South Africa’s president won’t offer refugee status and a chartered airplane to Black Americans when he visits the White House on Wednesday. But if he uses the same standards Donald Trump used in bringing a plane load of white Afrikaners to the United States last week, he should.
Black Americans have it much worse than those poor Afrikaners who have been so fulsomely championed by Trump.
Afrikaners make up just over 7 percent of South Africa’s population but own 73 percent of its privately-owned farmland. Here in the U.S., Black Americans make up nearly 14 percent of the population but own less than 1 percent of this country’s privately-owned farmland, according to FoodPrint, a program that researches food production.
And while Trump has grossly exaggerated the threat of violence Afrikaners face in South Africa, Black Americans have long been brutalized in the U.S., often with the blessing of their own government.
So, President Ramaphosa, where’s that plane? It doesn’t even have to be a $400 million “palace in the sky” from Qatar!
Of course, the South African president knows he can’t discuss Black Americans with the American president, just as he knows he will be lectured about the plight of those unfortunate white South Africans in South Africa. Expect South African expat Elon Musk, whose family suffered so much there he’s only worth $424,700,000,000, to get in on that action. If Ramaphosa tries to interrupt that lecture with facts about what’s happening in South Africa, about the effort to redistribute land to the nation’s Black residents after generations of brutal apartheid, he could get the Vladimir Zelensky treatment.
There likely will be little opportunity to note that Afrikaners have it so bad in South Africa that, of the 2.7 million of them who still call that nation home, a whopping 59 were on last week’s flight to the U.S. (Try offering refugee status and chartered flights to residents of, say, Venezuela, and see how many tens of thousands try to cram onto those planes to the U.S.)
Maybe Ramaphosa can find some other way to relay to the American president just who the Afrikaners are and what they and their ancestors were up to until that long, long ago year of 1994.
That’s the year South Africa held its first multi-racial elections. That’s the year Afrikaners, descendants of Dutch settlers, began to lose their primacy in a society upon which they had inflicted nearly 50 years of racial segregation.
Just like segregation in the U.S., South African apartheid was brutal and dehumanizing for its Black countrymen. Just as segregation did in the U.S. for white Americans, apartheid reserved land rights and the best education and employment opportunities for white South Africans. And just as today’s wealth gap between whites and Blacks in the U.S. is due at least in part to generations of slavery and then legal discrimination against Black Americans, Black South Africans have a similar tale to tell.
But there will be little, if any, time for that on Wednesday. Ramaphosa knows his task is to smile, shake the president’s hand, have his picture taken and then scurry on back to the Land of the Oppressed Afrikaner.