AFRIKANERS who call themselves white Africans arrived in America to the warmest welcome ever given to any African refugee in human history. And, it is interesting history, given that the first Africans to the United States arrived in chains and they were black. And they had been abducted and sold to work as beasts of burden in sugar, cotton and tobacco plantations that would make America great. The American beneficiaries of slavery, mostly the southern states called it ‘the greatest material interest in the world’.

When that interest was threatened by the northern states that had not benefitted from by the slavery of black Africans the result was the American Civil War. It is critical to note that, to date, the cause of that civil war is still being disguised as abolitionist. And this is notwithstanding that the inconsistent outcomes tell a different story.

The ‘freedom’ of the black African slaves came without compensation for the millions of lives harvested to make America great. It came without tenure of land on which to eke out a living. It came without relevant affirmative actions to correct historic injustice. It came without access to the economic infrastructure the ‘freed’ black African slaves had helped put together to make America great.

Racist US President Trump has promised white America a restoration of the greatness originally founded on the servitude of black people and it is a promise that secured him the white supremacist vote that put him in the White House the second time around.

It is the same greatness he has invited the white Afrikaner criminal beneficiaries of apartheid privilege from South Africa to enjoy.

In that respect, the granting of apartheid criminals special refugee status that was never offered to the black African victims of their crimes against humanity is an invitation that comes with an ominous sense in which the US president’s meaning of ‘making America great again’ is ‘overtly’ Ku Klux Klan. His racist immigration policies are simultaneously rounding up black African economic refugees fleeing  the havoc US foreign policies have created in Africa. And just as the first black people arrived in chains to make America great, these ones are also leaving in chains purportedly to make America exclusively great for apartheid white criminals.

Those falling victim to Trump’s racist immigration policy include black South Africans still excluded from the benefitting from their own economic heritage by the legacy of apartheid. And this is all happening at a time Africa is commemorating Africa Day under the theme, “Justice for Africans and People of African Descent through Reparations”.

In light of this theme, Trump’s kind gesture to the ‘white Africans’ whom he claims are victims of genocide and the South African government’s appropriation of white-owned farms without compensation carries more historical freight than is initially apparent. And this is something African scholarship has sadly missed.

The black Africans who arrived as slaves chained to make America great arrived in Jamestown, Virginia, on 20 August 1619. It is pertinent to emphasise that both the black African slaves and the white  slave masters were immigrants without ‘native title’ to the land and its resources.

On the other side of the world in South Africa, the first white settlers established the settlement that would become Cape Town on 6 April 1652 and were led by the Dutch Jan van Riebeeck of the Dutch East India Company. This African instance was different in the sense that black Africans had native title to land while the white settlers were immigrants without native title to anything.

What this means is that black Africans have been in America for 406 years and white settlers who now call themselves Afrikaners and an African tribe have been in South Africa for 373 years.

The difference in years between the settlement of black people in America and the settlement of white people in South Africa is 33 years and it translates to a whole generation. If anything, the generation makes black Africans more native or indigenous to America than the Afrikaners’ can claim to be native or indigenous to Africa as an entitlement to land tenure.

It is an argument that Malcom X posited in his autobiography that black Africans had earned a right to land through their labor during slavery. His proposal was that since integration of races in America was proving impossible, the best solution could be an African state among the self-governing ‘United States’ of America.

A  United States administration whose tradition of interference in African domestic affairs should be hard-pressed to oppose the proposal today given its support of the exclusively white state Afrikaners are building in South Africa on the basis more than three centuries of settlement in South Africa gives them native entitlement to land.

It is again important to point out that after settlement in 1652, the white settlers who would become Afrikaners engaged in the slave trade that sold black South Africans as the beasts of burden destined to make America great.

An iconic instance of that practice was Sarah ‘Saartjie’ Baartman a Khoisan woman who was  sold by a Dutch farmer named Peter Cezar to Alexander Dunlop, a British military surgeon who supplied British circus showmen with animal specimens. This means that the African woman was sold as a freak animal specimen to generate wealth out of the racial curiosity of European racists.

The critical case in point here is that it is ancestors of these champions of apartheid that supplied the black African slaves whose lives were harvested to make America great who are now being welcomed to enjoy the greatness their ancestors invested in over three centuries ago. And it is a greatness that has put glass ceilings on the black survivors of the holocaust.

And, after the Second World War, the Afrikaners are the very same ones who championed apartheid.

In his inauguration speech, Mandela defined the crime of apartheid as “the experience(s) of an extraordinary human disaster that lasted too long”.

The EXTRAORDINARY CRIME logically pointed to EXTRAORDINARY CRIMINALS deserving EXTRAORDINARY PUNISHMENT.

History identifies the EXTRAORDINARY CRIMINALS as the very same Afrikaners whom US President Trump is granting special refugee status in the United States.

The extraordinary crime of apartheid became South Africa’s official government policy in 1948, ironically the very same year the United Nations Human Rights Charter was commissioned as contingency against such abuses.

African scholarship has missed all  the foregoing as markers of disrespect of black Africans by white people both as our guests in Africa and as our hosts in their own Europe.

It is actually astonishing to imagine that when Mandela visited the United States after his release from 27 years in prison, the most curiously arrogant question he got from the racist audience that attended his press interview at Town Hall on 21 June 1990 was why he was friends with Fidel Castro and Muammar Gaddaffi  who had supported his struggle against apartheid and not the Americans and Europeans:

(We) get somewhat disappointed by the human rights models you have held up since being released from jail. You have met over the past six months three times with Yasser Arafat, whom you have praised. You have told Gaddafi that you share his views and applauded him on his record on human rights and his drive for freedom and peace around the world and you have praised Fidel Castro as a leader of human rights and said that Cuba was one of the countries that’s head and shoulders above all others in human rights in spite of the fact that documents at the United Nations and elsewhere show that Cuba is one of the worst. I was just wondering, are these your models of leaders of human rights? And, if so would you want Gaddafi and Arafat or Castro to be your future friends in South Africa?

The great Mandela’s answer was:

One of the mistakes which some political analysts make is to think that their enemies should be our enemies. That, we can and will never do. We have our own struggle which we are conducting. We are grateful to the world for supporting our struggle. But nevertheless, we are an independent organizsation with its own policy. And, … our  attitude towards any country is determined by the attitude of that country to our struggle. Yasser Arafat, Colonel Gaddafi, Fidel Castro support our struggle to the hilt. There is no reason whatsoever why we should have any hesitation about hailing their commitment to human rights as they are being demanded in South Africa. Our attitude is based solely on the fact that they fully support the anti-apartheid struggle. They do not support it only in rhetoric. They are placing resources at our disposal. 

It is again shocking to imagine was Mandela was only removed from the US ‘terrorist list’ in 2008, which was 18 long years after he was released from prison; 18 long years after the extraordinary apartheid criminals who had jailed had had their own restrictions lifted for freeing ‘the most popular prisoner that ever lived.’

It is equally shocking to imagine that notwithstanding that apartheid become racist South Africa’s official policy, the same year the United Nations Universal Human Rights Charter was promulgated in 1948, General Assembly ‘only labelled’ apartheid as a crime against humanity (resolution 2202 A (XXI) on 16 December 1966 and the Security Council only endorsed the determination (Resolution 556) on 23 October 1984.

For tolerating all this abuse, the extraordinary criminals who championed apartheid and their Western allies celebrated the ‘great’ Nelson Mandela for his policy of FORGIVENESS WITHOUT  VENGEANCE.   They celebrated him for not defining and talking about the extraordinary crimes he had forgiven without vengeance.

The foregoing is the backdrop against which the abuse South African President Ramaphosa has been subjected to by US President Trump must be viewed.

And, it is the same backdrop that must inform the African Union (AU) in its commemoration of Africa Day under the theme, “Justice for Africans and People of African Descent through Reparations”.

How does Africa even imagine getting any reparations when her own children tolerate so much disrespect? How do we celebrate a mother we have helped to strip of all self-respect?