White Refugees in South Africa: Fear, Fiction, or Historical Reckoning?

IOL News

16-05-2025

Is the idea of white refugees in South Africa fact or fiction — a genuine fear, or a red herring distracting us from deeper truths about belonging and identity in this country?
Image: Independent Media
By Dr. Iqbal Survé
In the decades since apartheid ended, one of the lingering questions that continues to quietly shape conversations — often behind closed doors — is this: what really happened to white people in South Africa and Namibia? It is a question loaded with discomfort, political risk, and emotional complexity. But it must be confronted, not to divide, but to understand, to heal, and ultimately, to move forward as a country still scarred by a deliberately engineered racial order.
Let us begin with a difficult truth: 'whiteness' itself is a construct, one built for power, not for identity. It is not a culture. It is not ancestry. It is not a shared language or history. Whiteness was invented to justify hierarchy, exclusion, and economic dominance under colonialism and apartheid. Today, that very construct has become something of an embarrassment, not because of individual white people, but because of the violence, dispossession, and social engineering it was used to justify.
When apartheid fell, many expected a retribution that never came. South Africa chose reconciliation over revenge. White South Africans remained in the country, kept their homes, businesses, and communities, and were welcomed into a democratic project that, in truth, they had historically resisted. But with political power shifted, many white South Africans began to feel like refugees in the land they once controlled. Not legal refugees, of course — but cultural and psychological ones, displaced by a changing society that no longer centred them.
This discomfort is not new. Nearly two centuries ago, the Great Trek saw Afrikaner settlers leave the Cape Colony in response to British rule and laws, including the abolition of slavery, that threatened their social and economic dominance. It was not simply a journey into new lands, but an escape from the loss of power, rebranded as the pursuit of freedom.
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What is often left out of that story is how the Trek itself was entangled with the question of slavery. When the British Empire abolished slavery in 1834, the Cape Colony was still deeply invested in the practice, particularly the Boer farmers, many of whom relied on enslaved labour. Instead of accepting this shift toward human freedom, they resisted. Some took their enslaved people with them on the Trek, converting them into indentured labourers, a softer name for continued bondage. In fact, while slaves were freed across the British Empire in 1834, emancipation in the Cape was delayed until 1838, revealing just how deep the resistance to equality truly ran.
There are those who claim 'white genocide' or persecution. That is not the reality. There is no mass campaign to eliminate white people, and no government policy that seeks to marginalise them in the way black South Africans were for centuries. What we see instead is discomfort, a loss of dominance being reframed as victimhood. This is not persecution; it is the pain of unlearning privilege.
In Namibia, the story is parallel but distinct. German colonisers committed genocide against the Herero and Nama people long before apartheid was formally constructed. Namibia's white population, especially those of German descent, held on to wealth and status long into independence. Today, much like in South Africa, they are negotiating a new national identity that requires more than economic participation, it demands historical accountability.
Some have even gone as far as to claim refugee status in other countries, citing 'reverse racism' and fears of crime or dispossession. While it is true that crime and inequality plague South Africa, these are national problems, not racially targeted ones. The principle of course — the fear, the sense of exclusion — is real to those who feel it. But it must be understood in its proper context: not as persecution, but as a shift in historical balance.
This is not a call to shame anyone. It is a call to reflect. Because we are now in a moment where the very idea of whiteness, as a social, political, and economic identity, is unravelling, and rightly so. The future must be built on shared citizenship, not racial exceptionalism. And the past must be remembered with honesty, not revisionism.
White South Africans and Namibians have not disappeared. They have not been persecuted. But they have been challenged, to let go of inherited privilege, to integrate into a society that is no longer structured for their comfort, and to participate in building a future that isn't only theirs.
Black South Africans, too, carry a burden, a burden of inherited trauma, systemic inequality, and centuries of exclusion. But the burden is not just economic. It is psychological. It is spiritual. And part of that healing requires that we all, black and white, understand the lies that built the system we inherited, and reject the identities it forced upon us.
Whiteness, as a construct, must fall, not white people. The same way apartheid had to fall, not South Africa.
In the end, we are not categories. We are not constructs. We are people. And our liberation, real, lasting liberation, can only come when we stop clinging to old labels and start facing each other as equals.
South Africans, black and white, must finally overcome the hangover of more than a few hundred years. Because the future we deserve cannot be built by people still drunk on the past.
* Dr. Iqbal Survé is the Executive Chairman of Sekunjalo and Independent Media.
** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.