How the US far right bought into the myth of white South Africa's persecution -- The Guardian

[erronis]

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/mar/10/how-the-us-far-right-bought-into-the-myth-of-white-south-africas-persecution
Eve Fairbanks

A long read with lots of good background. Essentially, the story told by the captive media is not the reality.

When Trump granted white South Africans refugee status, he was echoing a falsehood about Black people taking revenge for years of brutality. But no one flourishes in a repressive police state

There's a little town in the scrub in South Africa - a full day's drive from the country's big cities - that has become perhaps the most scrutinised place on earth, given its size. It is 9 sq km (3.5 sq miles) of suburban-style houses harbouring about 3,000 people, with a main drag, a municipal swimming pool, one gas station and some pecan farms. Nothing of consequence ever really happens there, a fact the townspeople take as a point of pride. And yet over the past three decades, dozens of English-language news outlets have made a pilgrimage to it, often more than once. The New York Times alone has run four dedicated profiles. The essays have kept pace year after year, quoting the same people over and over, even as nothing of note occurred. There's been no war, no disaster.

That changelessness is the point. No people of colour are allowed to live in the town, called Orania. The name is a nod to the river that runs nearby. Orania's founders established it in 1991, the year after South Africa's best-known Black liberation leader (and future president), Nelson Mandela, was freed following 27 years in prison.

Understanding that Mandela's liberation meant that white-minority rule was coming to an end, the founders trekked into the desert, bought a disused mining town wholesale and established a colony. Laws permitting - indeed, mandating - spatial segregation by race had just been abolished in the country, so they declared the town private property. Orania's founders said they wanted to run an experiment: could people of European descent live in South Africa without relying on people of colour to do manual labour, pump their petrol and clean their houses? In Orania, they stressed, white residents would do such work.

Orania's founders also foresaw a brutal race war, predicting that the population of the town would grow to 10,000 and its ideals would spread across an entire nearby province, drawing in hundreds of thousands.

[malaise]

1. BookmRked

Thanks