For decades, South Africa was controlled under apartheid rule by the country's white minority, many of them descendants of Dutch colonists. Apartheid, a system of legalized segregation, deprived the majority of citizens of basic rights and forced many Black South Africans to live in ethnic Bantustans.

American officials welcomed a group of 59 Afrikaners, who are from the white ethnic minority who ruled South Africa during apartheid, to the U.S. as refugees.