“I am an Afrikaner, not a refugee”

I am an Afrikaner, born in Africa, with no family or professional ties to Europe or the United States of America. This is my home. I have a green passport, and my heart beats to the rhythm of this nation and this continent. I can never be a refugee in any other country. My story is fueled by the blood and sweat of this nation in the far south of Africa. A story of both shame and pride.

I am a descendant of Arnoldus Willemsz Basson, from Wesel, Germany, who landed at the Cape of Good Hope in the 1600s in search of a better life. I am also a descendant of Ansela van Bengalen, an Indian slave forcibly transported to South Africa by Pieter Kemp, a commander of the Dutch East India Company, who sold her to Jan van Riebeeck [who established the first European settlement in southern Africa in 1652].

Arnoldus married Ansela, and they are the ancestors of the Basson clan, and so our ancestors are mixed, like most other Afrikaner families: De Villiers, Jonker, Du Plessis, Marais, Visagie.

I am from a new people who forged a life for themselves on this unforgiving and beautiful land. They were not European, even though, many years later, their history was corrupted to grant them “European” status on buses, in queues, and in bathrooms.

These people wanted to identify themselves as an African tribe, with European and Asian blood running through their veins. They named their language Afrikaans. Afrika-ans. Intimately linked to this continent that