Can Black South Africans be Afrikaners?

The recent news that over 1,000 South Africans have been granted refugee status in the United States has sparked an unexpected debate about identity.

According to reports, the Donald Trump administration’s programme, ostensibly designed for “Afrikaners” fleeing alleged persecution, has approved not just White Afrikaans speakers but also Coloured South Africans, Indian South Africans, and even people in interracial marriages with Black partners.

The awkward question no one asked for

This raises an uncomfortable question: if the US is granting Black South Africans refugee status under an “Afrikaner” programme, does that mean they’re recognising them as Afrikaners? Or does it suggest the entire premise is more about politics than cultural identity?

The traditional definition of Afrikaner

Traditionally, the term Afrikaner has been tied to White, Afrikaans-speaking South Africans descended from Dutch, French Huguenot, and German settlers. It’s a cultural and linguistic identity that developed over centuries, intertwined with a specific historical narrative and, yes, apartheid.

But language doesn’t see colour

Here’s where it gets complicated. There are millions of Coloured and Black South Africans who speak Afrikaans as their first language. They share the same taal, eat the same food, tell the same jokes. The numbers tell their own story: today, roughly six in ten Afrikaans speakers in South Africa are Black or Coloured.

Yet historically, they’ve been excluded from the Afrikaner identity by those who insisted it was defined by race as much as culture. White nationalists claimed the language exclusively, dismissing other dialects as substandard and their speakers as lesser.

Who owns the definition?

Marlene le Roux, a Coloured disability rights activist in Cape Town, cuts to the heart of the matter when discussing claims of Afrikaner persecution: “When they say they’re being persecuted because they’re Afrikaner, what they really mean is because they’re White,” she says. “But the rest of us who also speak Afrikaans, who’ve carried the trauma, who’ve had to make peace with a language we didn’t choose, where do we fit into that story?”

It’s a question with no easy answer. Former university rector Thenus Eloff, who is White, argues that being Afrikaner has never just been about race, though he knows that’s how the world sees it. For him, it’s simpler than that: “It’s a self-identifier. You can be an Afrikaans speaker and not claim the identity.”

The irony runs deeper still. Historical records show the term Afrikaner was first used to describe mixed-race people in the Cape, not White settlers. The identity’s transformation into something racially defined came later, shaped by nationalism and eventually apartheid. Now American bureaucrats are apparently deciding who qualifies, likely without understanding any of this messy history.

The contradiction exposed

The reality is that the US refugee programme exposes a fundamental contradiction. If Trump’s administration truly believes Afrikaners face genocide, yet approves Black South Africans under that same programme, it suggests they either don’t understand the term or, more likely, the entire scheme is less about protecting a specific cultural group and more about broader immigration politics.

The problem with boxes

This mess highlights a broader issue: racial classifications themselves are increasingly meaningless in a world of mixed families and fluid identities. How do you classify a child with one Black parent and one White parent? What about grandchildren of interracial marriages? The US programme reportedly approved people in mixed relationships, which raises the question of whether their children would qualify as “Afrikaners” too.

In modern South Africa, families are wonderfully complicated. Siblings can look different races. Partners cross cultural lines. Children grow up speaking multiple languages at home. Yet here we are, trying to squeeze complex human identities into neat little boxes invented centuries ago for far uglier purposes.

Rewriting identity from abroad

For South Africans watching from abroad, it’s a strange spectacle. The definition of Afrikaner, which caused so much division and pain during apartheid, is now being rewritten by American bureaucrats who likely couldn’t tell you the difference between Afrikaans and Dutch.

Perhaps the most South African irony of all: an identity that was once violently exclusionary is now being defined inclusively, but only by those who have no real stake in what it actually means.