South African Bishop Thanks Episcopal Leader for Declining to Resettle White Afrikaners
On Tuesday, we blogged that the Episcopal Church was refusing to resettle white Afrikaners who had been granted refugee status by the Trump administration and had arrived in the United States. We reported that white South African religious leaders had penned a letter about the situation in which they had said:
The stated reasons for (Trump’s actions) are claims of victimisation, violence and hateful rhetoric against white people in South Africa along with legislation providing for the expropriation of land without compensation. As white South Africans in active leadership within the Christian community, representing diverse political and theological perspectives, we unanimously reject these claims.
Today, RNS is reporting that the leader of Anglican churches in South Africa has thanked the American head of the Episcopal Church for refusing to resettle these “refugees” in the United States. According to the RNS report,
In a letter sent to Episcopal Church Presiding Bishop Sean W. Rowe on Thursday (May 15), the Most Rev. Thabo Makgoba, archbishop of Cape Town and head of the Anglican Church of Southern Africa, lauded Rowe for announcing on Monday that his church would end its decades-long relationship with the U.S. government to resettle refugees. Rowe explained the decision was rooted in moral opposition to being asked to resettle white Afrikaners, especially as the U.S. refugee program has been mostly shut down since Trump took office in January.
The report continues:
In his message, Makgoba thanked Rowe for calling him ahead of the announcement and rejected the Trump administration’s arguments for accepting white Afrikaners, who the president has insisted are the target of genocide — a claim widely disputed by the South African government as well as faith leaders in the country.
“What the administration refers to as anti-white racial discrimination is nothing of the kind,” Makgoba’s letter read. “Our government implements affirmative action on the lines of that in the United States, designed not to discriminate against whites but to overcome the historic disadvantages Black South Africans have suffered.”
Makgoba argued white South Africans “remain the beneficiaries of apartheid” by “every measure of economic and social privilege,” noting that, despite the end of the apartheid regime, South Africa’s society remains deeply unequal.
“Measured by the Gini coefficient, which measures income disparity, we are the most unequal society in the world, with the majority of the poor Black, and the majority of the wealthy white,” Makgoba wrote. “While U.S. supporters of the South African group will no doubt highlight individual cases of suffering some members might have undergone, and criticize TEC for its action, we cannot agree that South Africans who have lost the privileges they enjoyed under apartheid should qualify for refugee status ahead of people fleeing war and persecution from countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan and Afghanistan.”
Archbishop Makgoba is on point. I have no option but to agree wholeheartedly with his sentiments.
Vaughn E. James