The Unintended Consequences of US Refugee Policy for South African Minorities

IOL News

2 days ago

Members of the Khoi and San community camped outside the Union Building in 2019 demanding that their rights be recognised.
Image: Oupa Mokoena/African News Agency (ANA)
Clyde N.S. Ramalaine
The recent resettlement of 49 South Africans, described as 'Afrikaners', to the United States under refugee status via the US Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) has drawn public ridicule, suspicion, and commentary. While some predict their imminent return to sunny South Africa, the event offers an unexpected opportunity to examine how USRAP's criteria could inadvertently apply to other historically marginalised South African groups, particularly the KhoeSan and Coloured communities.
This article does not support or validate the ideological narratives of groups like AfriForum or Solidarity, who claim persecution under terms like 'white genocide.' Such claims are unsubstantiated, racially selective, and morally indefensible. Instead, this article offers a literal and policy-driven reading of USRAP's eligibility framework, focusing not on its intentions but on its possible implications for marginalised non-white South African identities.
USRAP eligibility criteria
Under Executive Order 14204, USRAP permits applications from South Africans who meet three conditions:
Must be of South African nationality;
Must be of Afrikaner ethnicity or a member of a racial minority;
Must articulate past persecution or fear of future persecution.
Although influenced by racialised narratives of white Afrikaner persecution, the policy does not explicitly exclude non-white groups. This opens an interpretive doorway that, when read literally and consistently, may qualify KhoeSan and Coloured South Africans—groups with longstanding, legitimate claims of marginalisation.
South African nationality - A contested construct
The idea of a unified 'South African nationality' is not neutral or straightforward. South African identity has been deeply shaped by colonial conquest, apartheid-era racial division, and selective post-apartheid nation-building. Far from a cohesive category, 'South African' is an ongoing site of contestation, haunted by economic inequality, cultural marginalisation, and incomplete reconciliation.
Under apartheid, nationality was fractured across pseudo-ethnic 'homelands.' Today, the uncritically adopted 'Rainbow Nation' rhetoric fails to conceal the persistence of racial and spatial disparities. For many, especially KhoeSan and Coloured South Africans, national identity remains fractured, imposed, and weaponised against their claims to full inclusion and recognition.
Afrikaner identity - An exclusionary social construct
The term 'Afrikaner' has always been a politically fluid concept. It was only in the 20th century, under apartheid, that it solidified as a synonym for white Afrikaans speakers. However, Afrikaans itself is a Creole language born at the Cape from African, European, and Asian linguistic influences. Millions of non-white South Africans—particularly the KhoeSan and Coloured communities—speak Afrikaans as their mother tongue and have made significant contributions to its literary and cultural legacy.
If 'Afrikaner' is used to denote those rooted in Africa who speak Afrikaans, then the most authentic claimants are arguably the KhoeSan and Coloured peoples. To exclude them is to perpetuate apartheid's racial gatekeeping. The USRAP, though likely intending to privilege white identities, inadvertently opens space for those previously denied recognition within the very cultural matrix it seeks to protect.
The notion of a "white Afrikaner" as a uniquely persecuted category is built on historical erasure. Afrikaner culture is not racially homogeneous. Its racialisation is a mid-20th-century political invention, not a cultural or linguistic truth. If USRAP implicitly assumes whiteness under the 'Afrikaner' identity, it contradicts its own stated openness.
Racial minorities - Recognition beyond whiteness
The policy's second clause, which asserts, 'or a member of a racial minority', broadens the scope for inclusion. Here, the KhoeSan and Coloured groups qualify, both as racial minorities and as communities subjected to historical persecution and contemporary marginalisation.
The KhoeSan, South Africa's first people, have endured centuries of displacement, genocide, and erasure. Today, despite growing self-identification, they remain denied official indigeneity and reparative justice. Their exclusion from land reform and identity recognition makes them textbook examples of persecuted minorities.
Coloured South Africans, a category created by apartheid to obscure Indigenous ancestry and maintain social control, also remain in a state of political liminality. This imposed identity, still used in state policy, has allowed the post-apartheid government to deny both their indigeneity and their oppression, framing them as 'beneficiaries' of apartheid while excluding them from targeted redress.
Post-1994 policy continues to maintain racial categories rooted in apartheid logic. In practice, this has meant retaining the 'Coloured' label to contain indigenous claims and limit state accountability. Despite Steve Biko's inclusive definition of Black Consciousness, embracing all non-white oppressed peoples, the state's operational framework reserves 'African' identity for Nguni-Bantu groups, excluding KhoeSan and Coloured communities from full African identification and associated redress.
A policy that outruns Its intentions
The original purpose of the USRAP criteria appears to have been the protection of white South Africans fearing political and land displacement. However, its language is broad enough to permit reinterpretation. A literal application of its three criteria—nationality, minority status, and persecution—clearly allows for KhoeSan and Coloured inclusion.
If USRAP is truly about offering refuge to marginalised South Africans, then KhoiSan and Coloured communities not only qualify but arguably embody the policy's intent more authentically than the white Afrikaners it was implicitly designed to protect.
The US Refugee Admissions Program, though politically motivated and ideologically framed, unintentionally exposes the contradictions in South African identity politics and racial categorisation. Its criteria, if interpreted without racial bias, could provide an unexpected platform for historically marginalised communities like the KhoeSan and Coloured peoples to assert claims long denied by the South African state.
This article is not an endorsement of emigration as a political solution. Rather, it is a call to critically examine how refugee policy, constructed with one ideological target in mind, might unintentionally illuminate deeper questions of identity, marginalisation, and justice. USRAP, as worded, opens a policy loophole. This gateway challenges racialised assumptions about Afrikaner identity and repositions the conversation around who truly qualifies as persecuted in post-apartheid South Africa.