A specially chartered plane departed from Johannesburg on Sunday and landed at Dulles Airport outside Washington on Monday.
The group of South African "refugees" consists mainly of families with small children, but also younger couples and some older individuals.
"Welcome here"
US Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau welcomed the travelers in a hangar at the airport.
I want you all to know that you are very welcome here and that we have respect for what you have had to endure in recent years, he says, according to AP.
According to the White House's Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, the flight is the first of many.
This is race-based persecution, Miller claimed on Friday.
Tens of thousands of Afrikaners have expressed interest in applying for refugee status in the US. This comes after President Donald Trump accused South Africa of racial discrimination and, among other things, claimed that the government in Pretoria seizes land from whites.
The South African government has consistently rejected the allegations.
Directs criticism
Ideological organizations are directing criticism at the US for giving white South Africans priority over people fleeing war and natural disasters, writes AP. The White House has accelerated the Afrikaners' applications and at the same time stopped refugee arrivals from, among other places, Iraq, and countries in Africa south of the Sahara.
The Afrikaners, descendants of settlers from the Netherlands and France, make up around 2.7 million of South Africa's 62 million-strong population. According to the South African government, they are among the most economically privileged in the heavily segregated country.
The word "apartheid" comes from the Afrikaans language and means "separation".
South Africa adopted apartheid as a political system in 1948, when the Nationalist Party came to power. Under the very brutal system, non-white inhabitants were subjected to extensive and systematic racism.
The population was divided into whites, blacks, Asians, and colored (of mixed descent). Many blacks were placed in reserves, so-called "homelands".
The UN General Assembly condemned South Africa on several occasions and emphasized that apartheid was a crime against humanity.
In practice, apartheid was more or less abolished in 1990. The resistance movement ANC's leader Nelson Mandela was released from prison then. After the country's first democratic election in 1994, Mandela became South Africa's leader.
Source: Landguiden/UI
