With the impending 50th anniversary of the Soweto Uprising, South Africa’s biggest rebellion against apartheid, it is important to remember who the true victims of its brutal racism were — and put the lie to President Donald Trump’s perversion of the country’s past.

Last year, Trump shockingly stopped all refugee admissions into the U.S. — including those from war zones — except for Afrikaners, a white South African minority group that he said were the targets of racial persecution and systemic violence. No matter that these claims have been widely debunked. Of the mere 4,499 refugees allowed into the U.S. since October 2025, all but three were white South Africans, according to the State Department’s Refugee Processing Center.

Apartheid horrors

As he does with race issues here in the U.S., Trump’s fixation on supposed white victimhood seems an attempt to flip South African history on its head. But no amount of sophistry can undo the reality of apartheid’s horrors. Yes, the country has experienced horrifying racial persecution and systemic violence — all institutionalized and aimed at the country’s Black and brown citizenry from 1948 to 1994.

I witnessed this first-hand as a journalist. By the time I landed in Johannesburg in 1987, I had covered wars and civil unrest around the world. I wasn’t a naïf. But never had I been in such a place as South Africa, where more than 85% of the population was, by law, marginalized, dehumanized and disenfranchised.

This was what apartheid mandated: the ability of your brain or contents of your heart counted for nothing; race was everything. Race was destiny. It determined, quite literally, where you were born, where you grew up, where you were educated, where you could work, whom you could marry, where you could live, where you would die and be buried. And it was ruthlessly enforced.

I will never forget one of the first interviews I did, that of an Afrikaner judge. “When I look down from the bench at a Black (person),” he told me, “I don’t see a human. I see a monkey.” This, from an ostensible arbiter of justice.

The heroic Mashininis

Among the hundreds of Black South Africans I met during my time there, the Mashininis — about whom I would ultimately write a book — perhaps best epitomized apartheid’s inescapable tentacles and the trauma that it inflicted across generations. A poor law-abiding family of 13 children, the parents were strict disciplinarians and unbending on two matters: regular church attendance and good grades in school. That is, until June 16, 1976.

On that morning, the youth of Soweto, Johannesburg’s massive Black township, rose up in protest against a new rule making Afrikaans the language of instruction in their classes. (A language that most of them did not know well.) Tsiestsi Mashinini, the charismatic second-oldest in the family who was a high schooler at the time, led them in demonstrations that quickly exploded into the country’s largest insurrection. Hundreds are thought to have died; thousands were injured.

Tsietsi’s actions on that day set in motion a chain of events that changed his country irrevocably and forever defined his family. From that moment on, the Mashinini name became the stuff of legend among people in the townships — and anathema among the dreaded Security Branch of the South African Police. Many of Tsietsi’s siblings, even his parents, now found themselves pulled inexorably into the struggle against apartheid.

One brother became a commander in the army of the outlawed African National Congress (ANC) — whose guerrillas launched attacks against the white government — living a clandestine existence for years. Another was twice arrested for his militancy, hideously tortured, tried for treason, freed — only to help incite the revolt of the 1980s that finally brought the white government to its knees. Yet another brother escaped from South Africa as a youngster; taken into the ANC fold, he would grow up in exile in the organization. Their mother, simply because of her surname, spent 197 days in solitary confinement in jail.

The courageous foot soldiers

As for Tsietsi, he managed to elude the security police and slip out of the country — only to die under mysterious circumstances in West Africa. He never got to see the fruition of what he started on that June morning: the transition to a free and democratic South Africa, culminating in the election of Nelson Mandela as president in 1994.

If the Mandelas were the generals in the fight against apartheid, then the Mashininis — and tens of thousands of other everyday South Africans — were the foot soldiers. Theirs is a story of imprisonment, torture, separation and loss, but it is also one of dignity, courage and strength in the face of appalling adversity. Ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances. 

These are the people who will be celebrated on June 16: the true victims of South Africa’s racial persecution and systemic violence. For Trump to assert otherwise is not just revisionist history. It is an utter disgrace.

Lynda Schuster is a former foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and Christian Science Monitor. Her book, “A Burning Hunger: One Family’s Struggle Against Apartheid,” has been reissued to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Soweto Uprising.