White refugees in SA: fear, fiction, or reckoning?

IN THE decades since apartheid ended, one of the lingering questions that continues to quietly shape conversations — often behind closed doors — is this: what really happened to white people in South Africa and Namibia? It is a question loaded with discomfort, political risk, and emotional complexity. But it must be confronted, not to divide, but to understand, to heal, and ultimately, to move forward as a country still scarred by a deliberately engineered racial order.

- DR IQBAL SURVÉ

Let us begin with a difficult truth: “whiteness” itself is a construct, one built for power, not for identity. It is not a culture. It is not ancestry. It is not a shared language or history. Whiteness was invented to justify hierarchy, exclusion, and economic dominance under colonialism and apartheid.

Today, that very construct has become something of an embarrassment, not because of individual white people, but because of the violence, dispossession, and social engineering it was used to justify.

When apartheid fell, many expected a retribution that never came. South Africa chose reconciliation over revenge. White South Africans remained in the country, kept their homes, businesses, and communities, and were welcomed into a democratic project that, in truth, they had historically resisted. But with political power shifted, many white South Africans began to feel like refugees in the land they once controlled. Not legal refugees, of course — but cultural and psychological ones, displaced by a changing society that no longer centred them.

This discomfort is not new. Nearly two centuries ago, the Great Trek saw Afrikaner settlers leave the Cape Colony in response to British rule and laws, including the abolition of slavery, that threatened their social and economic dominance. It was not simply a journey into new lands, but an escape from the loss of power, rebranded as the pursuit of freedom.