On 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 the University of Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs.