The refugee coordination group Inspiritus was forced to fire employment specialist Yasmeen Othman after she denied the refugee status of Afrikaners and attempted to persuade her co-workers not to do work on their behalf.
Alabama was selected as the destination for some of the 59 Afrikaners arriving in the United States as refugees from South Africa. Move-in began on May 12 with oversight from the local nonprofit Inspiritus, which operates refugee resettlement services in Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee.
Liz Kurtz, the Alabama refugee coordinator for Inspiritus, gave a statement to Alabama local news organization AL.com emphasizing that Inspiritus would “serve all refugees, no matter how they arrive.” Kurtz mentioned that she hopes to also welcome others whose status is currently in limbo due to the Trump administration’s pause on most refugee admission.
Enter Yasmeen Othman. An employment specialist with Inspiritus, she gave a hostile statement to AL.com targeting her nonprofit’s clients. In it, Othman described the resettlement of Afrikaners as “disrespectful” to the other refugees Inspiritus assists.
“I feel like it’s disrespectful to the refugees that we are assisting and helping, that are running from violence and forced displacement, to be helping this population,” she said.
Two weeks after its article, AL.com reported that Othman had been fired by Inspiritus. Othman attributes her firing to the comments she made to the media. However, her employer said that her effort to convince her co-workers to refuse to take part in helping the Afrikaner refugees also played a role in its decision to fire her, she said.
Speaking after her firing, Othman told AL.com that she believed because she was supporting “the right thing,” it would mean “nothing bad should happen to me.” She learned “unfortunately, that’s not the case.”
Othman stood by her interventions and comments, including in her statement that “I would definitely do it again.”
Othman continues to deny that Afrikaners are “actual refugees.” Instead, she describes them as “these individuals in with no evidence of them going through genocide.” In contrast, there is a well-documented record of the plight of the Afrikaners.
For a recent example, “instrumental” white anti-apartheid activist Helen Zille was denounced by South African leadership for praising Afrikaners’ ability to rise out of poverty throughout history as a model for all groups. Anti-white South African politicians attempted to conflate her statement with the horrors of apartheid, but Zille was referring to a very different set of historical facts: the Helpmekaar (“help each other”) Movement.
Ernst J. Van Zyl of AfriForum, an Afrikaner-focused group that constitutes the largest civil rights organization in the Southern Hemisphere and has worked with the Trump administration, is an expert on the Helpmekaar movement. He spoke about it in an interview before South Africa’s elections last year. He sees two chapters of Afrikaner history, the “devout statism” of the apartheid regime and an ignored past in which impoverished Afrikaners uplifted themselves “without a cent of government support.”
Only 1 percent of industry was under Afrikaner control at the turn of the 20th century. Afrikaners worked together as a community to improve their economic station. Communities pooled money to send students to school. Others organized to found cooperative banks, insurance companies, and associations for businessmen and workers alike.
With the goal of economic independence, community loans supported entrepreneurs. An early loan went to Anton Rupert. His family now owns a multibillion dollar international tobacco corporation, but it all began with a community loan and a garage.
Through this effort, the Afrikaner community went from poverty to progress in 40 years. The ensuing decades brought tragic mistakes as Afrikaners turned from relying on their community to state power. Van Zyl argues that by relinquishing their community institutions such as schools to the state during apartheid, the stage was set for these institutions to turn on Afrikaners once they lost control. Yet the spirit of the Helpmekaar Movement lives on through AfriForum and its work to build South African society.
Anti-Afrikaner bigotry pervades the Left, as demonstrated recently in Yasmeen Othman’s actions. In spite of this, the labor of a people that have demonstrated their work ethic throughout history continues.
Shiv Parihar is a writer at The American Spectator. Follow him on X at @ShivomMParihar.
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