How White South Africans Are Reshaping the Mississippi Delta

Sometimes, Ramsden and his Mississippi peers would jump into the mud to lay irrigation pipes. But their job usually involves operating machines. Area farms primarily grow row crops such as soybeans, corn and cotton, which require modern tractors equipped with complex software; workers monitor GPS-guided equipment that automates planting depth and seed spacing. Jason Holcomb, professor emeritus of geography and global studies at Morehead State University, told me that South African H-2A workers in the United States first found work in the Great Plains in the 1990s, working on custom harvest crews that moved from farm to farm cutting crops. Historically, this work was a rite of passage for high school and college students in the region. But in the 1990s, as regulations tightened, local interest waned. Today, South Africans represent the fastest growing source of H-2A agricultural labor in the United States: from 2011 to 2024, the number of visa holders increased by more than four hundred percent and the number of South Africans participating in the program increased fourteen-fold. Ramsden told me that on a flight from Atlanta to South Africa in November or December, at the end of the working season, you might find that two hundred and fifty of the three hundred passengers are farm workers returning home. “If this program disappeared tomorrow, farming would cease,” said Walter King, one of the co-owners of Nelson-King Farms.

For South Africans, part of the attraction is the money. Ramsden estimated that Mississippi workers could earn at least four times the wages they earned at home. But it’s not just the salary that sends them abroad: we also have the feeling that they escape anti-white sentiment. Many of these Delta men are descendants of settlers who, beginning in the 1830s, embarked on the “Great Trek,” a migration from the South African coast into the region’s interior to establish farms and, later, entire republics independent of the British Crown. They called themselves Afrikaners to indicate their attachment to what they considered their homeland, unlike the British who were always linked to London.

In the 20th century, Afrikaners took power in South Africa. Eve Fairbanks, the author of “The Inheritors: An Intimate Portrait of South Africa’s Racial Reckoning,” told me that, in the Afrikaner narrative, farmers were “the total backbone of the country – the big guys, the heroes.” (The word “Boer”, meaning “farmer” in Afrikaans, is sometimes used interchangeably with Afrikaner.) They presented themselves as a people who had tamed an empty space, thereby making possible the emergence of a nation. To maintain the illusion of democracy in a majority black country, Afrikaners created the system of apartheid, which in theory created smaller, independent states for different ethnic groups, but effectively denied citizenship to black South Africans, depriving them of the right to participate in politics, own land, or move freely. (The architects of apartheid took inspiration from Jim Crow policies in the American South, which effectively disenfranchised much of the region’s black majority.)

In 1992, after decades of external pressure and internal resistance, the country voted to end the system. But property imbalances persisted: today, white South Africans, who make up about seven percent of the country’s population, still own 72 percent of private agricultural land. Meanwhile, millions of black South Africans still live in informal settlements.