The U.S. Wants to Turn Apartheid’s Enforcers Into “Persecuted Victims”
When I moved into my first apartment in Johannesburg, South Africa, I opened all the windows and sat in the corner of the unfurnished space, listening to the wind enter from one end and exit the other while the rain banged on both my balconies. I was happy to be out of America. I’d left the day after the 2016 election for self-care mostly.
When I showered, the water would slip under the shower door and spill onto the bathroom floor. The main office told me they’d send their Head of Maintenance — a guy they called Schuelke. He’d arrive the next day for repairs.
I hung up and walked around the corner to visit Alex, another American who set up shop in Jeppestown. He was introducing me to Meshell Ndegeocello’s cover of Leonard Cohen’s Chelsea Hotel when I told him about my shower and Schuelke. Alex immediately told me to call the office and cancel the maintenance order or request another repairman after telling me about Schuelke’s past as an Afrikaans farmer who took a job to harm and kill Black and Colored South Africans who fought against apartheid, a brutal system of racial segregation and white supremacy that controlled South Africa for nearly five decades. It wasn’t just laws — it was an entire ideology that decided where Black and Colored people could live, who they could love, what jobs they could have, and whether they deserved to exist freely at all. It was a machine built to crush, to exploit, to erase, enforced by men like Schuelke, who saw Black resistance as something to be stamped out by any means necessary. I called the office and told them Schuelke was never allowed into my apartment.
“Why?” they asked.
“Because up til about 22 years ago, Schuelke was killing Black people,” I said.
They didn’t argue it. Didn’t even acknowledge it. They simply asked, “What would you like us to do?”
I told them they could decide that, but whoever they sent needed to be there in the morning still, and he couldn’t have a known history of racism or murdering folks.
The morning came, and the man they sent was not good at his job. The water never stopped spilling onto my floor in the little time I spent in that place before I needed to move out in order to stop supporting the people who would hire a man like Schuelke.
Now here I am, many years later, back in America, half-listening to the government tell me that men like Schuelke have been mistreated in South Africa. That they have been oppressed by the people some of them wanted dead and some even killed, and how the U.S. wants to open their doors to them and welcome them with open arms.
We must not throw anymore of our genius at explaining how it makes perfect sense that the U.S. would welcome such a people and also call them “asylum seekers” in the process. But I will say what I’ve always said: this country has been practicing racism so long, it’s perfect.
I think about that apartment on Albertina Sisulu Road sometimes. About the art I made for the walls, the hammock I stretched across the balcony that faced east and west, the cold tile beneath me as I sometimes still sat in the corner, breathing in the rain-soaked air, feeling safer than I’d ever been back home. I had left behind a country that had broken my spirit more times than I could count, a country that saw my body as disposable and my rage as unreasonable. History has a way of reminding you that there are no safe havens for Blackness — or very few that are seemingly inaccessible. There are only places where the violence wears different masks.
Schuelke was a specter from an era that some pretended was buried. But Alex knew better. He knew how history lingers in the bones of a place, how men like Schuelke don’t just disappear when the laws change. I knew it, too. They find new ways to exist, new doors to slip through, new people willing to look past their sins for the sake of convenience or shared ideology. My landlords knew exactly who Schuelke was when they hired him. They knew his hands were stained, and they hired him anyway. They knew and they expected me to let him into my home, to trust him to fix the thing that was broken. And when I said no, they didn’t fight me. They simply asked me what I wanted instead of him.
Because that is how racism works when it is perfected. It does not need to argue. It does not need to justify itself. It simply exists, smooth and self-assured, like the water slipping under my shower door, seeping into every crack, unbothered by resistance.
“Victims,” they call them. “Refugees,” some said. The same country that turns away Black and brown peacemakers in search of better homes for their children without hesitation is suddenly full of compassion for the people who once held the proverbial and quite literal whip, gun, and the power. They are painting them as the oppressed, twisting the narrative until the executioner is the one who deserves our sympathy.
Let’s be clear about this: white farmers in apartheid South Africa were not just passive beneficiaries of the system — they were active participants in its violence, exploitation, and oppression. They built wealth on stolen land, enforced racist labor policies, and helped maintain the apartheid state. The lasting effects of their actions are still felt today in South Africa’s ongoing struggles with land reform and economic inequality.
The red-hatted all-Americans are nodding along to the plan, while I am supposed to pretend that I do not see the machine at work. But I see it. I have always seen it.
I think about the South Africans who fought against men like Schuelke. Folks like Victoria and Griffiths Mxenge, Looksmart Ngudle, Mapetla Mohapi, Sparrow Mkhonto, and Vuyisile Mini who fought and died for freedom, liberation, dignity, and for the right to exist in their own country — in their homes — without fear. I think about how the world has already tried to forget them and the system they fought against, how their names are not the ones being spoken in the halls of power. Instead, we are being asked to weep for the men who hunted them. For the women who threw the dead folks’ albums out of houses and threw passed-down farming tools into the yard and watched them all burn before hanging their big wooden spoons and gold-framed photos on the walls and claiming the land was rightfully theirs. We are being told that justice is cruelty, that accountability is oppression, that the only true victims are the ones who once held dominion over others.
And I think about that water on my bathroom floor. No matter how many towels I stuffed in gap to keep it from flowing out or how many times I wiped it up, it always returned. Because the problem was never me. The problem was never the way I lived or the space I occupied. The problem was that the system was built to leak, designed in a way that ensured the damage would never be fully repaired.
America — like South Africa — has been practicing racism so long, it is perfect. Perfect in its ability to rewrite the past. Perfect in its ability to center the pain of the oppressor over the oppressed. Perfect in its ability to take something rotten and dress it up as righteousness.
Here we are, watching history repeat itself with the precision of a well-rehearsed lie. And the worst part? No one is even pretending to be surprised.
But if there’s a glimmer in all of this, it’s that Black South Africans are not mourning the departure of these racists — if anything, they’re relieved. The same men America says have been persecuted are the ones who spent decades stealing and upholding a system that was designed to keep Black people dispossessed. Their absence cracks open the possibility of reclamation, maybe even justice. Maybe it means land will return to those it was taken from, and those who once wielded violence as a tool of control will no longer have the soil beneath their feet to call their own.
