Late last month, a group of over forty "prominent Afrikaners" put their names to an open letter in response to United States (US) President Donald Trump’s decision to limit refugee admissions to 7 500 people, and allocate them primarily among Afrikaners, “and other victims of illegal or unjust discrimination in their respective homelands.”

In their missive in reply, the group of Afrikaans-speakers – led by public intellectuals Piet Croucamp and Max du Preez – rejected: “the narrative that casts Afrikaners as victims of racial persecution in post-apartheid South Africa.” They were then fulsomely praised by The Presidency, the Department of International Relations and Co-operation (DIRCO), and the African National Congress (ANC) for their: “courageous” and: “patriotic” stand, and the letter was presented as a total validation of the government’s position.

Its genesis became the source of some controversy after Rapport revealed a WhatsApp message from Karen Burger – a director in the office of Zane Dangor, the Director General of DIRCO – in which she related that she had written the draft, in her personal capacity, in response to a New York Times article on Trump’s looming refugee determination.

In the message Burger said she felt strongly that the voice of Afrikaners – other than those of Solidarity and Afriforum: “…should also have a place in the public debate about our country's future…It was suggested that the response not be submitted under one name, but that we rather try to put together a group of prominent Afrikaners who can support it and co-sign it."

Intelligence services

Given Burger’s long career in the intelligence services – she reportedly started out as an analyst for the old National Intelligent Service, pre-1994 – this has allowed the Solidarity movement to dismiss the whole initiative as a: “state security project” and the signatories, which included many esteemed and well-meaning individuals, as the useful idiots of the ruling apparatus.

Max du Preez, for his part, has emphasised that the initiative came entirely from Piet Croucamp and – as he related to Rapport this week – Karen Burger had told him she used artificial intelligence to write her WhatsApp message, and this had led to the creation of a wrong impression to the contrary.

On the substance, the letter would have been more credible had it voiced at least the tiniest squeak of criticism of the ANC’s destructive racial obsessions.

Its authority is also undermined by its reliance on a series of half-truths. It is true, for instance, that there is no “white genocide” in South Africa – something neither Solidarity nor AfriForum have claimed – but it is also a well-documented reality that the commercial farming community was subjected to brutal and murderous attacks on a daily basis through the first decade of ANC rule, though the intensity of that violence has gradually diminished since then.

The race laws and policies of the ANC may also not (yet) qualify as persecution, but it is undeniable that the liberation movement has implemented systemic discrimination against the white minority ever since coming to power in the name of the National Democratic Revolution (not "multiracialism").

As Max du Preez himself acknowledged over two-decades ago: “…what we are expecting white people to do, what I expect white people to do, is a very difficult thing for anybody to do: to step back, to accept that at least for the next generation they will have to stand at the back of the queue. But they will have to accept that there will be very limited scope for whites in South African public life in our lifetime.”

Restrictions

Since then, close to a generation on, the ANC has only ratcheted up the restrictions on opportunities for racial minorities. At the start of this year a legal instrument (the Expropriation Act) was put in place enabling government to target minority-owned property for expropriation for sub-market value compensation. A few months later the Ministry of Employment of Labour issued directives seeking to impose a numerous clausus restricting young white men to their minimal (4%) proportion of the population across most sectors of the economy.

South Africa may be being dragged into the US culture wars, as the letter complains, but that is not at the core of the problem here. Donald Trump is not exactly known for carefully calibrating either his language or his actions – and over the weekend intemperately announced that the US would not participate in the G20 in Johannesburg as Afrikaners were: “being killed and slaughtered and their land and farms are being illegally confiscated.”

Equally, however, he enjoys doing deals and resolving disputes. The “asks” that the Trump administration presented to Pretoria early this year were neither unreasonable nor against South Africa’s national interest. These were that farm attacks be classified as a priority crime, that death chants like “kill the Boer” no longer be officially condoned, that there be no land expropriation without fair market compensation, and that USA entities seeking to invest in South Africa be exempted from the black economic empowerment requirements the ANC has imposed on business.

The reason why the US-South Africa dispute has dragged on for as long as it has is – and become progressively uglier and messier – is because the ANC has obdurately refused to countenance any of these “asks”.

Had it responded positively it would have made quite clear that it had no intention of ever returning to a programme of violently dispossessing the white minority.

As it is, while the ANC may well have turned down the temperature for now, it outright refused, when pressed, to remove the pot from the stove. It is that fact which should concern South Africans far more than Trump’s wild and impulsive behaviour on social media.