Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief.
The highlights this week: Afrikaners touch down in Virginia as refugees, a federal judge temporarily blocks the Trump administration from deporting migrants to Libya, and a power struggle within the Tigray People’s Liberation Front renews fears of conflict in Ethiopia.
Trump Welcomes South Africans as Refugees
The first wave of 59 white South Africans to enter the United States as refugees arrived outside of Washington on Monday.
Although U.S. President Donald Trump suspended the country’s refugee program on the first day of his second term, he issued an executive order in February making an exception for Afrikaners, descendants of mostly Dutch settlers in South Africa.
This came in response to a new law that allows Pretoria to seize unused land under limited circumstances to address land inequality. Trump has claimed that the South African government is “confiscating land” and “treating certain classes of people very badly,” but no land has been seized thus far.
“What’s happening in South Africa fits the textbook definition of why the refugee program was created,” White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller told reporters last week. “This is race-based persecution.”
Pretoria slammed the resettlement effort but said it would not block anyone who wished to leave. In a statement last week, South Africa’s foreign ministry described it as an “entirely politically motivated” move against a democratic country that “has in fact suffered true persecution under Apartheid rule and has worked tirelessly to prevent such levels of discrimination from ever occurring again.”
South Africa is widely considered the world’s most unequal nation. Under white minority rule, Black South Africans were confined to just 13 percent of the country’s land and could not own land in all other areas designated as white-only.
More than three decades after the end of apartheid, Black South Africans hold only around 1 percent of the wealth held by their white counterparts. White South Africans, who account for 7 percent of the population, own around 70 percent of private land; their Black counterparts, who make up 80 percent of the population, own just 4 percent.
Despite this, Trump and his South African-born billionaire advisor Elon Musk maintain that a genocide is being committed against white South Africans. “White farmers are being brutally killed,” Trump said on Monday. The claims have been widely discredited.
South Africa does not report crime broken down by race, but police statistics show that 12 murders were recorded on farms and small agricultural land over the last three months of 2024; only one victim was a farmer.
Afrikaner lobby group AfriForum, which led a delegation to Washington in February, disputed these numbers, claiming that farm murders have hit white South Africans particularly hard, but did not provide further evidence.
Rights groups have criticized Trump’s decision to resettle white South Africans, particularly as his administration has frozen refugee resettlement from the rest of the world, including for thousands of Afghans who helped the U.S. military in Afghanistan.
“[Afrikaners] are people who were not living in refugee camps, who hadn’t fled their country,” Bill Frelick, the director of Human Rights Watch’s refugee rights program, told Al Jazeera. “It’s not like these are among the most vulnerable refugees of the world.”
“The hypocrisy is as clear as it is cruel,” said Shawn VanDiver, the head of refugee advocacy group #AfghanEvac.
The Week Ahead
Thursday, May 15: The United Nations Security Council receives a briefing on the International Criminal Court investigation in Libya.
Nigeria releases inflation data for April.
What We’re Watching
Trump’s deportation plans. A federal judge temporarily blocked the Trump administration from deporting migrants to Libya last Wednesday, ruling that it would “clearly violate” a previous injunction that blocked the U.S. government from deporting migrants to countries other than their own without due process.
The Trump administration was poised to send migrants to Libya as early as last week. Since Trump took office, top U.S. officials have engaged in talks with Rwanda and Libya, among other countries, on receiving deported migrants and asylum-seekers.
Abdul Hamid Dbeibeh, the prime minister of Libya’s internationally recognized Government of National Unity, said on social media last week that his country “refuses to be a destination for the deportation of migrants.” But his government suggested that “some parallel parties that are not subject to legitimacy” may be coordinating with the White House.
Since 2014, Libya has been divided between Dbeibeh’s U.N.-backed administration based in Tripoli and the de facto eastern Libyan government led by warlord Khalifa Haftar. Haftar’s son met with Trump’s Africa advisor, Massad Boulos, in Washington last month.
Libya has experienced instability for decades. Armed fighting broke out in Tripoli late on Monday following the killing of Abdel-Ghani al-Kikli, the leader of a powerful armed group, by a rival militia.
Congo’s critical minerals. Gold miner Twangiza Mining said last week that M23 rebels had ordered it to cease its operations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s South Kivu province over a tax dispute. M23 wrested control of the area this year.
Meanwhile, KoBold Metals, a U.S. start-up backed by Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, has struck a framework deal to buy Australia-based AVZ Minerals’ stake in Congo’s Manono lithium deposit, one of the world’s largest lithium reserves. Congo revoked AVZ’s mining rights in 2023. The government later granted some of the rights to Chinese company Zijin Mining.
KoBold’s agreement is part of a wider peace-for-minerals deal that Congo is pursuing with U.S. officials, who are racing to compete with China on critical minerals.
It remains unclear how a broader deal would work, particularly as M23 now operates a parallel proxy government across the territories it has captured since January, where it demands taxes from mining operations.
Eritrean troops in Ethiopia. Lt. Gen. Tadesse Werede, the new interim president of Ethiopia’s Tigray region, said last week that around 40 percent of Tigray still remains under the control of Amhara militias and Eritrean forces.
In recent months, a power struggle within the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) has sparked concerns among security analysts that the region may return to war. Tadesse’s predecessor, Getachew Reda, accused a dissident faction in the TPLF of working with Eritrean forces to try to instigate a coup in March.
The tensions threaten the 2022 peace agreement signed in Pretoria, which ended a two-year civil war between the Ethiopian government, backed by Eritrea, and the TPLF.
Nigerian fiscal reforms. Last week, Nigeria’s Senate passed four tax reform bills as part of the government’s wide-ranging effort to kick-start a sluggish economy.
The bills, put forward by President Bola Tinubu, seek to streamline tax collection and increase government revenue. They include measures to modernize stamp duties, first introduced by the British colonial government, and cover digital assets.
Lawmakers rejected Tinubu’s proposed increase in value-added tax from 7.5 percent to 12.5 percent in the draft legislation. The final bills need the president’s signature to become law.
Nigeria’s tax-to-GDP ratio of around 10.8 percent is one of the world’s lowest, and Abuja currently relies on oil revenue and borrowing to fund its budget. Abuja spent around $4.66 billion servicing foreign debt last year.
This Week in Culture
African cinema funds. The African Export-Import Bank has launched a $1 billion Africa Film Fund to support film production on the continent.
Africa’s most successful film industry is Nigeria’s Nollywood, which produces around 2,500 films per year, making it the world’s third-biggest film industry after Hollywood and Bollywood. Nigeria’s creative sector has the potential to generate around $25 billion per year, according to Olayemi Cardoso, the governor of Nigeria’s Central Bank.
But film industries across the continent, including Nollywood, have been hampered by a lack of investment. Last year, both Amazon and Netflix cut back their content production in Africa. The continent is home to fewer than 1,700 cinema screens—one for every 750,000 people.
Biennale curator dies. Cameroon-born curator Koyo Kouoh, the first African woman slated to lead the Venice Biennale, died on Saturday at the age of 57.
Kouoh, who headed the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town, was due to reveal the title and theme of next year’s exhibition in Venice on May 20. Her husband said she died of cancer following a recent diagnosis.
“Her passing leaves an immense void in the world of contemporary art and in the international community of artists, curators, and scholars who had the privilege of knowing and admiring her extraordinary human and intellectual commitment,” the Biennale said in a statement.
FP’s Most Read This Week
- A Tale of Four Fighter Jets by Rishi Iyengar
- What Is the Risk of a Conflict Spiral Between India and Pakistan? by Sumit Ganguly
- Joseph Nye Was the Champion of a World That No Longer Exists by Suzanne Nossel
What We’re Reading
Strategic investments. Chinese companies have invested an estimated $10 billion in Morocco’s electric vehicle and battery manufacturing industry in recent years as they look to circumvent European Union and U.S. tariffs, Patricia Cohen reports in the New York Times.
Rabat has a free trade agreement with Brussels; it has had a similar agreement with Washington but is now subject to Trump’s blanket 10 percent tariff on imports. If the Trump administration adopts a “for-or-against-us stance,” U.S.-China tensions could lead to hard choices for Morocco, Cohen writes.
Tunisia’s rap pioneer. Lully Snake is the first Tunisian female musician to fuse rap with mahraganat, a style of hip-hop that emerged from the streets of Cairo, Jyhene Kebsi writes in Africa Is a Country.
“Instead of reproducing the figure of the submissive North African woman, Lully Snake flips the script,” and her music and style challenge “both local misogyny and Western stereotypes about Maghrebi women,” Kebsi writes.
The post White South Africans Enter the U.S. as Refugees appeared first on Foreign Policy.
