OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP ON AFRIKANERS, CAPE SELF-DETERMINATION, AND THE FUTURE OF SOUTH AFRICA
Dear President Trump,
We applaud and thank you for the very public stance you have taken on the problems we face here in South Africa. These issues are not new, but for whatever reason, the international community has largely continued to buy into the romantic notion of the Rainbow Nation long after the dream has turned into a nightmare for so many of us here. That you have been willing to speak out so candidly has been extremely helpful.
Your decision to offer refugee protection to Afrikaners has had a profound effect on our society in general and on Afrikaners in particular. Once again, we thank you, but we are writing to you today to ask you to consider an alternative solution - one we believe to be better for Afrikaners, better for South Africa’s other marginalised peoples, and, most importantly of all from the United States’s perspective, better for you.
Africa is our home. We can flee and it is a statistical fact that many have chosen to do so, but to flee is to surrender. When Americans were transforming an untamed frontier into the most advanced and powerful nation on earth, we were transforming Africa’s south into the most advanced and powerful nation in Africa. When Americans fought world tyranny, fascism, and communism, we stood with you. We stood with the best when it came to technology, medicine, art, and literature.
In all sincerity and with great respect, we don’t want your pity, we want your help and support to defend our people and our civilization here in Africa.
Since its relatively recent formation in 1910, South Africa has had many well publicised challenges. What is all too often overlooked is that their essence lay in the fundamental and profound differences between the various peoples who can happily coexist when they cooperate on equal terms, but who rightly oppose the domination of one by the other.
Afrikaners and other minority groups do not need a new home. We love the one we have, we just need to be able to make our own decisions and to decide for ourselves how we want to be governed as opposed to having that dictated to us. This should be understood instinctively by all - in legal terms, we want to be able to exercise our inalienable and unquestionable right to self-determination and to pursue our economic and social development according to the policy we have freely chosen.
In South Africa, for many peoples, democracy does not mean agency. Instead, it has been rendered a performative process which, as election results since 1994 empirically demonstrate, leaves minority communities powerless and at the mercy of the national majority. We vote, but we have no control over how we are governed, even in the parts of the country where we form the majority.
Many South Africans share a Western outlook and heritage. Where our government has allied itself with China, Russia, and Iran, we are more ideologically aligned with the US and Europe.
President Trump, we want you to consider an alternative foreign policy towards South Africa. We are part of a movement striving to create a homeland for those who share this Western character and outlook, where we can live, as international law prescribes, according to the values we ourselves have freely chosen.”
The majority of people in the Western Cape and surrounding areas share this Western character. Since 1994, most have never once voted for the ANC, but they have never been governed by anyone else. Afrikaans is the most widely spoken language, not just by white South Africans, but also by the so-called ‘coloured’ people, many of whom have experienced marginalisation under both white and black-led governments alike.
Our own homeland - a revived Cape of Good Hope, Cape Independence - will do more for Afrikaners and other minorities than refugee status ever can.
Critically, we are not asking for altruism. The Cape of Good Hope has much to offer its allies. The strategic significance of Southern Africa and the Cape Sea Route is well understood, as are the South African government’s growing alignments with powers increasingly hostile to Western interests. No outcome would better serve the long-term strategic interests of the United States and its allies than the peaceful emergence of a democratic, Western-aligned partner at the southern tip of Africa.
Polling has consistently confirmed that the people of the Western Cape favour a referendum on Cape Independence. Unsurprisingly, the political establishment has done all that it can to prevent the Western Cape people being heard on this issue.
Our request, President Trump, is this: If you want to help Afrikaners and other minorities in South Africa in the way that offers us a multi-generational future on the African continent, we ask that the United States publicly support the democratic right of the people of the Western Cape to determine their own constitutional future through a referendum, and to engage directly with both the South African National Government and the Western Cape Provincial Government to encourage such a process and to emphasise that its democratic outcome should be respected.
We stand at a crossroads. We cannot exist outside of Africa. Our languages will be lost, our cultures absorbed, our flame extinguished. We have earned our place in the history books; our fight now is to secure our place in the future. Help us to do that.
Yours sincerely,
Phil Craig
For and on behalf of the Cape Independence Advocacy Group
