Kith and Kin: a phrase from old Middle English of the 1300’s, meaning “friends (Kith) and relatives (Kin).
NOT WELCOME
There’s one thing that the Trump Administration has made very clear. Immigrants are NOT WELCOME in the United States. Even those that were welcomed in the past, like the Haitians escaping gang rule, or the Venezuelans fleeing the Maduro regime, are now shown the door. They settled here, they work here, they raise their children here. Those refugees got Temporary Protected Status, legal standing here in the United States. Now, Donald Trump is telling them – “You must leave”.
That is, except for one “exceptional” group of people (exceptional – forming an exception, rare – Merriam-Webster Dictionary). The Trump Administration went far out of its way to find the Afrikaners and literally invite them to America. So who are they?
Boers
The Dutch explored and settled the Southern tip of Africa in the late 1600 and early 1700’s . They established a trading post at Cape Town, and settled the surrounding territories. Their descendants in Southern Africa were originally called the “Boers”. When the British took over the territory around Cape Town in the 1800’s, many of the Boers moved north in the “Great Trek”. They established farms and ranches and their own countries, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. The largest city in modern South Africa with five million people, Johannesburg, is located in that region.
Like the American settlement of the West, the Boers and later the English, didn’t recognize the land ownership of any native populations living in the area. The Bantu people had the land, but were under invasion from the Zulu tribe. This led to conflicts between the tribes and with the “settlers”; particularly as the Boers took over more and more territory.
The British also fought a series of wars against the Boers, in the late 1800’s, and ultimately brought the Boer countries into the greater British colony of South Africa. My grandfather (Mom’s side) fought for the British in the Second Boer War as a young man in 1900.
Apartheid
There remained a division between English speaking South African whites, and those whites descended from the Boers who spoke Afrikaans, a Dutch dialect. They are the modern Afrikaners.
In 1934 the British gave the nation of South Africa self-rule within the Commonwealth. Voting in South Africa was restricted to whites, and in 1948, the Afrikaner dominated National Party gained the majority. They instituted a strict plan of racial segregation called Apartheid, denying anyone of “color” (including migrants from India and Pakistan as well as Black Africans and folks of mixed race) the vote. Strictures were worse than even the Jim Crow segregation of the United States. Separate neighborhoods, schools, and government institutions were set aside for white, black, mixed or Asian communities.
The National Party remained in power until the 1990’s, when civil unrest became so great they were forced to grant rights and the vote to people of “color”. In 1994 Nelson Mandela of the Africa National Congress, imprisoned under apartheid for 27 years, became the first majority elected President.
Not surprisingly, when the Black majority gained power, they began to redistribute the land and wealth away from the minority whites. Afrikaners in particularly felt the brunt of the new majority rule, losing a lot of the privileges they held under Apartheid. Now, thirty years after, the white Afrikaners of South Africa claim to be “persecuted” by the majority government their own ancestors controlled for generations.
Victims
Which brings us back to the original question: why is the Trump Administration bending over backwards to prioritize Afrikaner immigration to the United States? On a purely political level, it might be because of Elon Musk, himself an Afrikaner who migrated first to Canada and then to the US. Musk donated $240 million to the Trump Campaign, and then lent his influence to the “DOGE” cuts of the first 100 days of the Administration.
But there’s a more important “kith-ship” between the leaders of the Administration and Afrikaners. Part of the common ideologic core of the Stephen Miller/Steve Bannon/Project 2025 mentality is white male victimhood. They claim that the “woke” changes of the past decades in the United States hurt the “regular white guy”, unfairly. Much like the Afrikaners, they claim that the changes in America that allowed minorities and women to advance in business, education, government and the military, are at the expense of “white guys”. They’re right.
Until the 1970’s, white men had extraordinary (forming an exception, rare) advantage in almost every employment category. Categories that were “women’s jobs”, teaching and nursing for example, were paid less simply because of the gender classification. For minorities, opportunities to advance were truly extraordinary (forming an exception, rare).
Kith
So any changes to make things “fair” were going to impact white men. When more women and minorities were admitted to Ivy League colleges, fewer white men got in. In the finite number of jobs and placements, the competition became much tougher. Many white men, who presumed that they should advance, found that they were no longer entitled, just like their “Kith” the Afrikaners.
So when Mr. Trump highlighted the “plight” of Afrikaners to the current President of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, at the White House yesterday, he wasn’t just “representing” Afrikaners. He was, implicitly, representing all those white, male, “victims” here in the United States, who lost jobs or opportunities to better qualified women and minorities.
It’s all about “Kith and Kin”.
