Time - Trump’s welcoming of Afrikaners as refugees can be understood as the latest chapter in a longer history of U.S. support for white Afrikaners. When Afrikaner apartheid was instituted in 1948, Washington didn’t flinch. Instead, the Truman Administration embraced the white regime in South Africa as a Cold War ally: anti-communist, rich in uranium (essential for U.S. nuclear weapons), and staunchly white supremacist.
During the 1950s and ’60s, as African nations gained independence and cast off colonial rule, U.S. leaders grew anxious. Would these new nations fall into the Soviet orbit? In this context, apartheid South Africa became a dependable partner, ideologically aligned and vocally anti-communist.
American officials were not shy about their racial biases. According to archival documents from the 432nd meeting of the National Security Council in 1959, then-Vice President Richard Nixon dismissed Black African leaders as “down from the trees 50 years ago.” And the U.S. intelligence community grew increasingly close to their South African counterparts, sharing intelligence, strategy, and a belief in the righteousness of white rule.
The CIA’s role in the 1962 capture of Nelson Mandela remains one of the clearest examples of this alliance between the U.S. and Afrikaner white supremacists. South African security police received a tip-off from the CIA, leading to Mandela’s arrest and 27-year imprisonment. Washington saw Mandela not as a freedom fighter, but as a dangerous radical whose African National Congress (ANC) had links to Moscow.
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