Trump spotlight divides S.Africa’s Afrikaners

Country music and the aroma of pancakes enveloped the “Boeremark”, or farmer's market, outside South Africa’s capital Pretoria where thousands of Afrikaners browsed on a recent Saturday morning.

- Julie Bourdin

Signs written in Afrikaans advertised traditional foods: braided “koeksister” doughnuts, cinnamon-sprinkled “melkkos” porridge, strips of “biltong” cured meat. There were stands of books in Afrikaans, a language linked to Dutch, and racks of khaki clothes associated with Afrikaner farmers known as “boere”.

The peaceful scene was a far cry from claims of fear and persecution that have reached Washington, leading President Donald Trump to offer refugee status to the white Afrikaner minority in February and thousands to apply. But, despite the mellow mood, many at the market told AFP they did feel threatened in post-apartheid South Africa. As “a white person and a boer”, she was a victim of “reverse racism’, said jewellery vendor Cesere Smith, 54. “There is trouble coming,” she said vaguely, welcoming Trump's intervention. “Every person should be proud of who they are, but here we must feel guilty—and that's not right,” Smith said. White Afrikaners are predominantly descendants of Dutch settlers who arrived at the tip of Africa more than three centuries ago. Today they make up most of South Africa’s 73 percent white population. Mainly Afrikaner-led governments imposed the race-based apartheid system that denied the black majority political and economic rights until it was voted out in 1994.