President Donald Trump may have thought he was helping Afrikaners by welcoming them as “refugees”, but he has dealt a setback to South Africa’s own home-grown haven for them — Orania.
A record monthly figure of 2,528 South Africans arrived in the US in July, the US state department reported, for a total of about 10,500 since the first batch arrived in May last year under the programme Trump created in terms of his executive order, “Addressing egregious actions of the Republic of South Africa”.
The programme is open to all “persecuted” minority groups — an unknown number of coloureds and Indians have also taken advantage of it, along with the masses of Afrikaners and English-speaking whites.
But the main motives that are driving the refugees — high crime rates and aversion to BEE — are the same ones that fuel migration to Orania, the Northern Cape kernel for an Afrikaner homeland set up in the early 1990s as apartheid collapsed.
“Orania must realise that to some extent we are in competition with the US,” the CEO of the Orania Movement, Joost Strydom, tells the FM. “It’s something we must understand, and plan accordingly.”
Some residents of Orania have already left for the US under the Trump programme, he says. It hasn’t been “a significant exodus”, but “I suppose there’ll be more”.
Economic opportunity is a priority for anyone, Strydom acknowledges. “We can’t compete with the US economic foundation. Orania is still a pioneering community. Our economy has been growing … but we cannot compete with a Western, first-world country’s economy.”
The vision of a sustainable Afrikaner homeland depends on attaining a critical mass of residents — the population is at 3,000 now, but Strydom says long-term infrastructure plans are designed for 10,000 people. “We need to expand.”
The lure of the US for Orania residents and others was clear during a visit to the enclave late in July by Chris Wyatt, a retired US Army colonel with a popular YouTube channel — he says he has an audience of 130,000 — who has become a point man for South Africans on the Trump refugee programme.
About 120 people, some from as far away as Gqeberha, attended a “meet and greet” event with him, one of dozens around the country he is hosting during a two-month trip to South Africa. He makes regular trips to the country, where his YouTube channel has a substantial fan base.
“People just want to meet me,” he tells the FM. “I try to say that in a humble fashion. I’m not trying to be arrogant, but people want to meet me. So that’s what the trips are about.”
The current trip is also about rugby — Wyatt has tickets for most of the All Blacks matches in August and September. He says Naas Botha — who has himself recently moved to the US, though not with the refugee programme — is a friend, as is Steve Hofmeyr.
“People who are lazy or ignorant, or have preconceived notions, aren’t willing to open their ears, so I frequently get attacked by all kinds of people, particularly political leftists, black supremacists and white leftists,” he says. “I’ve been called a white supremacist, but I challenge anyone to find anything I’ve ever said that said one group is better than any other.”
“Refugees” he has interviewed include former ANC MP Lawrence McDonald, now living in Tampa Bay, Florida. McDonald told Wyatt that the last straw was being ordered by party whips to vote down the attempt to start Phala Phala impeachment proceedings against President Cyril Ramaphosa in December 2022.
Another former ANC member, Roelf Meyer, is now ambassador to Washington, where he arrived on July 24. One of his priorities, he has said in media interviews, is to persuade the Trump administration to rescind the February 2025 executive order that, among other things, created the refugee programme.
But for South Africa, is the exodus a case of “good riddance”, perhaps?
“Some of the people who have registered [for the programme] are some of the most unambitious South Africans,” says Phiwokuhle Mnyandu, South Africa-born assistant director of the Center for African Studies at Howard University in Washington.
“These are people the country can afford to shed at any time. The Americans really love star immigrants, someone like an Elon Musk, like Pik Botha’s grandkid, who are going to kick butt and take names. But these are not that.” Venture capitalist Roelof Botha, grandson of the former foreign minister, now lives in Silicon Valley. He is a partner in Sequoia Capital and recently joined the board of SpaceX.
Many of the South African arrivals in the US are in for a rude shock, Mnyandu tells the FM. “America is no country for old men.”
At least eight of the South Africans who arrived in the US under the Trump programme have since returned home. Wyatt, on his YouTube channel, frequently criticises those South Africans who complain that life as a refugee in the US is too hard.
Many of them had comfortable middle-class lives in South Africa. McDonald told Wyatt that refugees on the plane to the US with him had included “a wealthy Indian family”. One of the couples Wyatt has interviewed is Werner and Naomi Stolze, who ran a thriving piano sales and repair business in Pretoria. They have three young children, two of them black girls who they adopted as babies.
