The US-funded charter plane carrying dozens of white South Africans who claim to be victims of discrimination in their country left Johannesburg on Sunday to head to the US where the Trump administration welcomed them as refugees.
The departure of white South Africans who say they were denied work and targeted by violence because of race was a prominent development in President Trump's redefinition of US foreign policy.
Trump has effectively stopped all refugee hospitalizations for those fleeing hunger and war from places like Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. However, he created a swift path to the country for Africans, the white minority who created and led South Africa's brutal apartheid regime.
The refugee process often takes years. But it's only three months since Trump signed an executive order establishing African refugee status to his first cohort heading to America.
Families lined up to check in on a flight in Johannesburg on Sunday evening or at Tambo International Airport said the US embassy had instructed them not to talk to news media. Parents spoke quietly as the child was towing, stacked the trolley high in their luggage.
One of the travelers temporarily cracked a smile when asked if they would miss a sport they missed Africa's favorite sports: rugby and the popular bilton bilton. However, police sometimes rebuke journalists and say they don't want to be hostile to Africans.
A total of 49 Africans were on board the flight, according to a spokesman for the South African airport authorities.
Executives plan to celebrate Africans on their scheduled arrival in Washington on Monday morning, but aid groups, immigration rights activists, the South African government and the public have criticised the refugee initiative and said they will create an ock laugh of a system designed to help the most vulnerable.
Even South Africa's leading African activists say they prefer if Trump provides support to them in order to build a better life at home.
The African refugee programme appears to have deepened tensions due to already tense relations between South Africa and the United States.
Trump equates the South African government's efforts to revoke racial inequality created by apartheid to anti-white discrimination, but South African officials have cast the grant of refugee status on Africans as a politically motivated attempt to distrust the country. The Trump administration criticized the South African government for its close ties with Iran and its strong stance on Israel.
But for many Africans, descendants of European colonists who arrived at this moment about four centuries ago, this moment is beyond politics.
“They're righteously in their hearts, white people will not remain in this country,” said Jaco van der Merwe, 52, of Africanor, who lives in Johannesburg. “I think South Africa is over.”
Van der Merwe said he contacted the US embassy in South Africa to inquire about his refugee status application but had not yet received a response.
The State Department said it received inquiries from more than 8,000 people in March. It is unclear when the government will accept more.
Much of the dissatisfaction among Africans is concentrated on experience in rural communities and tensions over land ownership that remained unresolved since the end of apartheid more than 30 years ago.
A farm where many Africans make a living. During apartheid, the government denied black South Africans the right to own major farmland. So almost all of the country's large commercial farmers are white and that remains to this day.
White South Africans make up only 7% of the population, but they own farmland that covers about half of the country. This shows a wider prosperity gap as white South Africans enjoy far higher employment rates, lower poverty rates and favorable wages than their black counterparts.
Government efforts to redistribute land after apartheid have largely been flattened due to a variety of factors, including corruption, lack of financial support for black farmers, and inability to get enough white South Africans to voluntarily sell their land.
This year, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa signed the law to take measures that would grant the government the ability to acquire private property without paying compensation. Legal experts say that uncompensated seizures are subject to strict judicial review and are likely rare, but African community leaders have expressed fear that white farmers will take their land from them.
Social media in February said there were no seizures, but inaccurately on social media that the South African government was confiscating the land.
Zimasa Matiwane contributed to reporting from Johannesburg, Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Hamed Aleaziz of Washington.
