A group of white descendants of Dutch settlers to South Africa landed at Washington Dulles International Airport last week, part of a new Trump administration program aimed at “Afrikaners in South Africa who are victims of unjust racial discrimination.” The group, Trump officials claimed, were fleeing “white genocide.”

On social media, South Africans turned the departure into a joke, dubbing it the Great Tsek, in a double entendre referencing both the Great Trek — the historic migration of Dutch settlers from the Cape Colony into the interior of the country in the mid-1800s — and the word tsek, an Afrikaans colloquialism that crudely translates to “fuck off.”

The departure was the latest development in a saga that has shocked, worried, and amused South Africans, in equal measure.

The events that led to that flight, and indeed to the executive order that enabled the flight, began during President Donald Trump’s first term, in May 2018. Kallie Kriel, the CEO of an Afrikaner rights movement called AfriForum, and his deputy Ernst Roets, traveled to America to make the case to U.S. officials and diplomats that South Africa’s Afrikaner farmers were being racially targeted and would be harmed by a proposed law that would expropriate land from owners who had not used it.

In Washington, D.C., the men met with then-national security adviser John Bolton and staffers in Sen. Ted Cruz’s office. Roets also secured an interview on Fox News. Tucker Carlson interviewed him about his book, “Kill the Boer,” which the duo were using as a calling card on their trip. In it, Roets argues that since the end of apartheid, South African authorities have done little to protect white victims of farm murders.

Carlson caught Trump’s attention a few months later, when he ran a follow-up segment on “white farm murders” in which the anchor insisted that the government of South Africa was “taking land from white people on the basis of their skin color.”

In response, Trump tweeted, “I have asked Secretary of State @SecPompeo to closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers.”

Kriel’s lobbying trip had been hugely successful — but while he was interested in making global links, the Afrikaner’s main focus was domestic South African politics. He knew the attention the visit had garnered would irritate the African National Congress government, which has been eager to safeguard its international reputation for peace, stability, and racial harmony, since it was first elected into power in 1994.

America was just a handy backdrop: For AfriForum, the real prize was increasing its reach and influence back home in South Africa, where Afrikaners have played a significant role in national affairs since the arrival of the first Dutchman at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652.

During the apartheid era, Afrikaners largely saw themselves as a self-sufficient white tribe of Africa. Their leaders were insular and distrusted global political institutions. After all, the Afrikaner nationalist rulers were reviled by the international community, which sanctioned their government and declared apartheid a crime against humanity.

When apartheid was defeated by a negotiated settlement between the Afrikaner government........

© The Intercept