Conversation: "Post-Apartheid? Restitution and Racial Fear in South Africa"
Thursday, October 30, 2025 4:00–5:30 PM
- Location
- DescriptionOn May 12, 2025, a group of 59 white South Africans arrived in the United States as refugees on a flight chartered by the U.S. government. The new arrivals, many of whom are Afrikaner descendants of Dutch settlers, were granted refugee status based on claims they faced racial discrimination and violence in South Africa. At the center of this situation is South Africa’s land restitution program, which is designed to return land, under certain conditions, to Black communities that were dispossessed during the country’s Apartheid era.
John Eligon, the Johannesburg bureau chief for The New York Times, has covered this story from all angles — including the passage of South Africa’s Expropriation Act, reactions to the policy in different communities, the Trump administration’s creation of a special refugee program for South Africa’s racial minorities, and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa’s pushback against narratives amplified by President Trump, Elon Musk, and others.
Eligon will share insights from his reporting during “Post-Apartheid? Restitution and Racial Fear in South Africa,” a public conversation moderated by Dory Mitros Durham, assistant dean for academic affairs and associate teaching professor in Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs.
About the speaker
John Eligon has served as The New York Times’ Johannesburg bureau chief since 2021. In that role, he is responsible for covering countries in southern Africa.
He writes about how big trends and phenomena — from climate change to political upheaval — influence and shape the lives of ordinary people across southern Africa. “My work seeks to upend easy assumptions and stereotypes about the region,” he says. “I strive to show readers a side of Africa they rarely see or hear about, like how the Apartheid-era townships have become a hub of nightlife for South Africa’s rising Black middle class, or how the Rugby World Cup unified a very divided South Africa.”
Eligon’s career at The New York Times started in 2005 as a sports reporter. He has covered courts for the Metro section and was a correspondent for the National section based in Kansas City, Missouri. He spent most of his time on the National desk covering issues of race across the United States. He was The Times’ first reporter on the ground in Minneapolis following the murder of George Floyd, and wrote extensively about the national movement for racial justice that it sparked. Several years earlier, he helped to shepherd The Times’ coverage of the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
Eligon was born in the Caribbean nation of Trinidad and Tobago, and grew up mainly in Florida and Michigan. He is a graduate of Northwestern University, where he earned degrees in journalism and German.
Originally published at klau.nd.edu. - Websitehttps://events.nd.edu/events/2025/10/30/post-apartheid-restitution-and-racial-fear-in-south-africa/