Boer means farmer.
It also means us.
A people, not a job. In Africa since 1652.
Afrikaners are the white, Afrikaans-speaking descendants of Dutch, German and French Huguenot settlers who landed at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652. Roughly 2.5 million of us remain in South Africa. We have our own language, our own churches, our own history, and for three hundred years our own farms. This page explains why the United States found that we are persecuted.
Who the Afrikaners are
- 1652 to 1700s. Dutch, German and French Huguenot families settle the Cape. Cut off from Europe, their Dutch becomes a new language, Afrikaans, the only Germanic language born in Africa. The word Boer, Dutch for farmer, becomes the name they call themselves.
- 1836, the Great Trek. Thousands of Boer families load ox wagons and leave British rule at the Cape, crossing the mountains into the interior to found their own republics. The Trek is to Afrikaners what the wagon trains west are to Americans.
- 1899 to 1902, the Anglo-Boer War. The British Empire fights the two Boer republics. Farms are burned and Boer women and children are put in concentration camps, where about 26,000 die. Every Afrikaner family has names from those camps.
- 1925 to 1994. Afrikaans becomes an official language. Afrikaners build universities, churches, farms and towns. In 1994 apartheid ends and Afrikaners, about 5 percent of the population, hand over power peacefully and vote for the new constitution.
- 1994 to today. Thirty years on, the laws that were meant to end race as a legal category have been replaced by new ones that make it central again. The farms are attacked. The chant is “Kill the Boer.” Half a million have left. The rest of this page is about that.
What Boer means
Literally, farmer. In South Africa it has meant something larger for two centuries: an Afrikaner, whether he lives on a farm or in a city flat. It is the name the Boer republics took, the name the British fought, the name on the war memorials. When a crowd chants “Kill the Boer,” nobody in South Africa thinks it is about agriculture. It is about a people.
That is why this site is called BoerSocial, and why the shirt says Afrikaners, not farmers. Of our family of five, none of us farmed for a living. We were still Boere.
What “Kill the Boer” is
A struggle-era song whose chorus is “Kill the Boer, kill the farmer.” It is sung today at political rallies by Julius Malema, leader of South Africa’s third largest party, to stadiums of supporters. In 1999 a convicted farm killer told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission the slogan drove him to murder. It has been found written in victims’ blood on farmhouse walls. In 2022 and again on appeal South African courts ruled that singing it is protected speech. In May 2025 President Trump played the video of it to President Ramaphosa in the Oval Office.
The race laws
The independent Institute of Race Relations keeps an index of every South African law that makes race or skin colour legally relevant. About 142 are in force today, more than 116 of them passed since 1994. These are the ones that reach into an Afrikaner family’s job, land, school and safety.
Employment Equity Amendment Act
Binding numerical race targets in 18 sectors of the economy. Every employer with more than 50 staff must file a plan to meet them by 2030. In practice it caps how many white people a company may employ and promote.
Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment
Ownership, management and procurement are scored by race. Government contracts and most large private deals require a score. A white-owned business, like the one we ran, is scored out before it bids.
Expropriation Act 13 of 2024
Allows the state to take property and, for land, to pay nothing in defined cases. The U.S. State Department said it “could enable the government to seize ethnic minority Afrikaners’ agricultural property without compensation.” It is the law Executive Order 14204 names.
Basic Education Laws Amendment Act
Gives the state power to override a school’s admissions and language policy. Afrikaans-medium schools, the way the language has been passed down for generations, can be ordered to change the language they teach in.
Firearms Control Amendment Bill
Would remove self-defence as a reason to hold a firearm licence, in a country where the police themselves report a murder roughly every twenty minutes and where farm families are the ones who live furthest from help.
The index
Every law above, with its text and date, is in the IRR Index of Race Law. We cite the independent count, not our own.
Every cross is a farm attack victim.
Farm attacks in South Africa are not burglaries. The pattern, documented for thirty years, is hours of torture of elderly people, often with nothing of value taken. The police do not keep a separate category for them and the government has called the figures propaganda. Afrikaners keep their own count: a white cross on a hillside in Limpopo for every farm murder since the 1990s. On 26 September 2026 those crosses stood on the National Mall in Washington.
Half a million already gone
Between 2001 and 2026 about 513,000 white South Africans emigrated, from a community of under five million. Those who have the papers, the money or the profession to leave, leave. Australia, New Zealand, Britain, Canada, and since 2025, the United States. The ones who stay are the ones who cannot go.
Farm visas, then asylum
Our family did not come in through the refugee program. It did not exist yet. We came on H-2A farm visas in 2024, the way Kansas farms have brought in Afrikaner workers for years, and applied for asylum on the same facts the President later found. The families already here came the long way round, through the front door.
What the United States has said
- 7 Feb 2025Executive Order 14204. The President finds that South Africa’s Expropriation Act and other policies target “ethnic minority Afrikaners” and orders the United States to promote their resettlement as refugees. Read it
- 12 May 2025First flight. The first 59 Afrikaner refugees land at Dulles and are met by the Deputy Secretary of State.
- 21 May 2025The Oval Office. President Trump shows President Ramaphosa the “Kill the Boer” video and the white crosses.
- 30 Sep 2025Presidential Determination 2025-13. The FY2026 refugee ceiling is set at 7,500, “primarily” for Afrikaners.
- 21 May 2026Presidential Determination 2026-14. An “unforeseen emergency refugee situation” caused by “incitement of racially motivated violence on the part of the Government of South Africa.” Ceiling raised to 17,500. Federal Register
- 15 Sep 2026Secretary Rubio. Visa restrictions on South African officials involved in race-based discrimination against Afrikaners. State Department
- FY2026More than 16,000 South Africans admitted to the United States as refugees on these findings.
We are the families
already here.
Same people. Same country. Same facts. We reached America before the program opened, and we are asking that the President’s finding reach us too.