There’s a little town in the scrub in South Africa — a full day’s drive from the country’s big cities — that has become perhaps the most scrutinized place on earth given its size. It is 3.5 square miles of suburban-style houses harboring about 3,000 people, a main drag, a municipal swimming pool, one gas station, and some small pecan farms. Nothing of consequence ever really happens there, a fact the townspeople take as a point of pride. And yet over the past three decades, dozens of English-language news outlets have made a pilgrimage to it, often more than once. The New York Times alone has run four long dedicated profiles. The essays have kept pace year after year, quoting the same people over and over, even as nothing of note occurred. There’s been no war, no disaster.

That changelessness is the point. No people of color are allowed to live in the town, called Orania. The name is a nod to the river that runs nearby — and to the Orange Free State, the apartheid-era designation for the province in which it lies. Orania’s founders established it in 1991, the year after South Africa’s best-known Black liberation leader (and future president), Nelson Mandela, was freed following 27 years in prison.

Understanding that Mandela’s liberation meant that white-minority rule was coming to an end, the founders trekked into the desert, bought a disused mining town wholesale, and established a colony. Laws permitting — indeed, mandating — spatial segregation by race had just been abolished in the country, so they declared the town private property. In their publicity for the settlement, Orania’s founders said they wanted to keep the town segregated to run an experiment: Could people of European descent manage to live in South Africa without relying on people of color to do manual labor, pump their gas, and clean their houses? In Orania, they stressed, white residents would do such work.

They also foresaw a brutal race war and an apocalypse for South Africa’s white citizens, predicting that the population of Orania itself would soon grow to 10,000 residents and its ideals would spread across an entire nearby province, drawing in hundreds of thousands. Statues of former white leaders watch over the town. A small museum displays fishing trophies won by the so-called architect of apartheid, former prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd, and a bust labeling him a “man of destiny.”

I’ve lived in South Africa for 16 years, ever since I left the United States in 2009. And I, too, dutifully traveled out to Orania for the evidently obligatory journalist’s visit a few weeks after I landed there. But in the ensuing years, I began to wonder why the town was a source of such stubborn fascination abroad. In the beginning, the U.S. and European reporters that descended on the town mostly hailed from mainstream or left-wing outlets, and they seemed to buy its claims about its widespread appeal, insisting that it was steadily attracting more and more revanchist white residents. At first I thought these reporters might have been comforting themselves: Our societies may have failed to address persistent racial injustice, but look at white South Africans, longing to return to outright segregation! At least we’re not that backward.

But more lately, the fascination with Orania has spread to the right wing outside South Africa. Starting in the mid-2010s, as Donald Trump was muscling his way onto the political stage, Australian, European, and, especially, American conservative commentators began to talk about the town. They, too, portrayed it as thriving — because of the enormous threat they claimed white people faced in the rest of South Africa. In these years — during which a Black man was president of the United States, demographers began to predict a “majority-minority” America, and the Black Lives Matter movement arose — it seemed as if a big shift was happening. Not only would so-called minorities seek legal equality in white-led societies but they also would take greater ownership of politics and the national story. White Americans worried about this transition didn’t need to provide proof because their anxiety was largely putative: If this trend continues, we will be victimized.

So they latched on to South Africa as a supposed natural experiment. After the country became a one-man, one-vote democracy, people of color took the reins of politics, came to dominate TV news and op-ed columns, climbed the ranks of business, and refashioned school curricula to narrate a different national history. Conservative bloggers, talk-radio hosts, and cable networks invited a small and vocal contingent of white South Africans — sometimes people associated with Orania, sometimes representatives of lobby groups for Afrikaner interests — to bear witness to a specific version of this transition. Although it may have been immoral, these South Africans’ story went, white-minority rule had created safe, stable, and happy lives for white people. After losing influence, white South Africans became increasingly subject to discrimination, hate, violence, and even a so-called white genocide by citizens of color bent on pursuing revenge.

The world that Trump and his acolytes have said they want to build, in fact, bears many striking resemblances to the unbearable policing that happened under apartheid. But the message from the vast majority of South Africans to people in the United States is: You won’t like it.

The cautionary tale was this: If formerly oppressed people got enough power, they would inevitably pursue violent retribution — even an annihilation program. That provided a justification for other white leaders’ efforts to retain their cultural influence. When Donald Trump reentered the White House in January 2025, his supporters’ fixation on South Africa grew exponentially as he became more willing to put policy behind his rhetoric. He’d tweeted about white South Africans’ victimization during his first term, but in the first six months of his second term, Trump promulgated an unprecedented executive order targeting the country. It cut U.S. foreign assistance and made a startling exception to his general antipathy to immigrants by offering expedited refugee status to Afrikaners, the Dutch-descended white group that helped build the apartheid regime. In May, he brought South African president Cyril Ramaphosa to the White House for a kind of kangaroo trial, declaring that he felt there was “persecution or genocide going on.” Taking the hint from Trump, nearly every big-league conservative influencer in the United States — Ben Shapiro, Dave Rubin, Tucker Carlson, Matt Gaetz — invited white South Africans to discuss the issue; sometimes these shows touted Orania as the only safe space left for them.

The problem is that the tale peddled about white South Africans’ historical trajectory isn’t true. They are not, as a group, subject to violent persecution on the basis of their skin color. Thirty years after white rule ended, white households’ average income remains four times that of Black households. Although South Africa’s devastatingly high crime rate victimizes all the country’s inhabitants, white South Africans are overall less likely than Black citizens to be crime’s victims. And to many white South Africans, the warped way their country is depicted abroad isn’t even the most important distortion. Spend some real time speaking to the estimated 4.5 million white people who still live in South Africa — a number that has remained steady since the late 1980s — and most will tell you that they are better off now than they were under the white regime that was purportedly designed to protect them. Violent crime has fallen by nearly half since its peak in 1993. The rule of law largely operates, elections are free and fair, and white politicians hold major cabinet ministries.

Why are people who live in white-majority countries so uninterested in the real story, even unwilling to believe it? It isn’t only right-wingers who believe that racial hatred can never disappear and will inevitably reassert itself in some form. I felt that the left-wing reporters who flocked to Orania were searching for evidence to feed a form of the same conviction: that white people will never give up the sense of superiority that drove them to impose racial segregation. That people want to live with their own and will push those unlike them to the margins of their societies, or out of them altogether. That wielding raw power over another group is terribly alluring, that the desire for it is so baked into human nature that efforts to trade it for equity and diversity will probably fail. This idea now passes for sophisticated thinking, even among self-identified progressives who wish for a more just and equitable world but often seem to have given up on it.

This loss of faith is sad, because the real South African story has a different lesson. What is often overlooked in the American fascination with South Africa is the violence the apartheid regime wrought on white people. They were not its main or intended victims; they were supposed to be its beneficiaries. But the apartheid regime became a police state that heavily circumscribed its white citizens’ lives, too. School curriculums were sanitized; the press was cowed. White teenagers were drafted into a brutal military that was perpetually mobilized to fight.

The world that Trump and his acolytes have said they want to build, in fact, bears many striking resemblances to the unbearable policing that happened under apartheid. But the message from the vast majority of South Africans to people in the United States is: You won’t like it.

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Ever since Europeans began to settle the southern tip of Africa, they sought to segregate the native populations. In the seventeenth century, the Dutch East India’s colony at Cape Town subjected indigenous people who hoped to trade with their soldiers, sailors, and farmers to different rules and planted thorn bushes to keep them out of the European settlement. Starting in the early 1900s, the South African government, by then a British imperial colony, began to institute formal laws restricting Black and mixed-race people, as well as inhabitants of Indian descent originally brought over as slaves, from living freely in 87 percent of the country’s territory and curbing their right to work so that they wouldn’t compete with white citizens. In 1948, an Afrikaner political party seized control from English-speaking white South Africans and began two parallel projects: to become independent from British rule and to further deepen and formalize “apartheid,” which in Afrikaans means “separateness.”

The apartheid state was a police state. Free speech was tremendously proscribed.

To maintain white people’s political and economic power, the Afrikaner government drew overt inspiration from Jim Crow, sending emissaries to the American South to study its “separate but equal” schools, buses, and water fountains. Apartheid’s so-called architect, Hendrik Verwoerd, was an authoritarian conservative. According to his biographer, he had a “dominating personality” and “those who came under his influence found him irresistible.”

Trained as a psychologist, Verwoerd justified apartheid, which created sprawling, geographically incongruent “native reserves” and condemned Black people to manual jobs in white neighborhoods, by maintaining that multiracial communities were, by definition, a recipe for “the most terrific clash of interests imaginable. The endeavors and desires of the Bantu [Black people] and the endeavors and objectives of all Europeans [white people] will be antagonistic. Such a clash can only bring unhappiness and misery to both.” He added that “resentment and revenge” would be the inevitable outcome of including Black South Africans in the country’s politics: “The people of South Africa cannot accept the consequence of a multi-racial state unless the Whites . . . are prepared to commit race suicide.”

The incredibly tightly regulated segregationist system that Verwoerd established victimized people of color the most. They could not own businesses, participate in national politics, or even walk in “white” neighborhoods without a “pass” signed by their employer. Taking “separate but equal” to a cruel extreme, the government insisted that Black-dominated –and less agriculturally fertile — regions of South Africa were separate countries; although no other country ever recognized these “bantustans” as independent nations, Black South Africans were required to get separate passports and many who lived in urban areas were forced back to so-called tribal homelands they had never set foot in.

But apartheid brought immense unhappiness and misery to white South Africans, too. The apartheid state was a police state. Free speech was tremendously proscribed. As the 1950s rolled into the 1960s, more and more African countries were freeing themselves from European colonial domination; this wave of liberation prompted the emergence of liberation movements in South Africa and anti-apartheid protests. At such protests, white policemen often famously saved their worst acts of brutality for the few white demonstrators. White newspaper editors were routinely imprisoned or forced to become police informants. Top government, military, and intelligence officials pressured and harassed newsrooms, even walking through them unannounced. In 1990, when one Afrikaans-language newspaper became too critical of the government, a defense ministry operative bombed its offices. The state routinely seized the passports of thousands of white politicians, journalists, artists, and students.

In 1960, the country’s most famous novelist, Alan Paton, the author of Cry, the Beloved Country, had his passport seized, forcing a choice: remain permanently trapped in South Africa, hobbling his ability to build a serious literary career, or be stripped of his citizenship and become a stateless person. A few months after Trump reentered the White House, Tucker Carlson dwelled on the idea that Black South Africans may, like Hutu leaders during Rwanda’s genocide, come to see white people as vermin. This was a hypothetical. But the apartheid government actually did see white citizens who didn’t toe the line that way. John Vorster, who served as South Africa’s prime minister from 1966 to 1978, famously explained the government’s philosophy: When a fly is troubling you, you either swat it or let it fly out the window.

Psychiatrists employed by the state used bureaucratic interactions like the military draft to hunt for people who might be gay. Those who came under suspicion were taken unwillingly to a military hospital in Pretoria, cut off from their families, and subjected to electric shocks. Nearly a thousand men and women whose behavior failed to “correct” itself were subjected to forced sex-reassignment surgery.

But the system didn’t target only white people who dissented from a norm. It kept the vast majority of white South Africans fearful and uncertain and gave them little room to maneuver. Television was banned altogether until 1975. A harsh censorship regime — you couldn’t buy a copy of Das Kapital in the country, and the radio couldn’t play Bob Dylan — kept white citizens artificially ignorant, relatively unaware of events both inside and outside their country. (In 1986, a U.S. News & World Report journalist wrote that during an interview with a white construction worker — who was “holding a copy of a leading Johannesburg newspaper” — the interviewee eagerly asked him for real news: “What’s really going on in this country?”) When my husband, a white South African, traveled to Germany as a teen in late 1989, he didn’t even realize the mysterious dismantling of structures in the middle of Berlin was the fall of the Berlin Wall: The bureaucrats who ran South Africa’s public schools, worried that white children would learn that dissent was possible, did not put the wall in the curriculum, nor even the broader European opposition to communism.

The government harshly policed interracial relationships. In 1972 alone, more than five hundred people were prosecuted under the Immorality Act, which forbade sex across the color line. White families nonetheless “had enormous proximity to Black people, particularly in the domestic realm,” David Bruce, a sixty-two-year-old white South African criminologist, told me. This led organically to feelings of love for one’s Black nannies and friendship with the children of your Black live-in maids, but this warmth had to be suppressed. “There was a deeply authoritarian mentality.”

It is sometimes said that white South Africans were, at least, insulated from apartheid’s physical violence. That is not true. In 1978, then prime minister P.W. Botha famously defined the white South African condition as a perpetual battle against “a psychological onslaught, an economic one, a military one, a diplomatic one — a total onslaught” by Black “terrorists.” That concept caused many white people’s lives to be pervaded by both actual violence and the fear of it. In school, white children learned to handle semiautomatic weapons to, in the words of the South African military’s magazine, instill an “awareness among schoolboys of the nature of the onslaught” by “malevolent revolutionary forces.” An abiding fear of the swart gevaar, or the “Black danger,” was drilled into them. Amos van der Westhuizen is a fifty-six-year-old financial adviser whose father was an official in the National Party, the political party that instituted apartheid. He told me that this sense of onslaught made childhood constrained and scary. In a memoir, Kat in die Honderhoek (Cat in the henhouse), he remembered a time when a gust of wind broke a window at his school. “They” — Black people — “are on us!” he and the other white boys thought, panicked. Van der Westhuizen loved to play cricket and rugby, but the segregationist apartheid regime stunted that dream by restricting him from testing his mettle with talented Black athletes. The government disallowed even elite white sportspeople from playing with Black sportspeople, which meant the white athletes could rarely compete abroad.

Van der Westhuizen and his friends could mainly look forward to joining the military. Just a few years after the apartheid regime was instituted, South Africa established mandatory conscription for every white teenage male, and in the mid-1970s the country went to war with multiple neighboring countries. If draftees declined to serve, they could be imprisoned. The army was callous: By the mid-1980s, hundreds of conscripts were attempting suicide every year. Angela McIntyre, a historian of the Angolan civil war and South Africa’s intervention into it, told me many white South Africans “were press-ganged into something they were forbidden from understanding.”

Mark Joseph, a fifty-two-year-old mental health and mindfulness educator born in Johannesburg, told me that as a teen, he’d bought into the apartheid state’s claims that Black people “were our enemy, were going to kill us all, and have no respect for life.” When he joined the military, however, he began to feel that these claims were truer of his own white superiors, the white state’s authority figures.

The military’s treatment of its white soldiers could be considered torture, he remembered thinking. In basic training, he and fellow conscripts were deprived of water “to toughen us up.” His corporal regularly beat him and once tried to strangle him. “We had industrial ceiling fans, and I recall boys would put their hands in the fan” to break their fingers, Joseph said, so that they would be taken to the hospital and away from the horror. “I saw a boy break another boy’s leg with his rifle on purpose.” Many feigned mental illnesses just to leave the barracks. “I got blood poisoning, and I landed in the hospital, which I was so happy about.” After he got out of the military, he “went off the rails,” Joseph told me. “I was angry and aggressive. I got into a lot of drinking and drugs.” This was not uncommon, either. Rehabs throughout South Africa are full of white ex-conscripts.

Six months after Trump had offered white South Africans a free flight and fast track to citizenship to the most powerful economy on earth, fewer than 100 had taken up his offer.

The toll was measurable outside of the military. A 1982 medical study in the Journal of Public Health Policy compared the health of white South Africans with residents of England and Wales. It found that although white South Africans were economically better off than the English and Welsh cohorts and mostly just as healthy, they had a much higher rate of what are now called “deaths of despair”: White South African men were at triple the risk of suicide, and white South Africans of both genders were at more than four times the risk of death from liver cirrhosis, a disease associated with alcohol abuse.

During the 1980s, South African newspapers reported on a sharp rise in “family murders” in which white men killed their wives, kids, and themselves. “If a white South African man felt he’d let his community down, he could become so humiliated he decided he had to commit suicide — while retaining the right to take his family with him,” I wrote in my 2022 book on South Africa, The Inheritors. A white South African friend of mine recalled to me the day, still etched in his memory, that his teacher announced that the father of one of his classmates, despondent over the bankruptcy of his business, had killed the boy with a crossbow. Some white parents beat their children with the same whips the apartheid police used in Black neighborhoods.

For many white South Africans, the pain they experienced under apartheid lingers. During his insulated schooling and military training, nobody told Joseph that South Africa’s white civilian leaders had changed their view of Mandela and were beginning to negotiate with him. When Mandela became president, Joseph was “convinced there was going to be a civil war.” All the time, they were told that Black people were the enemy and “they were going to kill us all and murder our families and rape our women and take our homes.” Joseph’s father would say, “‘If Mandela gets out of jail, we’re dead.’ I was having 10 to 15 panic attacks a day.” Later, realizing how thoroughly he had bought into a false view of his Black compatriots, he felt tremendous guilt, although he’d also been brainwashed. He took up Buddhism to exorcise his demons. But, he says, “I still have rage issues. My marriage ended because of it.”

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Six months after Trump had offered white South Africans a free flight and fast track to citizenship to the most powerful economy on earth, fewer than 100 had taken up his offer. By contrast, South Africa faced waves of white flight in the early 1960s, during the late 1970s, and throughout the 1980s. Reliable, comprehensive emigration statistics broken down by race under apartheid are hard to come by, but in 1961 alone, UNESCO calculated that no fewer than 25 faculty members resigned from the University of Cape Town to move overseas. A 1977 survey done at Johannesburg’s all-white University of the Witwatersrand found that 64 percent of graduating seniors said that they intended to “permanently settle in a country other than South Africa.” By 1985, 40 percent of white medical students and 45 percent of white business school students at that university left the country immediately after graduating. South Africa faced a skills shortage and business bankruptcies soared. In 1985, the U.S. consulate in Johannesburg reported that it was receiving, on average, 50 inquiries a day from people considering emigration.

As decades of repressive segregationist rule wore on, South Africa’s statist economy offered fewer opportunities to its white citizens. By the 1980s, it had become nakedly corrupt; come 1985, it was facing a sovereign-debt default. The currency collapsed, driving an inflation rate of nearly 20 percent. The construction industry laid off 40 percent of its workforce. Emigration became a business, as newspapers filled with advertisements from consultants offering to advise people on how to escape the country. Jokes went around: What is the definition of a South African patriot? Someone who can’t sell his house.

But emigrants often told newspapers that the reason they were leaving was not only economic. They were terrified that their children would be drafted; apartheid had become unbearable. “I just want to live, and more than that, I want my children to live in an environment free of the racial hatred that is poisoning my country,” one told The Guardian. Another who’d worked in America told the Journal of Commerce in 1987, “The more you see of the U.S., the less you want to involve yourself and your family in [South Africa’s] system.” In the end, in 1992, more than two-thirds of white people, motivated by fear and economic uncertainty, deserted the apartheid regime. In an all-white referendum on constitutional change held that year, 69 percent of the electorate chose to collapse their own government and establish a full democracy in which they knew they would have a minority of votes.

Mass revenge simply did not happen. That seems hard for people who never experienced such a total upending of a political hierarchy to understand. But in my years in South Africa, living in rural Afrikaner towns as well as in cities, I’ve heard much more about the shock white South Africans felt at how warmly their neighbors and colleagues of color have treated them than I’ve heard complaints about the opposite. An overwhelming number of South Africans of color understand that white people’s lives were not blissful under apartheid either.

Very few could escape the psychological distress apartheid generated.

In 2021, Jamie Gangat, a former anti-apartheid activist of Indian descent, found himself working at a rehabilitation program for ex-soldiers in a rural town called Harrismith, where he estimates that 10,000 white veterans have sought treatment over the past 20 years. Under apartheid, these men had been his enemy. Gangat’s maternal grandfather “was very close with Nelson Mandela,” he said; thanks to that and his family’s liberation activism the family had to flee South Africa when Gangat was six months old. The terrifying and degrading sense of being hunted affected his family long after they’d escaped. Because of it, he reckons, “My father [became] very quick to his gun. He ended up killing himself after trying to kill me and my brother.”

He was not expecting to feel sympathy for white ex-soldiers, but he did. They often said “they had a ‘demon’ in them,” he said. “My background, ironically, opened the doors for them to reveal their trauma. We realized we had much more in common than not.”

Don Lepati, a sixty-nine-year-old Black writer, spent his childhood under apartheid, but even back then he felt aware that his white fellow citizens were also the system’s victims. “The Immorality Act forced some white people to live like hunted animals,” he told me. “Those who showed even a semblance of humanity toward Black people, including preachers, were punished. White sportspeople suffered under the very apartheid laws their society had created.” Apartheid, he said, “was not comfortable or happy for many white people.”

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When we consider cases of asymmetric power, we tend to assume that powerful people are essentially unaffected by the stark duality in which they participate. That they have it good. This certainly wasn’t white South Africans’ experience. Very few could escape the psychological distress apartheid generated. White South Africans have ceded some privilege: The Black-led government renamed some towns and streets for Black historical leaders, instituted a form of affirmative action for government contracts, and shifted the primary language of instruction from Afrikaans to the more universally understood English in many public schools. But sharing their world has not been as traumatic as many outsiders presume it is.

The South Africans who go on U.S. cable news and right-wing talk shows to talk about what they see as the disastrous situation in their country represent a tiny minority. They typically belong to two South African lobby groups that, over the past decade, have run extensive public relations campaigns abroad, pushing the idea that when people of color take the reins of governance in multiracial societies, they will end up violently persecuting their white neighbors. In 2017, the Suidlanders, a right-wing extremist group that has long predicted that a race war is imminent in South Africa, sent two charismatic speakers to the United States for a six-month madcap media tour. They appeared on Alex Jones’s radio show; live streamed with Mike Cernovich, a right-wing commentator whom Donald Trump Jr. has said deserves a Pulitzer Prize; and showed up at the infamous Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

They barely advertised their tour back home, but the ideas they seeded soon leached into the U.S. right-wing mainstream. In 2018, Ann Coulter fielded an audience member’s question at a Breitbart town hall: “Why do you think the mainstream media has been silent on the genocide of white farmers in South Africa?” Wild applause broke out. “I am so glad you asked,” Coulter replied. She claimed that she had just visited a group of college students in Boulder, Colorado, and “every conservative question was about South Africa.”

Beginning in the mid-2010s, AfriForum, an organization dedicated to protecting the rights of Afrikaners, launched its own massive overseas PR campaign to spotlight white South Africans’ supposed victimization. The hope was to put pressure on the South African government to drop affirmative action for state contracts and pay extra attention to crime against white people. To get foreign conservatives’ attention, the group targeted major right-wing shows to cast white South Africans’ situation as a grim parable. Appearing on Fox News in 2021, Ernst Roets, AfriForum’s spokesperson, said, “In a way, the future has already happened in South Africa. And what I mean by that is that there are certain policies that people in the West, people in America, and so forth, are flirting with that have already been implemented in South Africa, and you can see the consequences.”

In South Africa, white South Africans mostly lampooned these efforts — and the handful of “refugees” that took up Trump’s offer. (An actor posted a TikTok video about the “pride” South Africans feel for generating “the best-fed, wealthiest refugees the world has ever seen.”) They objected bitterly to AfriForum’s depiction, noting that it had already made the overwhelming number of white South Africans who want to stay in their country suffer as Trump imposed tariffs that hurts their exports and dampens foreign tourism.

The real lesson from South Africa is that a police state wounds the people it claims to protect. A society that targets newspapers, universities, migrants, and protesters ultimately makes most of its supporters’ lives miserable, too. Often, moving toward a more just society is presented as the hard road. The arduous path. For so many white South Africans I have come to know, it was the easier one.