Theatre of white refugees from South Africa

As my flight landed in South Africa on Sunday, I looked in vain for the plane that was due to take off with the first 49 white, Afrikaans-speaking “refugees” of the many thousands who are supposedly going to find safety from racist persecution in Donald Trump's United States.

- Gwynne Dyer

Then I realised that they were probably taking a charter flight from a different terminal. It would have been a lot cheaper to buy them tickets on a scheduled commercial flight, but the notion of “refugees” demands a certain amount of drama, and this piece of theatre needed all the help it could get.

They aren’t actually refugees. They are bit players in a secular passion play staged by Mr Trump, probably at the suggestion of his more-or-less-faithful sidekick Elon Musk, who grew up very rich in apartheid-era South Africa and shares Mr Trump's belief in the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory.

Mr Musk is also fighting his own private battle against the Great Replacement by having as many white babies as possible. You'd think the world’s richest man would realise that his goal could be more efficiently achieved by artificial insemination, but it turns out that he prefers the human touch.

Another way to get up white numbers, especially in the United States, is white immigration, but that is quite tricky because white people in most other countries don’t want to move to the United States. You can see why not, given the violence, the politics and the dreadful health care system, but it therefore puts a very high premium on white refugees.