Note: Jamil F. Khan continues the Miami Institute’s forum, “Casting Afrikaners: Land, Identity, and Shaping History for a Future,” curated by Anell Stacey Daries. Daries’ first essay in the forum analyzed the U.S. government’s portrayal of Afrikaners and underscored the importance for us all to maintain critical eyes on “how history has been used to classify subjects as either perpetual victims or unrelenting perpetrators. This casting has deep and enduring repercussions as it dictates who receives empathy and aid and who is left behind.” Here, in the below post, Khan emphasizes the importance of “Daries’s use of the idea of ‘casting’,” writing: “The casting of Afrikaners as victims should therefore be understood not as a single act of representation but as a sustained political process. Its selections, repetitions, omissions and circulations gradually establish the appearance of an obvious reality, and in response I suggest that our work is to keep the analytical spotlight on the recurring, but always adapting process of social construction, or more imaginatively put: casting.”
The contemporary representation of Afrikaners as victims, circulated globally by the US government, should not be understood as an event in which an existing reality is simply described differently. It is a process through which a particular political subject is produced. Anell Stacey Daries’s use of the idea of “casting” is generative precisely because it draws attention to this process. To cast someone is not merely to describe them. It is to assign a role, establish the conditions under which that role can be recognised, and place the subject within a larger narrative. This requires selection, repetition, amplification, omission, staging and circulation. In the case of Afrikaners, the emerging role is that of an endangered white minority: the threatened farmer, the dispossessed landowner, the persecuted cultural community and, ultimately, the refugee.
These figures do not emerge spontaneously from history. They are assembled from particular experiences and historical memories, connected to one another until they produce a seemingly coherent account of contemporary Afrikaner life. The political significance lies in the fact that this account can make a particular interpretation of South Africa appear self-evident. This distinction matters because the contemporary Afrikaner victim is not simply discovered. The subject is made. Constructing a political narrative in which Afrikaners are principally understood through suffering, using fragments of a history in which suffering exists, is a process driven by intent. It requires the continual arrangement of facts, images and memories into a particular moral composition.
The process of casting is cumulative. As one would imagine casting for a movie role, the character is first formed in the imagination starting as a fantasy of the writer. In order to bring this character to life for its onscreen adaptation, actors, their talents and their likenesses have to be assessed for suitability. Suitability is assessed by how convincingly the actor delivers the traits, stories, histories and habits of the character. Some call for total transformation to be convinced, but the point is always to be convinced, so that we can believe. In this production of Afrikaner vulnerability, stories about white farmers under threat are repeated until the farmer becomes representative of Afrikaner experience. Images of rural insecurity are detached from the broader crisis of violence affecting South Africans across race and class. The history of British imperial violence is repeatedly recalled, while the subsequent consolidation of Afrikaner political power becomes a footnote that now pales in comparison to contemporary suffering. Land ownership is presented as ancestral belonging rather than as the outcome of colonial and apartheid property regimes. Transformation is represented through the language of loss. Each element reinforces the others to produce a script by which the experience of Afrikaner lives can be animated. The resulting image is that of a people whose security, culture, property and belonging are under attack, and who are in need of empathy and assistance.
Such a narrative does not need to account for the full complexity of South African history. Its effectiveness depends partly on simplification. The threatened white farmer is visually and emotionally legible. The historical processes through which land became concentrated in white hands recede into a shadow, barely detectable. A frightened minority can be represented through an image; the structural history of racial capitalism requires explanation. This difference matters because political narratives are not only constructed through what they include. They are also shaped by what they render unnecessary to see.
My earlier examination of Afrikaner identity in a piece titled, “South Africa’s white Afrikaners: Refugees on the run from the shame of their history”, focused on the unresolved relationship between whiteness, Europe and Africa. Afrikaner nationalism developed through a desire to establish an (African) identity distinct from British colonialism while retaining the racial privileges associated with European whiteness. This produced a persistent contradiction: Afrikaners could understand themselves as authentically African while maintaining a racial distinction between themselves and Black Africans. The legacies of these contradictions of integration and separation went on to shape what today is proudly referred to as Afrikaner culture which asserts a rich history of self-determination and conquest, sanitised of all references to the input and exploitation of African people.
Claims to land operate similarly. The figure of the Afrikaner farmer combines several political claims at once. The farmer appears as hardworking, rooted, vulnerable and ancestral. The farm appears as home, inheritance and cultural territory. Ownership consequently becomes evidence of belonging, but land ownership has a history. It is produced through political and legal arrangements that include conquest, dispossession and racialised property regimes. When that history disappears from the account, the contemporary landowner can appear to have arrived at ownership through nothing more than inheritance and labour. The construction of this narrative does not necessarily require fabrication. It requires selection.
Political narratives rarely operate through a single act of invention. They work through accumulation of images, memories, acts of speech; reenacted repeatedly. The hard and sustained work of repetition eventually becomes autonomous and functions as evidence. The Afrikaner victim narrative is therefore better understood as a methodology than as a moment. Genuine experiences are detached from some historical contexts, intensified within others, and arranged around a narrative of collective vulnerability. The resulting subject possesses a moral authority that the Afrikaner, as a beneficiary of historical privilege, does not.
Once Afrikaners are understood primarily through victimhood, the political meaning of South Africa’s transformation changes. Land redistribution can be represented as an attack on innocent property owners rather than an attempt to address historical dispossession. Employment equity can be represented as discrimination against white people rather than an intervention into inequalities produced by apartheid. Black political authority can be represented as majoritarian threat rather than democratic transformation. The end of white political dominance can be narrated as the beginning of white persecution. The result is a political inversion: the consequences of dismantling racial privilege are presented as evidence that the former beneficiaries of that privilege are now being oppressed.
The refugee figure makes this inversion particularly clear. To describe Afrikaners as refugees requires more than demonstrating that some individuals experience insecurity. It requires constructing a narrative in which South Africa itself has become hostile to the Afrikaner citizen. The refugee is displaced from a location that ought to be home. Producing the Afrikaner refugee therefore depends upon re-establishing the unquestioned prior claim to belonging, that was co-constructed through the displacement of Black South Africans.
The international circulation of this figure demonstrates the consequences. Once the Afrikaner is understood as an endangered minority, South Africa can be recast as a persecutor of a special kind: a persecutor of whiteness. In the hands of the global movement towards normalising white supremacy as a social organising principle, the figure of the Afrikaner refugee exemplifies whiteness under threat of a changing world. Particularly infuriating in the white supremacist imagination is the perceived humiliation of a people once lauded for their ironfisted resolve in cultivating one of the most famous race-based crimes against humanity - an inspiration to global white supremacy, and worthy of defence.
The contemporary politics of Afrikaner victimhood takes dispersed experiences and gives them a common meaning. It takes historical fragments and constructs a genealogy of persecution. It takes individual insecurity and produces collective vulnerability. It takes the loss of political and economic privilege and translates it into the language of oppression. Its central achievement is the conversion of historical power into contemporary innocence.
The past is therefore not merely being remembered incorrectly. It is being operationalised. Particular histories of Afrikaner suffering are selected because they can perform political work in the present. The history of British imperialism establishes a genealogy of victimhood. The history of Afrikaner cultural formation establishes exclusive belonging. The history of land ownership naturalises possession. Contemporary violence supplies the visual and emotional evidence that completes the composition. The resulting political subject is an endangered Afrikaner minority whose protection can be presented as a matter of justice.
This is why the process matters. Its power lies in the coherence created between otherwise disparate claims. The casting of Afrikaners as victims should therefore be understood not as a single act of representation but as a sustained political process. Its selections, repetitions, omissions and circulations gradually establish the appearance of an obvious reality, and in response I suggest that our work is to keep the analytical spotlight on the recurring, but always adapting process of social construction, or more imaginatively put: casting.
-Jamil F. Khan
Dr Jamil F. Khan (they/them) is a scholar, author, and PhD in Critical Diversity Studies at Wits University. Their work uses creolisation as a framework for queering race, while exploring themes of belonging, stigma, social construction, and the making of abject societal figures. Their sociopolitical memoir ‘Khamr: The Makings of a Waterslams’ has been awarded the 2021 Humanities and Social Sciences Award for Best Biography, as well as the 2021 University of Johannesburg Debut Prize for South African Writing in English.
References
Daries, A. S. (2026). Casting Afrikaners: Land, Identity, and Shaping History for a Future. Miami Institute of Social Sciences.
Khan, J. (2026). South Africa’s white Afrikaners: Refugees on the run from the shame of their history. shado.
Steyn, M. (2001). Whiteness just isn’t what it used to be: White identity in a changing South Africa. State University of New York Press.
Steyn, M. (2012). The ignorance contract: Recalling what we want to forget. Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research.
Erasmus, Z. (2017). Race otherwise: Forging a new humanism for South Africa. Wits University Press.
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McClintock, A. (1995). Imperial leather: Race, gender and sexuality in the colonial contest. Routledge.
Plaatje, S. T. (1916). Native life in South Africa: Before and since the European war and the Boer rebellion. P. S. King & Son.
Walker, C. (2005). Landmarked: Land claims and land restitution in South Africa. Jacana Media.
Erlank, N. (2003). Gender and nationalism in South Africa: Boer commando women and the South African War, 1899–1902. Cambridge University Press.
