As the Association of Concerned Africa Scholars (ACAS), we condemn the Executive Order “Addressing the Egregious Actions of the Republic of South Africa” issued on Feb 7, 2025 in the strongest terms. In it, the President of the United States identifies a group of white South Africans – Afrikaners – as the victims of racial injustice to such a great extent that they should be allowed refugee status in the United States. The Order also chastises South Africa for having the temerity to take Israel to the International Court of Justice over the genocidal war it has waged in Gaza.
As other executive orders slam the gates of refugee status shut on deserving, needy and desperate people around the world, the 7 February order would be laughable in its incorrect absurdities if what it lays bare for all to see were not so chilling: the historical alliance between extremist, supremacist projects in South Africa, Israel and the United States.
The South African Afrikaner minority was in the forefront of the effort to devise, impose and enforce apartheid: a socially repressive regime so extreme that its name has become globally synonymous with oppression. Although several European nations and generations of their citizens imposed colonialism, warfare, slavery, dispossession and racial discrimination on the majority of indigenous South Africans for centuries, it was the Afrikaner minority (never more than 10% of the South African population) that rose to political power in 1948 and proceeded to implement racial supremacy with dizzying speed.
South Africa achieved majority rule in 1994 after decades of bitter struggle waged domestically and internationally. Since then South Africans have seen many of the hopes of the Nelson Mandela-era “rainbow nation” dashed on the rocks of economic timidity, mismanagement, corruption and state brutality. Despair has set in on almost all fronts.
However, the small steps that have been taken to redress the wrongs of apartheid in terms of land ownership have been completely and cynically misconstrued by the Trump administration. Even right-wing Afrikaner groups in South Africa, the heirs of apartheid – who operate openly and freely as political parties – agree that they have not and do not anticipate becoming refugees and they have no desire to leave South Africa to settle in the USA.
US administrations stoutly supported apartheid through the Cold War era while ACAS and millions of other people and organizations around the world stood in solidarity with South Africans of all races who fought for freedom. Now ACAS unequivocally condemns the resurgence of a shameful legacy of supremacist machinations at the highest levels of American government.
The Feb. 7 Executive Order is just the latest step in a blitzkrieg to Make Apartheid Great Again – American style.
A luta continua!
The Association of Concerned Africa Scholars
February 2025