Latest news with #GillianSchutte
IOL News
15 hours ago
- IOL News
To Temu, or not to Temu
From a harmless USB lamp to a chaotic online shopping spree, discover Gillian Schutte's tumultuous relationship with Temu, the online shopping platform that blurs the lines between necessity and excess. Image: IOL It began innocently enough. A quick browse. A USB lamp. Something cheap. Something functional. Just a little practical click to fix the minor chaos of my overlit, underpaid existence. Harmless, I thought. Necessary. Like tea bags or a water-saving showerhead. But let me tell you this: Temu is not harmless. Temu is the casino of capitalism. The stalker in orange fonts and flash deals. The algorithmic sugar daddy you didn't ask for, didn't trust but still flirted with in the dark hours of existential fatigue. From that one USB lamp came the slippery slope. Next minute, I'm knee-deep in camouflage netting, meant for my activist bunker or maybe just my living room—because at this point, what's the difference? It seemed sensible at the time. A digital panic-buy. Who wouldn't want a large swathe of camo netting in a country where Steve Hofmeyr has recently warned me, on X, that I'm 'in for a big surprise'? I figured I'd drape it over myself when the clan of bearded, belligerent boeremag come marching with their hatred, pitchforks, and boerewors. It's not just Steve I'm dodging. There are disgruntled farmers who take offence at being told their freehold farmland sits atop stolen bones. There are free market evangelists who foam at the mouth whenever I utter the words socialism, land audit, or state intervention. And then there's your run-of-the-mill online troll—probably sitting in Kempton Park, wearing a Springbok jersey, and wetting himself with fury over my existence. Camo netting felt... reasonable. But Temu doesn't stop at reasonable. It lures you further. It feeds off your fatigue. It knows your weaknesses and your desperate hopes. You need a pump for your green fish-farming pond? Temu knows. It offers you one for R39. You click. It arrives. It's the size of a broken Bic pen. There are no instructions. No box. Just vibes. You hold it in your hand and weep. Another time, I believed I'd scored a grass trimmer for R120. A real tool. Something I could fire up to tame the wild, post-apocalyptic weedscape around our house. What arrived? A grass trimmer head cover. A lonely orange helmet for the machine I didn't own. A metaphor for my relationship with Temu: all cover, no engine. And yet. And yet. I kept going. Because many times—many times—Temu delivers. You order a wind chime, and it chimes. You order a tapestry, and it actually hangs. You get something that works, and for one shining moment, capitalism feels like it could be romantic again. I've had as many satisfactory things arrive as I've had things that look absolutely nothing like the photos. These moments are real. And that's what makes it dangerous. Other times, you order a grape-coloured winter coat, and what arrives is hot pink. Not just pink. Weaponised pink. Worn over black, I resemble a walking Game Store clearance banner. The kind that screams 'We're closing down! All morals must go!' Then again, I do love the trio of baggy sports slacks, the quilted dungarees, and the smart watch or three that arrived exactly as described. But for every hit, there's a humiliating miss. Like the coloured climbing net. Don't ask why. I blame Temu's fluorescent whisperings. Maybe I thought it would be good for the grand children I don't have. Maybe I saw a future in circus arts. What arrived was a limp RGB palette rope masquerading as structure. No child should hang from that net. No adult should admit to owning it. It now lives twirled around my neck as a scarf. A scarf of shame. A failed loop of remorse. And still... Temu calls. With its chirpy little app. It's fake urgency. 'Only 1 left!' it screams at me while I'm on the toilet, on a Zoom call, or mid-existential crisis. 'Someone in Durban just bought the same self-watering pot as you!' it lies. 'Claim your free gift!' it yells. 'Spin the wheel!' it demands. It's like being in a toxic relationship with an overeager multi-level marketer. It promises you the world, then sends you a teaspoon shaped like a giraffe. Or a wig storage head. Or a collapsible potato basket. And let me be fair: Temu delivers with remarkable efficiency. Orders arrive within days. Duty fees are modest and predictable. They have logistics down to an art form. But like a narcissistic boyfriend with a god complex, Temu expects absolute loyalty in return. It shouts, 'I did this for you! I gave you a garlic peeler shaped like a hedgehog! I sent you silicone fridge liners in pastel!' — and now you owe it. Emotionally. Commercially. Spiritually. You must reward it with ten more purchases, a five-star rating, and at least one public display of affection in the form of social media shame. Sometimes, I dream that I've escaped. That I've returned to a dignified, offline life where I buy actual tools in actual stores with actual packaging. But then Temu sends me a coupon for R10 off a 500-pack of biodegradable earwax removers, and I am once again caught in the neon-lit web of doom. Because Temu is not just a store. It's a psy-op. It's an emotional collapse made visible. It's a vision of the end times where you survive not with weapons or food but with 36 silicone storage bags, a broken nail light, a plastic bonsai tree, and a small army of camo netting rolls. If you see me wandering the bushveld wrapped in mesh and muttering about lost parcels and white supremacy, don't worry. Just know I went to war—and the enemy wore orange. And shipped for free. Which reminds me, I have three 'free' Temu gifts arriving just as soon as I pay the import duties. Pray for me. Or send a therapist. Either way, Temu already knows. * Gillian Schutte is a South African writer, filmmaker, and critical-race scholar known for her radical critiques of neoliberalism, whiteness, and donor-driven media. Her work centres African liberation, social justice, and revolutionary thought. ** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.
IOL News
5 days ago
- Politics
- IOL News
The case of Afriforum, Ernst Roets and the Trump era
AfriForum framed its global tour as free speech, but its "white genocide" claims led to U.S. threats against South Africa—and deadly consequences in Pretoria, writes Gillian Schutte. Image: IOL AfriForum insists its trans-Atlantic charm offensive was no more than free speech dressed up in diplomatic attire. Ernst Roets toured Washington and Canberra clutching a dossier of farm-murder horror stories, selling the fable of a 'white genocide' and pleading for punitive action against his own country. He left satisfied; the Trump administration promptly threatened South Africa with sanctions, visa bans and the possible suspension of AGOA trade benefits. On Pretoria's streets the price was paid in bodies. Sanctions rarely arrive with a whistle like a bomb, yet their impact is explosive all the same. Treasury bean-counters scramble to plug the resulting hole in revenue; police salaries are delayed; overtime is cancelled. Officers facing shrinking pay-packets are quick to reach for the baton and the live round when township unrest flares. Land-rights activists—already framed by AfriForum's narrative as agents of genocide—become soft targets for 'pre-emptive' repression. A late-night knock, a shot in the dark, no warrant, no body-cam: the tell-tale pattern of extrajudicial killing the Minnesota Protocol warns about and our Constitution expressly forbids. Roets and his backers cannot pretend surprise. The scholarly record is vast and grim. Rhodesia in the 1960s, Iraq in the 1990s, Venezuela after 2017: starve a state of cash and it feeds on its own citizens. AfriForum was repeatedly warned. DIRCO briefings laid out the social cost of trade penalties; labour federations predicted blood on the shop-floor if jobs evaporated. Roets shrugged and pressed on, proclaiming that 'international force is the only option left'. That shrug is not political bluster—it is dolus eventualis, the legal heartbeat of treason. Under South African criminal law, a person acts with dolus eventualis when they foresee a forbidden outcome and embrace it as an acceptable price for their goal. AfriForum foresaw that foreign coercion would cripple the state and ratchet up violence; it welcomed the risk because the bigger the chaos, the stronger the leverage to freeze land reform. Call it by its common-law name: betraying the Republic. The usual riposte is freedom of expression. Yet the Bill of Rights draws a clear line: speech that incites imminent harm enjoys no sanctuary. Crying 'genocide' where none exists is more than hyperbole; it is a dog-whistle to foreign hawks and local vigilantes alike. One need only glance at the surge in armed 'boer protection' patrols after AfriForum's Washington jaunt to see how the narrative hardens triggers into action. There is also the convenient dodge that Washington's decision was sovereign and thus breaks any causal chain. Our courts are not so easily misled. They ask whether the outcome was a reasonable and foreseeable consequence of the accused's conduct. Sanctions in response to a choreographed moral panic? As foreseeable as sunrise. The United States even spelled out its reasoning in press releases echoing AfriForum's briefing notes almost word for word. Influence need not be decisive; it must merely be material—and the paper trail of meetings, podcasts and FARA-registered lobbying contracts more than meets that standard. Some will mutter that treason is an archaic charge, rolled out only for coup plotters in camouflage. Nonsense. Treason protects constitutional sovereignty, not party flags or presidential motorcades. When a well-funded pressure group enlists a foreign power to twist Pretoria's arm, it strikes at the very nerve centre the crime was designed to defend. The High Court confirmed as much in S v Harris (1952), convicting defendants who funnelled intelligence abroad without firing a shot. The principle is unchanged: you may criticise government, but you may not invite outsiders to batter it into submission. Video Player is loading. Play Video Play Unmute Current Time 0:00 / Duration -:- Loaded : 0% Stream Type LIVE Seek to live, currently behind live LIVE Remaining Time - 0:00 This is a modal window. Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window. Text Color White Black Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Transparent Window Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Transparent Semi-Transparent Opaque Font Size 50% 75% 100% 125% 150% 175% 200% 300% 400% Text Edge Style None Raised Depressed Uniform Dropshadow Font Family Proportional Sans-Serif Monospace Sans-Serif Proportional Serif Monospace Serif Casual Script Small Caps Reset restore all settings to the default values Done Close Modal Dialog End of dialog window. Advertisement Video Player is loading. Play Video Play Unmute Current Time 0:00 / Duration -:- Loaded : 0% Stream Type LIVE Seek to live, currently behind live LIVE Remaining Time - 0:00 This is a modal window. Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window. Text Color White Black Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Transparent Window Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Transparent Semi-Transparent Opaque Font Size 50% 75% 100% 125% 150% 175% 200% 300% 400% Text Edge Style None Raised Depressed Uniform Dropshadow Font Family Proportional Sans-Serif Monospace Sans-Serif Proportional Serif Monospace Serif Casual Script Small Caps Reset restore all settings to the default values Done Close Modal Dialog End of dialog window. Next Stay Close ✕ If the National Prosecuting Authority baulks at the optics of a treason trial, it still faces the ICC Act's uncompromising reach. Aiding or abetting crimes against humanity carries universal jurisdiction, and the Rome Statute treats systematic extrajudicial killings as just that. Evidence that lobbying paved the road to lethal police raids would drag AfriForum into a courtroom whether or not the charge-sheet carries the T-word. Beyond the legal calculus lies a political imperative. South Africa's bargain of 1994 was fragile to begin with; it cannot withstand a precedent that outsources our policy debates to foreign strongmen. If AfriForum walks unscathed, every aggrieved faction will learn the lesson: skip the ballot box, shop your grievance in Washington, wait for the rands to tumble and the rubber bullets to fly. That path leads to a broken republic and a queue of grieving families outside mortuaries. Ernst Roets likes to ask who will protect his community when the state fails. The honest answer is that the state begins to fail when citizens like him decide its laws and institutions are expendable bargaining chips on Capitol Hill. Accepting foreign sanctions at the cost of South African lives is not patriotism; it is collusion. And collusion, when it endangers the very sovereignty that guarantees all our rights, crosses the line into treason. The NDPP should enrol the indictment. If it lacks the nerve, the families of those shot dead in sanctioned austerity's shadow will eventually force the issue—here or in The Hague. That day cannot come soon enough, for in a constitutional democracy the loudest defence of free expression must never drown out the quieter, irrevocable right to life. * Gillian Schutte is a South African writer, filmmaker, and critical-race scholar known for her radical critiques of neoliberalism, whiteness, and donor-driven media. Her work centres African liberation, social justice, and revolutionary thought. ** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.
IOL News
23-05-2025
- Politics
- IOL News
The Great White Offload: AfriForum and the Export Scam of the Century
Just as the United States dumped its low-grade chicken parts into Africa through AGOA — wings, necks, gizzards — AfriForum and Solidariteit appear to have tried the same trick with what they perceive as politically expired volk, says the writer. Image: IOL Gillian Schutte Donald Trump was promised Christian farmers fleeing 'white genocide' in South Africa. What he got instead was AfriForum's charity box of surplus volk: out-of-work bouncers, hairdresser assistants, boarding house managers, and working-class families looking for a better life. If the contents of that consignment had been chicken instead of people, the U.S. Department of Agriculture would've shut it down for misleading labelling. Just as the United States dumped its low-grade chicken parts into Africa through AGOA — wings, necks, gizzards — AfriForum and Solidariteit appear to have tried the same trick with what they perceive as politically expired volk. It was strategic dumping — with a PR budget. Disguised as a refugee programme, this was AfriForum's Great White Offload. Ideological offcuts in the guise of human cargo. The roots of this export scheme reach far deeper. The poor white problem in South Africa emerged in the late 1800s and early 1900s, as economic shifts, drought, and the fallout of the Anglo-Boer War pushed large numbers of Afrikaners into unemployment and despair. These were white people falling out of whiteness — collapsing into visible poverty in a society premised on the illusion of white superiority. By the 1930s, this so alarmed the ruling elite that the Carnegie Corporation of New York was invited to investigate. Their report didn't call for inclusive upliftment. It recommended the structural elevation of poor whites into the formal economy — achieved by kicking Black people out of skilled jobs, redistributing state resources to whites, and creating an entire welfare system reserved for the pale and struggling. Apartheid picked up this baton with fervour. Job reservation, racial quotas, and whites-only benefits became the architecture of white respectability. But by the 1990s, as the democratic transition unfolded, the scaffold was dismantled. Suddenly, whiteness no longer came with guarantees — and many of those once sheltered by policy were left exposed. Video Player is loading. Play Video Play Unmute Current Time 0:00 / Duration -:- Loaded : 0% Stream Type LIVE Seek to live, currently behind live LIVE Remaining Time - 0:00 This is a modal window. Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window. Text Color White Black Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Transparent Window Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Transparent Semi-Transparent Opaque Font Size 50% 75% 100% 125% 150% 175% 200% 300% 400% Text Edge Style None Raised Depressed Uniform Dropshadow Font Family Proportional Sans-Serif Monospace Sans-Serif Proportional Serif Monospace Serif Casual Script Small Caps Reset restore all settings to the default values Done Close Modal Dialog End of dialog window. Advertisement Next Stay Close ✕ Fast-forward to the post-1994 stage play, and the volk were now untouchables. They camped in informal settlements, hoarded cheap liquor, and haunted traffic lights. The Afrikaner elite, having jumped ship from volk socialism to neoliberal capitalism, turned their backs — unless the poor could be used as extras in the next episode of 'White Victimhood: Global Edition.' Enter Solidariteit, which became the Discovery Health of Afrikaner identity — premiums high, benefits selective. And then came Roets, who grew up in Solidariteit, broadcasting his resignation from the union, only to re-emerge in Washington — stroking his chin like a chipmunk on Ritalin, peddling the narrative of white victimhood to any outlet that would listen. He appeared on platforms like Tucker Carlson, warning of a 'white genocide' with the jittery earnestness of a man who mistook his PR script for scripture. Shortly after, the broader AfriForum brigade landed in the States — armed with press kits, moral indignation, and the trumped-up land expropriation story embellished just enough to pass for human rights advocacy. Their mission: distract from decades of complicity by reframing strategic abandonment as persecution. What followed was pure spectacle. Farm murders were rebranded as genocide, and economic reform morphed into cultural warfare. Roets preached in polished English to people who think Johannesburg is a city teeming with elephants, tsotsis (gangsters), and safari jeeps — depending on which Indiana Jones film they last watched. President Trump lapped it up — like any white supremacist handed a story that flattered his worldview. In this exported discourse, the strategic group was no longer white addicts with broken teeth and expired ID books. They were now noble victims — refugees in biblical proportions — waiting to be airlifted to American suburbia. But the export was selective. In true eugenicist fashion, Trump wanted white bodies that appeared intact — wholesome enough to fit the fantasy. So the architects of this refugee 'crisis' didn't send the barefoot meth heads or the cousin who thinks 5G causes liberalism. They sent the 'better poor whites' — the ones who could still say 'Yes, sir' without spitting out a tooth. Clean shirt. Church background. Desperation with decorum. Those who didn't qualify were left behind — still in shacks, still invisible. No funding drives. No Elon Musk tweetstorms. Just the slow erasure of those who had once patrolled the walls of apartheid and were now its abandoned children.
IOL News
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- IOL News
The Great Tsek: What a Meme Can Tell Us About White South Africa's Real Escape Plan
TikTok memes of Afrikaner panic distract from the real betrayal — the liberal white brain drain that quietly fled with privilege intact. Gillian Schutte exposes the projection economy of whiteness. Image: Supplied By Gillian Schutte South African humour has once again taken root on TikTok: white migration parody. These aren't real departure videos. They're satires, staged and edited by mostly middle-class white South Africans depicting Afrikaner "refugees" exiting the country hoping for a whiter, brighter future in America. In these clips, families from places like Brakpan or Boksburg pack up bakkies with Koo tins, whisper solemn goodbyes to their gardens, and strap confused boerbols into the front seat. A child in a Springbok jersey cries as the family heads for Texas. The captions read 'Goodbye Ouma, Hello Walmart' or 'Last Braai Before the Border.' They mock the idea of white panic — but with a particular target: those visibly unsettled, unskilled, and poorly equipped for the post-apartheid world. What the memes really parody — perhaps unintentionally — is a long-standing pattern of flight dressed up as foresight. The title these meme-makers don't always explain is The Great Tsek. Tsek, in township slang, is a riff on voetsek — the Afrikaans 'get lost,' reinterpreted as f**k off. And this is precisely what has unfolded over the last 30 years: a long, layered, racially coded f**k-off from the promises of democracy. TikTok memes of Afrikaner panic distract from the real betrayal — the liberal white brain drain that quietly fled with privilege intact. Gillian Schutte exposes the projection economy of whiteness. Image: Supplied The meme-makers themselves — often liberal whites living in Cape Town, Joburg's loftier enclaves, or abroad — aren't innocent observers. Besides appropriating a black term like they were its originators, they are, in many cases, the relatives of the original exodus: the liberal brain drain that quietly fled in the early 2000s. Those earlier departures weren't filmed. They were notarised. The First Great Tsek involved no bakkies, no tears, no Steve Hofmeyr soundtracks. Just bank transfers, EU passports, elite university placements, and farewell brunches in suburbs soon renamed for foreign consulates. These were the whites who had enthusiastically embraced the Mandela moment, benefited from post-apartheid appointments, property prices, and the glow of being progressive — and then left before transformation could rearrange the hierarchy too fully. Now, sipping flat whites in Vancouver, Berlin, or Perth, they share the latest TikTok parody, laughing at the working class Brakpan family panicking at the threshold of irrelevance. 'We're not like them,' they say — from safe distances, in sanitised democracies. But they are. Their performance is more discreet. Their fear was just better funded. This is textbook projection. Mock the thing you once were. Create distance from the part of yourself still invested in your fleeing. And flee they all did — from Die Swart Gevaar. No longer shouted through loudspeakers, the old apartheid fear now mutters itself into euphemisms: 'service delivery,' 'crime,' 'we had no future there.' The fear wasn't of violence — it was of governance. Of becoming irrelevant. Of no longer being the protagonist in the national story. AfriForum, of course, recognised the panic for what it was — useful. Faced with the growing embarrassment of 40,000 impoverished Afrikaners — living in informal settlements, outside of the racial myth of white economic success — they rebranded them as refugees. It was a clever narrative sleight of hand. The poor white problem became the persecuted white minority. Enter Trump. Primed by AfriForum's curated crisis, he expected to rescue stoic farmers — rugged, land-owning, God-fearing Calvinists. What he got was a loose assortment of unskilled, economically displaced white South Africans hoping that whiteness still had trade value. It did not. They became punchlines again — this time in the American meme economy. 'You're not coming here to own land,' one creator quipped. 'You're here to mow it.' Others were more blunt: 'You're replacing the Mexicans,' and from Black American creators, 'We won't be washing your underwear.' Meanwhile, the original liberal leavers remain untouched. They laugh from repurposed precincts in Melbourne or glassy co-working spaces in London. They repost the memes, relieved that someone else is now carrying the visible burden of white decline. This is the theatre of displacement. The poor white panic becomes a caricature. The liberal white exodus becomes invisible. What unites them isn't class or tone, but the impulse to tsjek. The memes are funny. The imagined garden gnome goodbyes. The dramatics about Idaho and replacing Boxers with Walmart. But the real theatre happened earlier — in embassies, in bank offices, in the offshoring of conscience. And Die Swart Gevaar, ever-morphing, ever-haunting, continues to animate both the satire and the silence. South Africa is left with the consequences — a thinning middle class, an unfinished national project, and a meme economy that disguises historic betrayal. And, in the end, whether they left with satire or suitcases, with Koo tins or capital gains, they all did the same thing: They all f**ked off in the end. * Gillian Schutte is a South African writer, filmmaker, and critical-race scholar known for her radical critiques of neoliberalism, whiteness, and donor-driven media. Her work centres African liberation, social justice, and revolutionary thought. ** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.
IOL News
13-05-2025
- Politics
- IOL News
Whiteness, Trekking and the Spectacle of Persecution
Why are white Afrikaners framed as victims while brown-skinned refugees face harsh realities? Gillian Schutte delves into the complexities of race, migration, and historical narratives in the context of Donald Trump's refugee policy. Image: Saul Loeb / AFP By Gillian Schutte When Donald Trump offered refugee status to white South Africans, it became clear that whiteness still honours its own kin — globally, psychically, and politically. While brown-skinned refugees are shackled, deported, and held without trial in desert jails, Afrikaners were framed as the persecuted. Trump spoke of 'genocide' against farmers and dispatched America's welcome. The spectacle was complete — a rerun of old scripts in which the settler becomes the victim and the empire opens its gates not to the wretched of the earth, but to the discomforted custodians of colonial memory. They left with visas, suitcases, and nostalgia — a motley procession of pilgrims fleeing transformation. They cited crime, collapse, and instability. But beneath these explanations lies the deeper reason. The mirror of post-apartheid South Africa reflects something too sharp to bear — the end of centre-stage whiteness. The erosion of assumed status. And so they trek again. This is not the Great Trek of wagons and rifles. It is the soft trek of displaced entitlement. No fanfare. No anthem. Just the silent movement of whiteness away from discomfort and toward reabsorption into a global order that still centres it. The United States, itself built on the sacred blood of stolen land, provided the perfect terrain for this next trek. Trump's offer was more than a policy. It was sanctuary in sameness. Whiteness recognising itself in the face of dislocation, and offering a way back into its fold. But there is no trek without violence. Video Player is loading. Play Video Play Unmute Current Time 0:00 / Duration -:- Loaded : 0% Stream Type LIVE Seek to live, currently behind live LIVE Remaining Time - 0:00 This is a modal window. Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window. Text Color White Black Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Transparent Window Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Transparent Semi-Transparent Opaque Font Size 50% 75% 100% 125% 150% 175% 200% 300% 400% Text Edge Style None Raised Depressed Uniform Dropshadow Font Family Proportional Sans-Serif Monospace Sans-Serif Proportional Serif Monospace Serif Casual Script Small Caps Reset restore all settings to the default values Done Close Modal Dialog End of dialog window. Advertisement Video Player is loading. Play Video Play Unmute Current Time 0:00 / Duration -:- Loaded : 0% Stream Type LIVE Seek to live, currently behind live LIVE Remaining Time - 0:00 This is a modal window. Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window. Text Color White Black Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Transparent Window Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Transparent Semi-Transparent Opaque Font Size 50% 75% 100% 125% 150% 175% 200% 300% 400% Text Edge Style None Raised Depressed Uniform Dropshadow Font Family Proportional Sans-Serif Monospace Sans-Serif Proportional Serif Monospace Serif Casual Script Small Caps Reset restore all settings to the default values Done Close Modal Dialog End of dialog window. Next Stay Close ✕ History has recorded this. My own lineage traces back to some of its early architects. Tjaart van der Walt, my ancestral uncle, moved into the Karoo and Eastern Cape interior during the frontier wars — into territories inhabited by the amaXhosa, the Khoekhoe, and the !Ora. There, land was seized, cultures were obliterated, and the rhetoric of civilisation marched hand-in-hand with brutality. My great-grandparents, Johan Pieter van der Walt and Hester Venter, were not warriors, but engineers of the white spiritual code. They helped build the first Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk in Middelburg — a sanctified laager in which Blackness was cast outside of God's favour, and land theft was moralised into divine instruction. This kind of history does not dissolve with migration. It travels. It informs the body, the posture, the speech. When Afrikaners claim refugee status, they are not only crossing borders — they are carrying a legacy of dominance that has never been publicly mourned. Psychoanalysis tells us that what is unprocessed festers. And so the guilt that was never named becomes projected as threat. The former beneficiary recasts themselves as the hunted. The discomfort of equality is rebranded as persecution. Hermann Giliomee maps this psychic architecture in The Afrikaners: Biography of a People. He writes of the laager mentality — the encircling of identity in times of perceived threat. He shows how Afrikaner nationalism was forged through a blend of Calvinist chosenness and settler trauma. Always chosen. Always suffering. Even in power. Especially in power. What is taking place now is another encircling. A soft siege. Except this time, it's not around a farm or church or town. It is around the idea of whiteness itself — its right to exist unchallenged. America becomes the next laager. Its conservative suburbs, evangelical churches, and racial hierarchies offer a new enclosure in which whiteness can breathe freely again — untroubled by questions of land, labour, or history. But there is always an outside to the laager. And it is always marked. While white South Africans are welcomed as 'refugees,' brown-skinned men with tattoos — many fleeing gang violence in Central America — are deposited into holding cells, criminalised before they speak, assumed guilty by skin and story. Their claim to safety is questioned. Their identity is scrutinised. They are reminders of how refuge is racialised. How the gates of the empire swing open only for those who mirror its founding myth. The Afrikaner trek to America is not a neutral act. It participates in this economy of racial privilege. It reinforces the idea that some displacements matter more than others. That some pasts deserve asylum, while others are punished into silence. And yet, those who trek now speak in hushed, melancholic tones. Their language is grief-coated, but the grief is for the fading of supremacy, not for the lives lost in its service. They mourn a world that no longer bends toward them. They carry a sadness born of de-centering. This melancholia is not harmless. It turns outward. It becomes anger. Projection. Myth. The 'farm murder' narrative, inflated beyond statistical reality, becomes a global meme — a rallying cry for white preservationists across continents. It is the displaced guilt of colonial violence, returning as spectacle. And the violence continues — quiet, bureaucratic, and structural. Every place granted to a white South African refugee is a place denied to someone fleeing genuine structural abandonment. Every narrative of 'Christian family values' masks another that is censored. Every visa is a decision about who is seen, and who is discarded. There is always blood in the trek. Always violence in the story of movement when whiteness seeks safety in sameness. This migration is not a rupture from history — it is its continuation by other means. The Afrikaner arrival in America will be welcomed, prayed over, and celebrated in spaces that still refuse to name conquest. But the ghosts will arrive too. The land does not forget. The unconscious does not release what has been buried. And eventually, even the trek loses its holiness. Because without truth, the journey is just repetition. A looping spectacle of evasion dressed up as exile. Why are white Afrikaners framed as victims while brown-skinned refugees face harsh realities? Gillian Schutte delves into the complexities of race, migration, and historical narratives in the context of Donald Trump's refugee policy. Image: IOL * Gillian Schutte is a South African writer, filmmaker, and critical-race scholar known for her radical critiques of neoliberalism, whiteness, and donor-driven media. Her work centres African liberation, social justice, and revolutionary thought. ** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.
