Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau, left, greets Afrikaner refugees from South Africa, Monday, May 12, 2025, at Dulles International Airport in Dulles, Va. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)
Julia Nikhinson of the Associated Press this week shot a photograph that will earn a place in the annals of iconic South African imagery.
It captures the first moments after the arrival of the Afrikaner refugees on American soil.
The Stars and Stripes dangling limply from their hands, they look bedraggled and bemused. It was undoubtedly a long, tiresome journey, in fairness. But there’s enough in their expressions to suggest they were mortified at realising that the pageantry greeting their arrival betrayed the political game they are being used in.
Their landing in the US was orchestrated by a political machine that cares as little for their supposed plight as it does for the deportees going in the other direction.
Back home, a mixture of anger, humour and incredulity greeted the news. The ANC, as it is wont to do, took the great trek personally, insisting a statement that “ours is not a broken or failing state, it is a people’s democracy advancing against the tides of distortion and destructive, divisive narratives”.
But most of us can agree on the reality that the logic that granted 49 people refugee status is founded in falsehoods and misrepresentations. For all of South Africa’s issues — crime being one of its most pernicious — it is an unequivocal fact that no group faces prejudiced, violent persecution.
Regrettably, turning fiction into policy is not just a slight to the country that can be laughed off.
What has emerged as most worrying throughout a week’s reporting is how this week’s act threatens to undermine the solemnity and global appreciation of terms such as “refugee” and “asylum seeker”. These are designations reserved for people who have reached the depths of desperation, who have no other choice but to flee their homes into a foreign land.
President Donald Trump granting refugee status spits on that understanding, potentially risking untold lives in the future.
It was immediately clear that his second term of presidency was not interested in maintaining what we broadly call the liberal world order. That much has been obvious from his protectionist rhetoric, annexation overtures and disregard for multilateral institutions.
Yet this is different. This is the weaponisation, and ultimate barbarisation, of the refugee concept for political expediency. It is immoral, ridiculous and dangerous.
We can do little to halt the capricious whims of the president of the United States. But we can refuse to be a part of it.
South Africa does not have genocide but it does have division — much of it created by the political games that our own leaders play. If there ever was a time to put our bullshit aside and present a unified front to the world, it is now.