NKENKE KEKANA: Unravelling twisted race classification

The recent executive order of US President Donald Trump inviting "the ethnic minority descendants of settler groups" to that country has sparked an unprecedented debate about race in SA.

Trump and SA-born and US billionaire Elon Musk has offered refugee status to the "disfavored minorities" whose "properties are being seized without compensation".

This bizarre offer is assumed to target white Afrikaner people although the order does not specifically mention Afrikaners. It is, however, encouraging that many prominent leaders of this community have rejected the offer.

The heart of the land question in SA lies in the history of dispossession by white Europeans from the black African majority. Today, the majority of the most productive land in South Africa still remains in the hands of a minority white population.

There is no evidence of any properties belonging to the so-called descendants of settlers being confiscated.

The South African Constitution and the laws that have been passed guarantee security of tenure and land is only expropriated through market value compensation, after a lengthy process, which can at any stage be challenged and arbitrated in and by SA's courts, which are known to be credible and fair in their dispensation of justice in SA.

It is ironic that the architects of apartheid colonialism today cry foul for being discriminated against because of their race.

The Afrikaners who are globe-trotting and telling the whole world that they are victims of racial discrimination are disingenuous and shortsighted and their campaign has backfired. Their business interests are bound to suffer more if the Trump administration imposes tariffs on SA, especially on the country’s agricultural produce such as fruit and wine.

Also, if Trump decides to kick SA out of the US's preferential trade agreement known as the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), it may block that country's access to the entire continent and push many African countries closer to China.

The descendants of the settlers in South Africa have been in this part of Africa much longer than the Trump ancestors have been in America and yet they are being identified as refugees. Afrikaners are ethnic South Africans, apart from their origins, and they belong nowhere else except in this part of the continent.

There are more than four million white South Africans here and more than fifty percent of this grouping call themselves Afrikaners. It is a fact that the majority of farmers who work the most productive agricultural properties are Afrikaners.

Perhaps Trump wants these Afrikaners to come to the US to bolster that country’s fledgling agricultural produce as farmers and labourers replacing the repatriated Mexicans.

In SA, the most productive land is in the hands of a population grouping that makes up seven percent of the population of nearly sixty million citizens.

Trump’s order is misinformed because the private property rights of the white population, like all South African citizens, are protected.

Contextually, if we are to digest the issues perhaps it is important to revisit the history of the Afrikaners in South Africa.

The majority of Johan Anthoniszoon "Jan" van Riebeeck and his two ships that docked in the Cape in 1652 (employed by the Dutch East India Company) were mainly of Dutch origins.

In 1688, the French Huguenots arrived in the Cape Colony as refugees escaping from religious persecution from the Catholic monarchy in France.

In 1836, the Cape Dutch and the Trekboer, together with the Huguenots, made up the majority of the Boers Voortrekkers who trekked away from the British rule in the Cape Colony in search of greener pastures northwards.

Although many of the Great Trek leaders who led the movement like Hendrik Potgieter, Piet Retief, Piet Uys, Janse Van Rensburg, Louis Tregard died in numerous battles with the native African tribes, but nevertheless, their offspring consolidated their political power and formed what was internationally recognised as the Boer Republics; the ZAR (Transvaal) and the Orange Free State.

The French Huguenots, for their part, settled in the Cape Colony - they established the wine farms and built a lucrative wine industry.

The French Huguenots as part of the Afrikaner political elite also used their administrative skills to run the country after the 1910 Union of South Africa.

Many of the political elite in the last hundred years of apartheid rule were all descendants of the French Huguenots. Names of notable Afrikaner leaders such as de Klerk, du Plessis, Cronje, de Villers, du Toit are all descendants of the French Huguenots.

They came to Africa as refugees and settled here and it is unthinkable that they will migrate again as refugees to the US, now seemingly the land of Donald Trump.

It was only after the Anglo-Boer war and the birth of the Union of South Africa that a language called Afrikaans was used in schools and in the Dutch Reformed Church.

The language itself is a creole language, a fusion of many languages. Although the word Afrikaner was used historically to refer to different peoples of the British/Dutch Cape Colony; race was prefaced to the Afrikaner after the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910. It was only after the 1910 whites-only administration that the Afrikaner was reborn as a whites-only descriptor.

Today, if the more than two million white Afrikaners can come together with the four million Coloured people who speak Afrikaans and have overlaps in cultural practices, they could be a significant portion of the population in SA.

But because 'the pure race" white identity dilutes the potential for the Coloured population to be Afrikaner, the descendants of the Cape Dutch, Trekboer and the Huguenots form a small cultural bloc that is being courted by the likes of Musk and Trump.

We need to remove the veil of ignorance on the Afrikaners and apartheid racial classification.

It was indeed the Apartheid Nationalist Party who in the 1940s twisted history to suit their racist "own affairs" apartheid policies. The "Afrikaners" have evolved over many years and it has to be nurtured to accommodate the true history of its evolution.

Is it not absurd that descendants of Simon Van der Stel, the first Governor of the Cape Colony, who may reside in Stellenbosch are perhaps today also talking about the "pure white race'.

Simon was the son of Adriaan van der Stel, an official of the Dutch East India Company and his mother, Maria Lievens, was a Malay mixed-race descendant.

Simon Van der Stel will be categorised as a Cape Coloured. The town Stellenbosch and the naval town called Simon Town are named after him. Today, his farm Constantia is one of the wealthiest land masses in Cape Town.

The history of the Coloureds is coupled with European colonialism, indigenous Khoisan and Malay slave influences. This mixed ethnicity forged a new identity and cultural practices that are strongly tied to the history of South Africa. The Afrikaners of Colour have as much claim to Afrikaans as a language and the Afrikaner as a distinct identity community.

One day in the not-so-distant future the children of the "regte Afrikaners" (apart from those who might once again be refugees in the Americas) and those of the Afrikaners of colour or Afrikaap may come together to acknowledge their common African ancestry.

We must move beyond the teachings of the racist propaganda and the twisted history books of the Apartheid National Party ideologues and embrace the true meaning of Afrikaners.

The Afrikaners are as ethnic as all other tribal groups in South Africa. They are part of a South African nation with its rich diversity and history. The land belongs to all who are willing to work it and no particular racial group must disproportionately own the land in South Africa.