Introducing “Casting Afrikaners: Land, Identity and Shaping History for a Future”

Note: This new forum at the Miami Institute for the Social Sciences—titled “Casting Afrikaners: Land, Identity, and Shaping History for a Future”—is curated by Anell Stacey Daries, lecturer at the Centre for the Study of the Afterlife of Violence and the Reparative Quest (AVReQ) at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. Daries has penned this introductory post, to be followed by response essays authored by peers within and beyond South Africa. Focusing on the U.S. government’s relatively recent casting of Afrikaners, Daries underscores in this essay 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.”

In February 2025, the alleged violence directed against an ethnic minority in South Africa was condemned on a global stage. International networks reached across the Atlantic to come to the aid of a people crying out in distress. Images of a sea of crosses, symbolising the purported loss of life, were plastered across screens. The world appeared to be in crisis, and a global superpower claimed to have the solution. Afrikaners, descendants of European colonial settlers who first arrived on South African shores from the seventeenth century, were now refugees, and the U.S. was their proverbial Canaan.

In the Executive Order titled “Addressing Egregious Actions of the Republic of South Africa”, signed by the U.S. President, the South African government was criticised for disproportionate violence targeted against the Afrikaners. Condemning the South African government for its supposed disregard for the well-being of its citizens, the function of the Expropriation Act 13 of 2024, passed by the South African state, was interpreted as a mechanism through which the state could seize the agricultural land of white South Africans without compensation. The Order from the U.S. claimed that this Act in South Africa followed a myriad of domestic policies designed to limit Afrikaner’s employment opportunities, access to education, and participation in industry. According to the U.S. President’s Executive Order, hateful rhetoric and violence experienced by the Afrikaners was incited by the South African state. Consequently, the Afrikaners were no longer safe in a land they once claimed as their own. In purposeful execution, the Executive Order not only portrayed the South African government as a threat to its Afrikaner inhabitants but also to the national security and interests of the United States and its allies. Subsequently, in the wake of this Executive Order, the U.S. government gave, and it took away. On one hand, all aid and assistance given to South Africa was suspended. On the other hand, the U.S. government promoted and facilitated the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees fleeing the reported turmoil they faced in South Africa. The Executive Order disrupted the lives of many and fundamentally altered the terms of engagement between the U.S. and the South African government.

With the passing of the aforementioned U.S. Executive Order and the rhetoric surrounding the granting of refugee status, the U.S. government collectively cast Afrikaners in two roles: first, as a persecuted people, and second, as racially disfavoured landowners. In this essay, I am interested in the apparatus of casting as a tool through which collective narratives are built. In the case of the U.S.’s global representations of Afrikaners in 2025, such dominant narratives tie the group to the land through misleading versions of history, which more often than not draw on nostalgic retellings of lost utopic worlds that presumably changed profoundly after political transitions—in this case, with the formal end of South African apartheid. The nostalgic storytellers involved profess concern with a lost past. However, as I stress in this essay, their project has little to do with history. Rather, these narratives are deceptive and pose a greater threat to geopolitics today. These narratives, designed to shape broader understandings of identity, land rights and the rightful place of Afrikaners, are about shaping a future. Therefore, in these narratives, history—both factual and fictitious—serves merely as scaffolding for a tomorrow. A future built on warped retellings of the past, casting narratives and the subjects thereof as timeless and true. In this essay, I explain the historical context for the rise of this image of Afrikaners as a persecuted people, victims of transition and as racially disadvantaged landowners.

A persecuted people

In 1910, the Union of South Africa was established. In the founding of Union, as a segregationist ‘Anglo-Afrikaner’ state, the tales of Afrikaner suffering under British imperialism firmly took root in the socio-political zeitgeist of the early twentieth century. With the rise of Afrikaner nationalism in the Union, ideas emphasising the Afrikaners’ need for self-reliance and economic independence paralleled moral panics over the loss of racial, cultural, and ethnic purity. Simultaneously, this period bore witness to the strategic disenfranchisement of Black South Africans. Despite widespread suffering, perceived threats to the future and preservation of white South Africans influenced not only the politics of the day but also dominated public discourse. The push for the protection and advancement of white South Africa became the preoccupation of Afrikaner culture brokers, with these interests extending beyond national borders. This movement gained prominence in the 1930s through the publication of the 1932 Carnegie Commission’s Report on the Poor White Problem in South Africa and the 1934 Poor White Conference, where organisations like the Carnegie Corporation of New York provided aid and resources to identify the root causes of white poverty and address fears of racial degradation. With the formation of South Africa as it is known with its current geographical borders, rampant concern with the perceived dangers posed against Afrikaners, and by extension white South Africans, shaped political priorities and contributed to the groundwork for what would later become apartheid. Portraying Afrikaners as a persecuted people depicted them not merely as victims of history but as an ordained people deserving of vindication and redemption.  

Land and the settler colonial imagination

Globally, romanticised images of European frontiersmen conquering untamed—inaccurately described as uninhabited—lands, are common across settler colonial contexts. As colonists' tracks have been stamped into South Africa's soil, issues of land rights, ownership, and access have long been a site of contestation and ongoing struggle within the country. For the Afrikaners, as descendants of European settlers, the open terrain of rural South Africa has played a significant role in shaping a shared collective imagination. In efforts to cast an inherently heterogeneous group as an ethnically, socially, and culturally homogeneous people, narratives of shared suffering following the South African War and politico-economic exclusion under British imperialism served to unite a diverse class-based society under a unified Afrikaner nationalist banner (Grundlingh, 2020, p. 28). To create the origin stories to which this group was to hold true, the bonds to land were reinforced through culturally produced memories expressed across popular media, literature, art, and audiovisual representations (Coetzee, 1986, pp. 14-17; Bothma, 2017, p.8). While urban spaces were depicted as corrupt and dangerous, rural farmland was staged as the Afrikaners' ancestral homeland. The representation of a close relationship between the countryside and the Afrikaners served to justify settler-colonial territorial claims (Coetzee, 1986, pp. 14-17; Bothma, 2017, p. 8). The connection between fatherland and volk was fundamental to constitute identity. As evidenced by the alternative collective name for the Afrikaners, "Boers", denoting farmers, the conquest, ownership and cultivation of the land have been tied to this group. Although this imagery can be traced back to earlier periods of European colonisation in Southern Africa, the image of the pioneer-farmer venturing into the African interior in search of new futures away from British imperial interference gained prominence in the ways in which the Great Trek of the 1830s was memorialised and enshrined in collective memory. Historically significant for its impact on the land and its inhabitants, a hundred years later, the Great Trek Century was invoked as an aspirational symbol of Afrikaner resilience and self-determination in the late 1930s. Today, Afrikaner territorialism fuels protests over the possibilities of land expropriation and reports of the murders of white farmers on white-owned farms. Within the broader context of crime in South Africa today, violent crimes –particularly femicide and violence against women and children—are matters of grave concern nationally. However, amid global awareness of South Africa’s high crime rate, purported violence experienced by white South Africans, with a particular focus on the Afrikaners, is portrayed as the country's most pressing issue following the passing of the U.S. 2025 Executive Order.

By way of conclusion

Throughout the 2020s, there has been an inundation of images across media landscapes broadcasting ongoing genocides, gross human rights violations, and the capitalist-driven oppression of millions. Accelerated by technological advancements, we are exposed to a 24-hour media cycle filtered through echo chambers bolstered by social media algorithms. Beyond gruesome imagery materialising the unimaginable, this period has also revealed that violence and disregard for human life often assume more insidious forms, for example, with the deployment of nostalgic narrative-making. This narrative-making not only weaves in and out of historical truth but can also serve as a justification for shaping a future that prizes certain lives over others. By focusing on the casting of the Afrikaners, this essay sought to illustrate 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.

-Anell Stacey Daries

Dr. Anell Stacey Daries is a lecturer at the Centre for the Study of the Afterlife of Violence and the Reparative Quest (AVReQ), Stellenbosch University. Her research explores the origins, trajectories, and social implications of sciences to do with the human body within the context of South African pedagogical histories. As an extension of her interests, she seeks to explore how notions of gender and race have been constituted and reinforced by science. Through these inquiries, she seeks to understand how history comes to bear on and through the body.