigeria notwithstanding). So why is Ramaphosa sitting there nodding like a star-struck schoolboy wearing an ill-fitted suit when Trump scolds him? Videos of Julius Malema making his usual raving, radical statements were played.

Why didn’t Ramaphosa counter with a demand that Trump explain his white supremacist, Holocaust-denying, rabidly puritanical, ignorant supporters’ speeches regularly made in the US? Why didn’t he challenge Trump’s apparent violation of the rule of law in the US? In the view of some, the US should rather work hard to prop up the weakened African National Congress’ Ramaphosa and pray to God that Malema and the Economic Freedom Fighters never come to power.

• This opinion piece has been shortened. Read full shortened. Read the full piece on The Namibian’s social media platforms.
  – Jackie Asheeke is a professional writer and former editor at Windhoek Observer.

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