On February 7, President Donald Trump issued an executive order “addressing serious human rights violations occurring in South Africa.” The order denounced “blatant discrimination” against “ethnic minorities who are descendants of settler groups” and mandated “a program for the resettlement of disadvantaged ethnic minorities in South Africa who are discriminated against on the basis of their race as refugees.” His actions reflect a long history of American right-wing support for racial injustice in southern Africa, including mobilizing support for apartheid regimes in white Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and South Africa.
South African analysts were quick to point out that Trump’s accusations contained numerous factual errors. Even the Afrikaners he claims are persecuted are unlikely to accept refugee status because South Africa is their homeland. The 1997 post-apartheid constitution, which mirrors the African National Congress’s 1955 Freedom Charter, clearly states that South Africa belongs to “all who live therein”. But President Trump’s fallacy is an example of how white racist nostalgia extends beyond borders.
An essential element in opposing MAGA attacks on human rights in the United States was a new understanding of American history, as reflected in the 1619 Project and many other publications. But for the most part, this discussion focuses on the isolated United States. Scholars such as Ana Lucía Araujo in The Man in Bondage and Howard French in The Birth of the Negro are pioneers of broader world history. But however influential this trend is among historians, it is unmatched in the attention it receives in the media and public debate.
In the world history of white supremacy, the close relationship between the United States and South Africa stands out in centuries of interaction between the two settler colonies from the 17th to the 20th century, with connections both ideological and material. Significant connections between black resistance movements in both countries also date back to at least the early 20th century. But until the end of official apartheid in the 1990s, the closest ties were between white America and white South Africa.
In a short history of the Boer War written in 1901 by the eight-year-old Allen Dulles, who later became director of the CIA, and published by his grandfather, Dulles said that the Boers had landed on the Cape in 1652, but that it was “uninhabited except for a few Indians,” and that “it was not right for the English to come in, as the Boers had the first right to the land.” For Dulles, as for other American policymakers, until near the end of the 20th century it was an axiom that only white people had rights.
The similarities between these two settler colonies were significant. Robert F. Kennedy spoke to university students in Cape Town in June 1966 and said:
I am here this evening because of my deep interest and love for this land, which was settled by the Dutch in the mid-17th century, then occupied by the English, and finally independent. Indigenous peoples were first conquered in this land, but their relationship with whom remains an issue to this day. A land located on a hostile frontier. A land that has tamed its rich natural resources through the vigorous application of modern technology. This land was once a slave-importing nation, but now it must struggle to wipe away the last vestiges of its former bondage. Of course, I’m referring to the United States.
This similarity was matched by a long history of exchange. The concept of African Reserves (later Bantustans) in South Africa was modeled on Native American reserves. As historian John W. Sell has pointed out, in the mid-twentieth century Americans and South Africans debated how to form “racism” in an urbanizing society. The Carnegie Corporation of New York funded both the classic study of the conditions of the “poor whites” in South Africa and Gunnar Myrdal’s The American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and American Democracy.
In the early 20th century, mining engineer Herbert Hoover (later president of the United States) was the founder and director of the China Engineering and Mining Corporation, which sent approximately 50,000 Chinese workers to South Africa to work in the country’s mines. This plan was abandoned in 1911. The mention of this plan was recently removed from Wikipedia, most likely in 2018.
The two countries were unified by anti-communism during the Cold War. South African officials studied the American McCarthyist laws and applied them domestically through the Suppression of Communism Act. In both countries, “anti-communism” became a means of opposing demands for civil rights. Although white racism in South Africa became the focus of international condemnation after apartheid was formally adopted in 1948, the United States and other Western countries systematically opposed sanctions against South Africa for decades until a growing international anti-apartheid movement led Congress to override President Ronald Reagan’s veto and pass the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986.
This success comes after decades of campaigning in the United States and around the world, amid growing international attention in response to resistance on the South African mainland. The treason trials between 1956 and 1961, in which Nelson Mandela and 135 other leaders of the African National Congress were indicted, sparked widespread anti-apartheid action in Britain and other countries. The 1960 Sharpeville Massacre and the 1976 Soweto Youth Uprising sparked even greater waves of protest with new media options. After the formation of the United Democratic Front in 1983, the resistance movement reached a new peak.
After Nelson Mandela’s release in 1990 and the first non-racial elections that saw him become president, there was a worldwide celebration of the end of political apartheid. In later years, it became clear that only a small number of black South Africans joined the elite at the top of a still deeply unequal society. There was disillusionment and dissatisfaction with high unemployment and poverty among the majority black South Africans.
But it is a very different sentiment than the nostalgia for the old apartheid order of white South Africans who left the country and of many who remained in South Africa.
Right-wingers in countries such as the United States, Britain, and Canada have a strong interest in apartheid and regret its abolition. The global anti-apartheid movement has sparked unprecedented public demands for curbs on corporate activities that support apartheid. Just as climate change activists have studied divestment, conservative lobbying groups have studied ways to thwart divestment groups. The sympathy that even liberal Robert F. Kennedy expressed for white South African settlers on a hostile frontier evokes a common ideology that justifies settler conquest. Trump’s executive order can only be understood in that context.
