Not exiles, but stayers

Ryan Else’s Critic essay on white South Africans as “exiles from the Rainbow Nation” deserves reflection. It is true that many white South Africans, and Afrikaners in particular, feel politically estranged from the post-apartheid state. It is true that the ANC’s racial vocabulary, its fixation on “transformation”, and its astonishing indifference to state failure have created a deep reservoir of mistrust. 

But it should be pointed out that this political estrangement is not limited to Afrikaners. In the 2024 national election, the African National Congress lost its outright majority for the first time since 1994, falling to just over 40% of the vote and being forced into coalition. More recent polling suggests the trend has not reversed and the ANC now sits at roughly 39%, with its ideological cousins in the EFF and MK parties at around 6% and 10% respectively. Taken together, support for the parties most explicitly committed to the old grammar of racial transformation, state patronage, and liberation-era redistribution now sits well below the commanding heights it once enjoyed. The deeper discontent, in other words, is national rather than ethnic. Afrikaner mistrust may be its sharpest expression, but millions of black South Africans have also wearied of a governing elite that still speaks in the idiom of historical redress while failing to provide the ordinary conditions of a functioning society.

It is true, too, that the new Expropriation Act has intensified these fears, and that Donald Trump’s administration chose to elevate them into an international cause by explicitly offering refugee settlement to Afrikaners it said were facing “government-sponsored race-based discrimination”.

But Else’s piece, I think, rests on a misdescription of what is actually happening. White South Africans are not, in any broad sense, becoming exiles. They are not fleeing en masse. They are not leaving their homes behind in some Zimbabwean-style final rupture. A small number have indeed taken up Washington’s offer. Reuters reported that roughly 2,000 white South Africans had entered the United States as refugees by the end of January 2026, and later reported that the total had risen to about 3,500 since the programme began in May 2025. That is not nothing, but it is fewer than the population of Orania, the Afrikaner self-determination enclave on the Orange River. But it is not remotely the same thing as “thousands and thousands” leaving South Africa in a civilisational panic. 

The white population in South Africa has remained relatively stable around 4.5 million measured between 1996 and today. This despite an estimated cumulative net white outflow of roughly 503,562 people since 2001. When Robert Mugabe took power at Zimbabwean independence in 1980, the country’s white population was about 220,000, and 2022 census figure puts it at just 24,888, a tenth four decades later. 

A larger number of white South Africans are doing what middle classes do in most non-first world countries by sorting themselves into pockets of order. In South Africa, that has meant semigration to better-governed areas, above all the Western Cape where the pro-Western and pro-free market Democratic Alliance governs provincially and most of the municipalities. It also includes concentration in particular cities and towns where daily life remains highly functional for those with means. It shows a population adjusting pragmatically to cost, work, schools, municipal competence through state-proofing.

By state-proofing, I mean the deliberate construction of social, economic, and cultural capacity that reduces dependence on a hostile or unreliable state without demanding its overthrow. Afrikaner civil society has redirected its energies toward competence, resilience, and self-organisation. This turn toward self-reliance attracted familiar criticisms. It was accused of insularity, parallelism, and even separatism, charges not unlike those levelled at contemporary grievance-based movements on the Right in Europe.

South Africa’s state-proofing impulse produced durable institutions: schools, universities, labour organisations, a network of organisations that litigate for the protection of minority rights (white South Africans being the demographic minority), welfare networks, and cultural bodies that function within the law while reducing vulnerability to political hostility. This parallel competence has, over time, reshaped the terms on which participation in a plural society takes place.

And the result is one of the great ironies of post-apartheid South Africa. White South Africans are, on average, materially better off today than under apartheid, precisely because apartheid tethered them too tightly to the state. In 2019, average per capita income among white South Africans was comparable to the national per capita income of Denmark, while average income among black South Africans was closer to that of Bangladesh. This outcome cannot be attributed to state-proofing alone but it does show how the loss of political power can accelerate rather than arrest the cultivation of independent capacity.

If white South Africans really believed South Africa as such had become unliveable, one would expect a much larger overseas exodus. Instead, many appear to be making a more recognisably South African calculation to remain in the country, move to where the roads work, where the municipality functions, where the schools are good, where the private hospitals are excellent, and where one can still have what Europeans would regard as an enviable middle-class life (the average white household in South Africa owns nearly two vehicles).

All that being said, I share Else’s concern about the Expropriation Act. The danger of the Act lies precisely in the fact that it widens the zone of discretion around nil compensation, normalises a more aggressive political posture towards property rights, and does so in a governing culture that has made little secret of its hostility to inherited patterns of property ownership. That is serious enough. One need not caricature the law to oppose it. The Act does not amount to an open racial confiscation clause, nor does it suspend constitutional constraints overnight. Its menace is subtler and, in some ways, more insidious because it introduces new uncertainty into the security of property rights while inviting future governments to test just how far “public interest”, “justice”, and “equity” can be stretched. 

But critics weaken their case when they pretend the Rubicon has already been crossed. The stronger argument is that the Act moves South Africa closer to a politics in which property is less secure, discretion more ideological, and the temptation to turn legal powers into political instruments materially greater.

Zimbabwe remains the caution that hangs over every South African argument about land, property, and state power. It would be foolish to dismiss the comparison altogether. Once a government begins to treat property not as a protected foundation of social order but as an instrument of political morality, the degradation can be swift. But gratefully South Africa is different, our courts remain more consequential, our economy is more complex, and our political incentives are not identical. The serious case against current trends is therefore not that the destination is already predetermined, but that the direction of travel is troubling enough. One may reasonably fear a gradual erosion of property rights without pretending that the final chapter has already been written. To say that “the objective is clear, and how it will be applied is obvious” substitutes certainty for judgment. 

Moreover, the article’s own preferred authorities point in a different direction from its thesis. AfriForum, which Else cites warmly, has for years emphasised self-reliance, community organisation, rural development, and creating conditions for Afrikaners to remain in South Africa. Its broader worldview is not one of national evacuation but of endurance by building institutions, strengthening communities, deepening self-management, and therefore staying put. The Solidarity Movement said in May 2025 that “by far, most Afrikaners will remain in South Africa”, and explicitly framed its mission around creating conditions for Afrikaners to stay and contribute sustainably to the country. AfriForum’s own public language similarly emphasises self-reliance and growing self-determination in the communities where Afrikaners “live and work”.

That is why I am cautious about the “exile” framing. It imports into South African reality a melodrama that flatters both the American right and the South African left. For Washington, it produces a usable morality play about white victims of anti-white persecution. For Pretoria and its defenders, it allows any serious minority grievance to be dismissed as Trumpist theatre. In both cases, the result does not help any South Africans.

The white South African response to this has been not so much emigration as selective secession from dysfunction

The post-1994 settlement in South Africa is failing because a state built on liberation legitimacy and racial arithmetic has struggled to produce ordinary competence. That failure expresses itself in many ways: collapsing infrastructure, anaemic economic growth, predatory patronage, and a politics that still speaks as if the central question is demographic representation rather than whether trains run, taps work, and police solve murders. The white South African response to this has been not so much emigration as selective secession from dysfunction.

Else is right to insist that elite Western commentary often trivialises minority fears in South Africa. He is right that many outsiders prefer to talk about Trump and Musk rather than about the people supposedly at the centre of the story. But his own account goes astray by replacing one simplification with another. White South Africans are not best understood as exiles from a lost rainbow nation. They are better understood as stayers in a country they no longer trust, concentrating where life remains good enough to make staying rational.

It’s less “last chopper out of Saigon” than “move to a well-run municipality, find a good school, install solar, get private medical aid, and carry on”.