Trump’s New Security Adviser Studied in South Africa, Speaks Afrikaans, Reads Huisgenoot

Robert O’Brien, the new security adviser to President Donald Trump – his fourth since taking office – studied at the University of the Orange Free State in the years that sanctions were being heavily imposed against South Africa and speaks Afrikaans fluently, according to news reports.

O’Brien was appointed six days ago to take over from John Bolton, who followed retired U.S. Army Lieutenant-General H.R. McMaster and Michael Flynn.

According to an interview with AfriForum in 2017 O’Brien, who is a partner at Larson O’Brien and served as Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs, said he still spoke Afrikaans and his wife got copies of De Kat and Huisgenoot magazines sent to him monthly.

He told AfriForum that in preparation for his time at the University of the Orange Free State in 1986, after getting a scholarship from Rotary International, he studied Afrikaans under Professor Jacques du Plessis, who taught at universities in Wisconsin and California at the time. Du Plessis had developed Afrikaans study materials for Brigham Young University in Utah, which O’Brien said he had also used.

The Guardian newspaper in England ran a headline today reading, “Robert O’Brien attended ‘routinely racist’ university in apartheid South Africa”.

It quoted Professor Jonathan Jansen, a former vice-chancellor of Free State University, saying that at the time O’Brien was a student, the institution was “in short … a white, Afrikaans university for people then called Afrikaners – very conservative and routinely racist not only in their policies but in their practices.”

O’Brien stayed in a men’s hostel during his year in Bloemfontein.

“South Africans are in my opinion the most hospitable people in the world and I learnt it at Kovsies (the old nicknamed for the university),” he told AfriForum. “The Afrikaans students in my hostel  were very interested in the USA and knew more about world events than my American friends. My classmates also were very helpful helping me and took trouble to help me with my Afrikaans.”