This article was first published by DC Journal on 27 July 2026
In this respect, Meyer recently told South African radio presenter Clement Manyathela that he was working hard to persuade President Trump to abolish the refugee admissions program for Afrikaners and other racial minorities facing racial discrimination, which has been deeply humiliating for the South African political elite.
The D.C. establishment should approach Meyer with caution. His political formation occurred inside the old National Party government that administered the policy of apartheid. He rose through its ranks and later served as the defense minister and constitutional affairs minister of the White minority government. In that world, race-based legal discrimination was treated as ordinary and often productive statecraft.
It is unsurprising that he and the government he now represents treat the hundreds of post-1994 race laws operating in South Africa as unremarkable, even as those laws primarily burden racial minorities.
This reality is documented.
According to the Index of Race Law, which I maintain on behalf of the South African Institute of Race Relations, the democratic government has adopted at least 122 acts of Parliament since 1994 that contain provisions making a person’s race or skin color a legally relevant factor. Most of these statutes are justified as “redress” for apartheid. In 2026, they continue to impose barriers on generations of racial minorities born long after the end of apartheid, denying them equal citizenship in their own country.
A recent illustration in July came with Bokkieweek, an Afrikaner sport and cultural gathering for schoolchildren.
The event drew condemnation from senior government figures, including the national sport minister, Gayton McKenzie. Parliament’s education committee has also called for a formal investigation into Bokkieweek’s “inclusivity” and the singing of traditional Afrikaner folk songs.
Afrikaner identity in South Africa is treated as perpetually stained by what President Cyril Ramaphosa calls “the original sin,” regardless of whether the participants were born under apartheid or 30 years after it ended. Afrikaners who wish to remain Afrikaners must wage a constant, expensive and demoralizing battle against the political elite for mere moments of normality.
Then there is land.
The government’s 2017 Land Audit claimed that Whites own 72 percent of South African land, a statistic endlessly recycled to justify coercive redistribution of private property. Afrikaner civil rights group AfriForum, itself gratuitously accused of “high treason” for attempting to restore Afrikaners’ standing abroad, undertook an analysis and factsheet recently that exposes the figure as a fabrication built on methodological sleights of hand.
First, the Land Audit’s racial breakdown applied only to a narrow subset of individually owned agricultural land and small holdings, 38 million hectares out of South Africa’s total 122 million hectares, while excluding trusts, companies and state-owned land that together constitute the majority of the surface area. Measured against the whole country, White-owned rural land is closer to 21-22 percent.
Second, where official racial data was unavailable, the audit resorted to analyzing surnames to assign race, a method the report itself acknowledged carried significant risks of error. For instance, if former ANC finance minister, Des van Rooyen, owned farmland (like many politicians today do), his land might have been counted as White-owned, even though he is Black.
Third, the underlying data suffered from inconsistencies across government sources (discrepancies exceeding 1 million hectares in total land area), numerical errors, and reliance on 2015 figures that were already outdated when published.
This distorted picture supplied the political rationale for the 2024 Expropriation Act, which also drew ire from official American sources.
The act permits the state to take private property and pay no compensation whatsoever, for “land reform.” This is impossible to reconcile with international legal norms on private property, with the South African Constitution’s property clause, with the American understanding of just compensation, or with South Africa’s common law heritage. The act has been publicly defended almost exclusively as a tool for transferring land from White to Black South Africans, though in practice the land is more likely to end up under state control and political patronage like in neighboring Zimbabwe.
Persecution involves serious harm or the well-founded fear of it on account of race, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or a similar immutable characteristic. It almost always involves some kind of targeted victimization in public policy.
Afrikaners, and Afrikaner farmers in particular, have been systematically demonized in elite and media discourse as the archetypal embodiment of historical evil. State policy discrimination, however, is broader. It targets all racial minorities while simultaneously harming the Black majority principally through the economic distortions and patronage politics that race law inevitably produces.
All South Africa’s racial minorities, being Afrikaners, English-speaking Whites, Indian-descended South Africans, and mixed-race “colored” communities, have shown remarkable resilience, adapting to the discriminatory rules and managing to live happily and even prosper despite the government’s best efforts to victimize them.
That resilience has come at a national cost – skilled emigration and chronically weak economic performance. South Africa has rarely managed to crack 2 percent GDP growth over the past two decades. Many highly capable people have left in search of jurisdictions that treat them as individuals with human dignity, rather than pawns in a demographic game.
None of this complexity is conveyed by South Africa’s new man in Washington.
Roelf Meyer’s task is to rehabilitate the international image of a government that has spent three decades operating an extractive, racialist order under the banner of “non-racial democracy.” The U.S. refugee program for South African racial minorities is a profound humiliation for that elite precisely because it made the mask slip. For the first time in 30 years, an external power has treated the continued persistence of systematic racial discrimination in South Africa as a legitimate ground for protection.
I write as Head of Policy at the Free Market Foundation, founded in 1975 at the height of apartheid and consistently opposed to race-based policy ever since. The same is true of the Institute of Race Relations, founded in 1929, for which I maintain the Index of Race Law.
Both institutions approach these questions from a classical liberal (Americans would say “libertarian”) individualist perspective. We rejected racial domination under apartheid, and we reject racial domination today. It is exactly the “poisonous” far-left extremism “masked as equality” that Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently warned against.
We remain committed to the unfulfilled promise of the 1990s: a non-racial free society in which every South African can live as co-equal individuals possessed of dignity. Until that promise is kept, policies such as the American refugee program for racial minorities are not only defensible, but just.
