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Afrikaner refugees may be too embarrassed to admit they had it good in South Africa

Ismail Lagardien
By Ismail Lagardien
23 May 2025
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The spaza refugees may find life in the US especially difficult, but don’t expect them to admit they were wrong to leave South Africa. They would sleep on park benches before accepting they actually had it good here.

In life’s mangle of mixed feelings, there is a tendency to pull a single strand, a single truth, from the multiplicity of truths that constitute the world in which we live and attempt to lead functional and fulfilled lives. Any such single strand becomes one’s orthodoxy; it shapes the core of what one thinks about something — anything, for that matter.

You may believe, for instance, that the Afrikaners who sought refuge in Donald Trump’s United States have fled from persecution, and that single story is poured as the foundation of the edifice you wish to build.

It’s a bit like saying Christianity is under threat, based on the attack on a Christian prelate in Pakistan. For what it’s worth, Christians and Christianity have been fundamental in shaping almost every aspect of our daily lives, from the calendars we use to the contours of Earth, of all its lands, continents, seas and explorations into outer space.

We should not overstate that. These achievements coincide with the more than 500 centuries of European dominance extended across the world through empires.

The contributions of dark-skinned people outside the European axis have simply been underplayed… See here, here, here, here and (even) here for those who would imagine that the world was made by the North Atlantic Community of blue-eyed, blonde-haired people, and that that is justification sufficient to prop up status quo patriotism.

There are, however, very many things at play around the #greattsek of 2025. There is more than one truth that should be raised and discussed, not all of which are easy to digest. But more than one thing can be true at the same time. It just depends on which of these truths you wish to highlight or erect an edifice to. There are truths, or claims and statements that are beyond dispute. One of these statements is that people are, in general, free to leave the country of their birth.

Movement of people helped shape the world


I want to appropriate and redeploy the term “geography is not destiny”. One of the great things about our presence on Earth is precisely because humans have moved around the world for as long as one cares to remember — and that is almost always a good thing.

Among the very many marvellous things I learned with my travels and studies of the Silk Road is how hybrid communities were created in the contact between Asian and non-Asian people… “The World That Trade Created: Society, Culture, and the World Economy, 1400 to the Present” was always the second on the list of recommended readings to undergraduates of global political economy. Karl Polanyi’s “The Great Transformation” topped the list.

Anyway, a heavy caveat needs to be inserted here. Some people have “moved” around the world to establish colonies where they subjugated people, abused and oppressed or simply erased people. I am always reminded of European campaigns in North America, which Theodore Roosevelt justified as the most “righteous of all wars” against “savages” who stood in the way of settler colonialism. That’s a story for another day.

Home truths are necessary. One home truth is that if you ask people around the world whether they wanted to live in a country where lawlessness is rampant; violent crime is running out of control; gender-based violence approaches epidemic levels; unemployment (especially among restive youth) is anywhere between 30 and 40%; the police cannot be trusted; electricity supply is unstable and unreliable; cities like Johannesburg, Pretoria or Gqeberha are crumbling, you might not get many volunteers.

I am tempted to include harassment by the SABC to pay for a TV licence when I don’t watch TV, but it’s a problem to generalise from personal experience…

Very many decent people are working at making South Africa a better place; it was never going to be easy…

Before proceeding, I should say that I often miss Minnesota in winter; New York City at Christmas; I pine for Princeton, New Jersey; I think Lake Macdonald in Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park is one of the most beautiful places in the world; and if I weren’t such a massive failure (and made as many wrong decisions as I have) I would have given a limb to teach at Northwestern University on the shores of Lake Michigan. The Melville Herskovitz library at Northwestern once had the largest collection of African studies, and, well, Chicago.

They’re in for a shock


Anyway, let’s get to the Afrikaner “refugees” who left for the US. A lot has been written about the spurious basis of their claims of “a white genocide” (which is just false, more black people are killed in South Africa every day), of “farm murders” (also false, because it excludes black workers or owners of farms, and the evidence does not support the claim of systemic violence against white farmers. It is the “white” part that upsets people…).

The so-called refugees may be in for a shock, and only embarrassment will make them grin and bear the US. They will suffer through all sorts of trauma, as long as they’re away from “those blacks” in South Africa.

The adults among them, may, sooner rather than later, find (assuming they pay attention to macro issues) that since the late 1970s, the US progressively became an extremely difficult country in which to live.

Inequality and poverty have grown and spread. The social safety net that helped secure the benefits of capitalism’s Golden Age, and which ended in the mid-1970s, began to be dismantled by Ronald Reagan, and the Trump-Musk Tryst (with Mary Shelley’s Marjorie Taylor Greene as the blunt instrument) will add the final nails to the coffin of the social safety net.

More and more people need to hold down more than one job to keep their heads above water; very, very many get by with excessive use of credit cards; and some declare bankruptcy because they can’t pay healthcare bills. 

Consider the following conclusion by the Petersen Centre on Healthcare: “Despite over 90% of the United States population having some form of health insurance, medical debt remains a persistent problem. For people and families with limited assets, even a relatively small unexpected medical expense can be unaffordable. For people with significant medical needs, medical debt may build up over time. People living with cancer, for example, have higher levels of debt than individuals who have never had cancer.”

On the plus side, for them, is the fact that they are white, and white people in the US will take care of them. When things go wrong, and they may well, the spaza refugees will be too embarrassed to acknowledge that they made a mistake.

A decade or more ago, I looked at the situation of a family from Guyana, seduced by all things good and great in the US (and there are very many; from the Big Sur to the Grand Canyon), who abandoned their property in Georgetown, Guyana, a rough, tough place, and moved to the US.

Things did not quite turn out well for them. Declared a family member who opted to remain in Guyana: “They will sleep in doorways and park benches before acknowledging they made a mistake to leave behind family and community networks and safety nets of their hometown.”

Social cohesion


Our discussion was about social cohesion, and how much of it is based on family and community networks after a talk I gave on Amartya Sen’s concept of multiple affiliations.

In about 2007/8 I met a young woman who moaned about her damp and dingy London flat, and longed for her family home in the Cape, but she could not get herself to admit that life in Blighty was tough.

There is a massive refugee problem in the world. The United Nations estimated that by the middle of last year, there were “an estimated 122.6 million people around the world who have been forced to flee their homes. Among them are nearly 43.7 million refugees.”

We should not become Suella Braverman, and traduce the plight of refugees and/or asylum seekers!

Having spent time teaching in Karen refugee communities along the Thai-Myanmar border, I did not find a single refugee who arrived in the place of refuge with bags of luggage on chartered flights.

It’s probably harsh, but the spaza refugees are best understood as pawns in the Musk-Trump game, and are useful/useless idiots — depending on your sentiments, which truth you want to use as the foundation for your edifice, and which truths you sequester or hide behind thickets of (quite spurious) claims about persecution. DM

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