Afrikaners mark pilgrimage day, resonating with their US backers

The crowd included men dressed in short-sleeved shirts and khaki shorts and women wearing traditional Voortrekker dresses, similar to that of their pioneer ancestors. 

"We just decided to come today because it felt like the right thing to do: to come and enjoy this important day in our language," mechanic Johan Reid, 24, told AFP, on his first pilgrimage accompanied by his fiance. 

"It's a hard time now to be an Afrikaner with the politics that's going on in South Africa -- you know what Donald Trump is saying."

US Vice President JD Vance was due to visit the monument during last month's G20 summit before Trump decided to boycott the event, claiming Afrikaners were "being killed and massacred". 

Sticking to that position despite evidence to the contrary, Washington blocked South Africa from participating in the G20's first technical meetings under its leadership Monday and Tuesday. 

- Treks and destiny -

Eighteenth century Dutch-speaking settlers migrated in what is known as the Great Trek from the British Cape Colony across modern day South Africa -- a journey in their mind similar to the conquest of the American West under the mythos of "Manifest Destiny". 

Descendants of those settlers -- who now speak Afrikaans, a language descended from Dutch -- every year still celebrate a 1838 victory over indigenous Zulu people at the Battle of Blood River, fulfilling the mythical vow. 

"We made a promise with God. If he saves us during that war with the Zulus, then we will commemorate this year, this day every year. So that's what we do," said Rudolf Brits, 61, who had made the two-hour drive from Sasolburg in the Free State. 

The date has remained a public holiday since the end of apartheid, but was renamed as the Day of Reconciliation in 1995 following the election of Nelson Mandela.

"The underlying ethos between Manifest Destiny and the Great Trek are similar: descendants of colonists who felt sure of their claim to the land -— all the land —- despite the presence of people already living there," Laura Mitchell, a University of California Irvine history professor specialising in South Africa and the Dutch East India Company, told AFP. 

The comparison extends to the initial settlers. Huguenots went to South Africa to flee persecution in Europe while the pilgrims who sailed to the United States on the Mayflower left for the same reasons.

- Migratory waves -

They "are all sort of part of the same wave of migration," Joel Cabrita, director of the Center for African Studies at Stanford University, told AFP. "There (was) a global Anglo-Saxon chauvinism in this period. this idea that white people are somehow closer to God."

Those parallel migration myths are now being rekindled with Trump's MAGA movement's interest in South Africa.

"I think it's about whiteness. It's about places around the world where white right-wing American nationalists can see evidence of whiteness under siege, whiteness under attack," Cabrita said.

She also noted that hundreds of American mercenaries fought in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, to defend white minority rule in the 1960s and 70s. 

"Today it's South Africa, but 50 years ago Rhodesia was the kind of cause celebre," Cabrita said.

At the monument in Pretoria, Reid, the mechanic, accused South African President Cyril Ramaphosa of denying the murders of white farmers, a claim echoed by Trump.

"I've had family that was in farm murders. My uncle's mother was murdered on a farm," Reid said. 

Twelve people -- not all white -- were killed in rural areas in South Africa between July and September this year, according to the latest police statistics, compared to nearly 5,800 homicides country-wide. 

The insistence of some white South Africans and Americans to still believe in massive racial targetting stems from their fear of losing cultural identity, Mitchelle said. 

"The fear looks bigger than the actual risks," she said. 

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