In his 1947 diary entry, former US President Harry S Truman once remarked, “The Jews I find are very, very selfish. They care not many Estonians, Latvians, Finns, Poles, Yugoslavs or Greeks get murdered or mistreated as Displaced Persons as long as the Jews get special treatment.” Truman’s frustration stemmed from mounting pressure he faced over the question of Jewish refugees in the aftermath of the Holocaust, particularly as Jewish lobbying groups sought US support for resettlement in Palestine.
Nearly seven decades later, echoes of this logic persist, though in an inverted form. The State of Israel, born out of the Jewish privilege and the very refugee crisis Truman grappled with, continues to actwith a similar exclusivist lens in its treatment of Palestinians. The prioritisation of one people’s security and national survival has repeatedly come at the expense of another’s dispossession, exile and suffering. This reflects not merely the tragic irony of history but a structural continuity: the inability, or refusal, to see justice as indivisible.
Just as Truman lamented in 1947 that Jewish advocates seemed blind to the plight of other displaced Europeans, many now argue that Israel and its allies fail to recognise the full humanity and rights of the Palestinian people. Herein lies a theological and political paradox: the invocation of a covenantal identity as ‘God’s chosen people’ has been mobilised not as a moral responsibility towards others, but as a justification for exclusion, territorial entitlement, and the denial of equal dignity. The sense of chosenness, transposed into statecraft, becomes a modern variant of exceptionalism.
As a result, Israel unashamedly deflects accountability by cloaking political power in sacred legitimacy, claiming proximity to God akin to a refashioned divine right—not of kings, but of Jews over other tribes and races. This article is not about the Jews but the Afrikaners, who similarly invoke biblical election and covenantal chosenness to legitimise neo-apartheid, racism and hatred towards Black South Africans. Like Israel, Afrikaner nationalism constructed a theological scaffolding for political domination, equating their survival and prosperity with God’s will, while dismissing the suffering of Black South Africans as peripheral, necessary, or even divinely sanctioned.
• Afrikaners as God’s Chosen People
The Voortrekkers and the Republican Afrikaners conceived of themselves as a chosen and covenanted people, akin to the Israelites of the Old Testament. This self-image endowed them with a presumed divine mandate to smite “heathen” peoples and to reduce them to their preordained position as perpetual hewers of wood and drawers of water. Such a worldview reinforced the violent subjugation of African communities during the frontier wars, while establishing a theological foundation for racial hierarchy and dispossession.
The origins of Afrikaner nationalism, and with it the racial ideologies that later crystallised into apartheid, have often been traced to a stubborn strain of Calvinism. This theology, shaped through centuries of Dutch Reformed tradition, provided Afrikaners with a worldview that fused race, religion, and destiny. Whiteness was not only material privilege but also sanctified identity, defended through church, family and volk (tribe). To be white was to be chosen; to be Black was to be condemned to servitude.
Strangely, the parallels between Jews and Afrikaners become contradictory at a certain point. The Third Reich’s Adolf Hitlerinvoked the doctrine of Aryan racial superiority (Herrenvolk) to marginalise, persecute and ultimately annihilate Jews. According to this logic, Afrikaners do not regard Jews as full members of their imagined community, since Jews did not fit into Afrikanerdom in the same way that Palestinians, excluded from Aliyah and the Jewish homeland, are denied recognition within Zionism.
In a paradoxical twist, however, Afrikaner nationalism appropriated elements of both Hitler’s racial doctrine and Jewish narratives of chosenness to construct its own identity. From Hitler, Afrikaners absorbed the myth of racial supremacy and separation andborrowed the imagery of covenant, election and divine entitlement to land from Zionism. The fusion of these ideologies produced a uniquely Afrikaner nationalism: one that is simultaneously racial, theological and territorial, and which laid the groundwork for apartheid as both a political system and a sacred calling.
Personal accounts underscore the weight of this theology in shaping identity. Some Afrikaners, when confronted with the reality of whiteness and its enduring privilege, have described feelings of depression, guilt and alienation. Others have attempted to listen to the voices of Black South Africans, recognising the need to confront and dismantle entrenched privilege. However, the shadow of Afrikaner chosenness remains embedded in institutions, churches and social structures. The Gereformeerde Kerk, or Dopper tradition, one of the most conservative strands of Afrikaans Reformed Christianity, epitomised this worldview: insular, rigid and convinced of divine sanction for racial separation.
In their book, The Chosen Peoples: America, Israel, and the Ordeals of Divine Election, Todd Gitlin and Liel Leibovitz explore the profound effects that the concept of chosenness can have on those who embrace it. Although their primary focus is on Jewish identity, they trace the evolution of the idea through diaspora, its crystallisation in Zionism and its role in the ongoing dilemmas of Israel and Palestine. They argue that belief in being divinely chosen can drive political and moral behaviour, justifying privilege for one group, and note that this dynamic occurs in any society where chosenness intersects with power and hierarchy.
Gitlin and Leibovitz also note the American manifestation of chosenness, which emerged with colonial settlers and their attitudes toward Indigenous peoples, later informing US support for the state of Israel. Gitlin and Leibovitz’s work underscores how theological or ideological notions of being “chosen” can translate into political privilege, territorial entitlement and moral exceptionalism—patterns that resonate with the historical and contemporary experiences of both Afrikaners and Zionists.
• Afrikaner Selfishness and their Pursuable Truman (Trump)
It is striking how history appears to repeat itself: a new group of ‘chosen people’ in the form of Afrikaners have also arrived at the American doorstep seeking their special type of treatment. Rather than encountering resistance akin to Truman’s frustration in 1947, they have been welcomed and entertained by a colourful Donald Trump and influential Israeli lobbyists, all under the guise of displacement and persecution.
Notwithstanding apparent ideological contradictions, Jews and Afrikaners do not seem to mind the incongruities between their respective histories and narratives of chosenness. Both groups prioritise their own interests and leverage frameworks of whiteness and imperialism that continue to portray them as exceptional and entitled to protection. As a result, this year has marked a defining moment in US immigration policy.
The Trump administration fast-tracked a controversial initiative under the US Refugee Admission Programme to resettle approximately 3,000 Afrikaners and other minorities from South Africa, alleged victims of racial discrimination. Framed as a humanitarian response to supposed racial persecution and white genocide in post-apartheid South Africa, the programme was swiftly condemned. This has amounted to a racial spectacle, inverting established victimhood narratives to recentre and uphold white supremacy within global imaginaries.
However, this development does not occur in isolation but reflects a deeper transnational pattern of racialised policymaking, what W.E.B. Du Bois famously termed the “global colour line.” Within this enduring hierarchy, whiteness functions as a passport to mobility, citizenship and legal protection, while Blackness and other racialised identities are routinely subjected to suspicion, surveillance and exclusion.
In this context, the US refugee resettlement programme for Afrikaners is not merely an anomaly in immigration practice but a calculated affirmation of whiteness as globally “grievable,” worthy of empathy, institutional action and protective intervention. As Hidetaka Hirota notes, America’s immigration laws have historically been exclusionary, evolving from colonial-era restrictions on the poor to racially biased federal policies, with the “nation of immigrants” narrative emerging only in the 1960s. Trump’s language and approach, therefore, are extensions of longstanding discourses.
At this point, it is safe to argue that settler-colonial privilege is now reframed as persecution. In the discourse surrounding the resettlement programme, post-apartheid measures, especially land reform and racial equity, are portrayed as a “collective existential threat to Whites.” This rhetorical shift co-opts the language of international asylum to legitimise a settler narrative of victimhood. This manoeuvring not only distorts the trajectory of South Africa’s democratic transformation but also reinforces the deeply embedded notion that whiteness is synonymous with civilisation, productivity, and vulnerability.
• Untruthful Afrikaner Narratives and Realities
South Africa’s agriculture began with Dutch settlers introducing crops and techniques, which the British later expanded. Black South Africans faced dispossession under the 1913 Land Act, forced into labour on white-owned farms under the Masters and Servants Acts. Racist policies and exploitative labour have entrenched inequalityand marginalised black farmers while enriching whites, a pattern persisting despite post-apartheid land reforms and labour protections.
Even after apartheid’s official end, many Black South Africans remain stateless, displaced, or severely exploited within the agricultural sector. Farms are often structured along paternalistic lines, with white landowners, or sometimes powerful state actors, assuming a father figure role, dictating the daily lives of farmworkers and their families. Small concessions, in the form of non-market ‘gifts’ or welfare, are granted in exchange for loyalty, obedience and labour, while coercive power ensures compliance. In a 2024 report by The Witness, however, a farm dweller whose family has resided on the same farm for five generations described their living conditions as ‘horrific’.
Complaints are frequently met with eviction, dumping workers on open land with no legal recourse. Often, they are replaced by illegal immigrants who face the same exploitation and racialised abuse. Such patterns reveal the true dynamic: the white farming community, far from being victims, perpetuates oppression, consolidates power and fosters deep resentment, exposing the persistent inequalities embedded in South Africa’s agricultural landscape.
The majority of white South Africans enjoy a quality of life far beyond what most Black South Africans could hope to attain, a legacy of historical economic rigging. Crime patterns reflect these inequalities: wealthier, predominantly white populations are less vulnerable to violent crime, while poorer, Black communities experience higher exposure.
Contrary to popular claims, there is no evidence of targeted, race-based killings of white farmers by the government, and statistics demonstrate that farm murders are not disproportionately inflicted upon white landowners. For instance, in the first quarter of 2025, of the six farm-related murders reported nationally, five victims were Black, and only one was white. These figures illustrate that crime in farming communities is not racially selective but rather driven by socioeconomic conditions, with perpetrators targeting the most visible sources of income and wealth.
The myth of the “white farmer under siege” obscures the real dynamics of exploitation and entrenched inequality. Farms remain sites of structural oppression, where white landowners consolidate power, marginalise Black workers, and perpetuate historical patterns of dispossession. The narrative that white farmers are uniquely victimised ignores the lived realities of Black farmworkers, who continue to face coercion, impoverishment and systemic neglect.
As usual, the ‘chosen people’ are indifferent to their atrocities, yet they claim to be victims of conditions they created.
Siya yi banga le economy!
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