South African blame game

A White Afrikaans rights group’s years of lobbying right-wing US politicians culminated in President Donald Trump on Friday falsely accusing South Africa of seeking to seize land from “ethnic minority Afrikaners” and withholding financial aid to the nation.

The accusation of racist policy against the country that overcame apartheid sparked an unusually united condemnation across the South African political spectrum.

But the fringe groups that have spent years promoting the narrative that the government is oppressing the White minority that once ruled the country said Trump had a point — even as they tried to roll back some of their most alarmist rhetoric in the face of a surprisingly aggressive US response.

“The fact is South Africa has 141 racial laws and race-based statements that are repeatedly made by government officials,” Kallie Kriel, CEO of AfriForum, said in an interview following a hastily-called press conference on Saturday in the group’s office in Pretoria, on a street named after the prime minister under whom apartheid was formalized. 

President Cyril Ramaphosa’s party, the African National Congress, blamed AfriForum for its “racist distortions” that “mislead the global community and protect apartheid-era land ownership patterns.”

He signed a bill in December similar to eminent domain laws in the US that allows the government to expropriate land in some cases.

The biggest impact of Trump’s decision will be on R7.5 billion of funding for South Africa’s longstanding HIV program, which could grind to a halt.

“We did not accuse the government of large-scale race-based land grabs or distribute false information in this regard,” said Flip Buys, chairman of the White-majority Solidarity Movement that includes AfriForum.

“We did not and will not ask for sanctions against South Africa or the funds for vulnerable people to be cut off by the US government.”

AfriForum, which says it has 300,000 members, opposes South African laws that favour Black people for business ownership and hiring and are aimed at redressing the economic exclusion that formed one of the bases of apartheid.

Over the past few years, it’s taken its lobbying for what it’s called “expropriation as well as the widespread murder of farmers” global, meeting with Republican US Senator Ted Cruz and Trump’s then-National Security Advisor John Bolton in 2018.

An appearance on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show at the time helped prompt Trump to weigh in for the first time.

South African officials are “basically threatening White farmers that if they do not voluntarily hand over their land to Black people, there would be a violent takeover,” Ernst Roets, AfriForum’s then-deputy chief executive, said on Carlson’s show in May 2018.

While AfriForum has said that White farmers have been targeted, crime in South Africa is rampant, with many blaming extreme inequality for rising levels of murders and attacks on residents of all races. 

Trump’s top ally, South Africa-born billionaire Elon Musk, has cited the same laws flagged by Solidarity Movement as the reason he won’t bring his Starlink satellite internet service to South Africa, which requires significant Black ownership.

It’s one of the few countries regionally where Musk’s company doesn’t already operate or plan to this year, according to the Starlink’s website.

“There’s a renewed focus on South Africa — people were appointed to the White House that were very aware of South Africa and wanted to review the relations,” said Jaco Kleynhans, international liaison head at Solidarity Movement. AfriForum supports Musk’s efforts to avoid the Black ownership laws.

Musk has spent years trafficking the false conspiracy that there’s a “White genocide” in the country. AfriForum and its allies don’t use that language. 

But they’ve found a ready audience online — where many accounts affiliated with the groups celebrated Trump’s intervention over the weekend — at first on the fringes before being embraced by foreign White nationalists and right-wing figures that amplify their message. 

And finally, Trump, who on Friday said that the US would promote the resettlement of White Afrikaans South Africans — descendants of the Europeans who settled in South Africa from the 1600s — and their families as refugees, an offer Pretoria quickly contrasted with Trump’s immigration crackdown at home.

“It is ironic that the executive order makes provision for refugee status in the US for a group in South Africa that remains amongst the most economically privileged, while vulnerable people in the US from other parts of the world are being deported and denied asylum despite real hardship,” South Africa’s foreign ministry said.

While AfriForum seems to have the US president’s ear, in South Africa, it remains confined to the edges of mainstream discourse.

“How did a small and quite radical group of people hijack an entire conversation around land reform and racial redress laws in South Africa?” said Ziyanda Stuurman, an independent political risk analyst based in Cape Town. 

Three decades after Nelson Mandela’s “Rainbow Nation” adopted democracy, it remains the world’s most unequal society.

Race is the biggest driving factor, and a government land audit found Whites still hold 72% of farmland owned by individuals even though they constitute just about 7% of the population.

Last year, Mandela’s party, the ANC, was delivered an electoral rebuke, losing its majority for the first time in three decades in large part because it has failed to fully address the legacy of apartheid.

“We’re now 30 years and more down the line, and we’re still facing very many of the same issues around racialized poverty,” said Stuurman. “It’s very, very difficult to dismiss the fact that poverty is correlated with race.”

Those continued disparities have, in recent years, fed calls for the state to seize land without paying for it. Ramaphosa’s party in 2021 failed in its attempt to change the constitution to allow it. 

Solidarity Movement blames Ramaphosa for signing the law that it says threatens property rights and South Africa’s case against Israel in the International Criminal Court over the war in Gaza for prompting Trump’s response.

“They brought this on themselves,” Kleynhans said in an interview on Feb. 4, after Trump first threatened to withhold aid.

But “I’ve reached out to someone in the White House, I’ve reached out to people in Congress. We’re doing that in ways to get them to think differently about South Africa.”

“There may be an opportunity in this,” he added. “It creates an opportunity to engage in a different relationship.”