The Great White Offload: AfriForum and the Export Scam of the Century

Gillian Schutte

Donald Trump was promised Christian farmers fleeing “white genocide” in South Africa. What he got instead was AfriForum’s charity box of surplus volk: out-of-work bouncers, hairdresser assistants, boarding house managers, and working-class families looking for a better life. If the contents of that consignment had been chicken instead of people, the U.S. Department of Agriculture would’ve shut it down for misleading labelling.

Just as the United States dumped its low-grade chicken parts into Africa through AGOA — wings, necks, gizzards — AfriForum and Solidariteit appear to have tried the same trick with what they perceive as politically expired volk. It was strategic dumping — with a PR budget.

Disguised as a refugee programme, this was AfriForum’s Great White Offload. Ideological offcuts in the guise of human cargo.

The roots of this export scheme reach far deeper. The poor white problem in South Africa emerged in the late 1800s and early 1900s, as economic shifts, drought, and the fallout of the Anglo-Boer War pushed large numbers of Afrikaners into unemployment and despair. These were white people falling out of whiteness — collapsing into visible poverty in a society premised on the illusion of white superiority.

By the 1930s, this so alarmed the ruling elite that the Carnegie Corporation of New York was invited to investigate. Their report didn’t call for inclusive upliftment. It recommended the structural elevation of poor whites into the formal economy — achieved by kicking Black people out of skilled jobs, redistributing state resources to whites, and creating an entire welfare system reserved for the pale and struggling.

Apartheid picked up this baton with fervour. Job reservation, racial quotas, and whites-only benefits became the architecture of white respectability. But by the 1990s, as the democratic transition unfolded, the scaffold was dismantled. Suddenly, whiteness no longer came with guarantees — and many of those once sheltered by policy were left exposed.

Fast-forward to the post-1994 stage play, and the volk were now untouchables. They camped in informal settlements, hoarded cheap liquor, and haunted traffic lights. The Afrikaner elite, having jumped ship from volk socialism to neoliberal capitalism, turned their backs — unless the poor could be used as extras in the next episode of “White Victimhood: Global Edition.”

Enter Solidariteit, which became the Discovery Health of Afrikaner identity — premiums high, benefits selective. And then came Roets, who grew up in Solidariteit, broadcasting his resignation from the union, only to re-emerge in Washington — stroking his chin like a chipmunk on Ritalin, peddling the narrative of white victimhood to any outlet that would listen. He appeared on platforms like Tucker Carlson, warning of a 'white genocide' with the jittery earnestness of a man who mistook his PR script for scripture.

Shortly after, the broader AfriForum brigade landed in the States — armed with press kits, moral indignation, and the trumped-up land expropriation story embellished just enough to pass for human rights advocacy. Their mission: distract from decades of complicity by reframing strategic abandonment as persecution.

What followed was pure spectacle. Farm murders were rebranded as genocide, and economic reform morphed into cultural warfare. Roets preached in polished English to people who think Johannesburg is a city teeming with elephants, tsotsis (gangsters), and safari jeeps — depending on which Indiana Jones film they last watched. President Trump lapped it up — like any white supremacist handed a story that flattered his worldview.

In this exported discourse, the strategic group was no longer white addicts with broken teeth and expired ID books. They were now noble victims — refugees in biblical proportions — waiting to be airlifted to American suburbia.

But the export was selective. In true eugenicist fashion, Trump wanted white bodies that appeared intact — wholesome enough to fit the fantasy. So the architects of this refugee “crisis” didn’t send the barefoot meth heads or the cousin who thinks 5G causes liberalism. They sent the “better poor whites” — the ones who could still say “Yes, sir” without spitting out a tooth. Clean shirt. Church background. Desperation with decorum.

Those who didn’t qualify were left behind — still in shacks, still invisible. No funding drives. No Elon Musk tweetstorms. Just the slow erasure of those who had once patrolled the walls of apartheid and were now its abandoned children.

Once the performative pilgrimage concluded, AfriForum welcomed their intrepid travellers and myth merchants back into their plush offices — no doubt pleased with the global reach of their repackaged grievance. Solidarity moved on to planning more private universities with crests, Wi-Fi, and limited Black people. The ANC muttered outrage — a few late press statements, some faint hand-wringing — but took no decisive action. Ramaphosa remained politically paralysed — too busy carrying out the will of Stellenbosch and the Democratic Alliance (DA) to even consider invoking the word 'fraudulent.'

The fraud lies in how racial nostalgia launders betrayal. Billionaire Afrikaners sip imported whisky while their volk is turned into ideological exports — boxed into narrative, barcoded in sympathy, and recycled as victims for Western political spectacle.

* Gillian Schutte is a South African writer, filmmaker, and critical-race scholar known for her radical critiques of neoliberalism, whiteness, and donor-driven media. Her work centres African liberation, social justice, and revolutionary thought.

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.