Make Apartheid Great Again?
Trump's actions signal need to understand global history of white supremacy.
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Editor´s Note
After Trump's executive order on South Africa, both Zeb Larson and I immediately thought that it needed an analysis that went further than simply denouncing his racism. Instead of writing separate articles, we agreed to collaborate. The article below was published by Foreign Policy in Focus last week.
The article does not mention Elon Musk, since he was already too much press coverage on other issues. But it is worth noting that his own family background features the multi-generational connections between ideologies of white supremacy in both North America and Southern Africa. His maternal grandfather, from Canada, was Joshua Haldeman, “a chiropractor, aviator, and political activist with ties to the technocracy movement, known for his radical views, including support for apartheid-era South Africa.”
Also included below is an article by leading South African journalist John Matisonn debunking Trump´s misleading rhetoric on South Africa. For a more accurate picture of contemporary South Africa, readers may also want to check out the websites of the Daily Maverick or the Mail & Guardian. For a more in-depth examination, read Stephen Friedman, Prisoners of the Past: South African democracy and the legacy of minority rule. Or, if one is inclined to read mystery novels, one cannot find a better portrait of the racial complexity of post-apartheid South Africa complexity than Deon Meyer´s novels featuring Afrikaner police officer Benny Griessel, his African commanding officer Mbali Kaleni, and ´Coloured´ colleague Vaughn Cupido.
For another article analyzing Trump, Musk, and South Africa, see https://africasacountry.com/2025/02/elon-musks-south-african-fantasy
By Zeb Larson and William Minter
Originally published in Foreign Policy in Focus, February 21, 2025
On February 7, Donald Trump issued an executive order “to address serious human rights violations occurring in South Africa.” The order charged “blatant discrimination” against “ethnic minority descendants of settler groups,” and mandated “a plan to resettle disfavored minorities in South Africa discriminated against because of their race as refugees.” His actions echo a long history of right-wing support in the United States for racism in Southern Africa, including mobilization of support for white Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) as well as the apartheid regime in South Africa.
Analysts in South Africa quickly pointed out the many factual errors in Trump’s diatribe. Even Afrikaners, who he alleges are persecuted, are unlikely to accept being refugees since South Africa is their home country. The post-apartheid constitution of 1997, echoing the African National Congress’ Freedom Charter of 1955, clearly states that South Africa belongs to “all who live in it.” But Trump’s misunderstanding is an example of the transnational scope of white racist nostalgia.
An essential component of opposing the MAGA offensive against human rights in the United States has been new understandings of U.S. history, as reflected in the 1619 Project and a host of other publications. Most often, however, this discussion has focused on the United States in isolation. Scholars such as Ana Lucia Araújo, in Humans in Shackles, and Howard French, in Born of Blackness, have pioneered wider global histories. But however influential this trend is among historians, it has not been matched by attention in the media or public debate.
In the global history of white supremacy, the close relationship between the United States and South Africa stands out for centuries of interaction between the two settler colonies, with both ideological and material links from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. Significant links between Black resistance movements in the two countries also date back at least to the early twentieth century. But until the end of official apartheid in the 1990s, the closest bonds were between white America and white South Africa.
In a short history of the Boer War written by 8-year-old future CIA Director Allen Dulles in 1901, and published by his grandfather, Dulles noted that the Boers landed at the Cape in 1652, “finding no people but a few Indians,” and that “it was not right for the British to come in because the Boers had the first right to the land.” For Dulles, as for other U.S. policymakers until almost the end of the twentieth century, it was axiomatic that only whites had rights.
The parallels between these two settler colonies were significant. Robert F. Kennedy, speaking to university students in Cape Town in June 1966, put it like this:
I come here this evening because of my deep interest and affection for a land settled by the Dutch in the mid-seventeenth century, then taken over by the British, and at last independent; a land in which the native inhabitants were at first subdued, but relations with whom remain a problem to this day; a land which defined itself on a hostile frontier; a land which has tamed rich natural resources through the energetic application of modern technology; a land which once the importer of slaves, and now must struggle to wipe out the last traces of that former bondage. I refer, of course, to the United States of America.
The parallels were matched by a long history of interaction. The concept for the African reserves (later Bantustans) in South Africa was modeled on American Indian reservations. As noted by historian John W. Cell, Americans and South Africans debated how to shape “segregation” in urbanizing societies in the mid-twentieth century. The Carnegie Corporation of New York financed both the classic study of the situation of “poor whites° in South Africa and Gunnar Myrdal´s The American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and American Democracy.
In the early twentieth century, mining engineer Herbert Hoover (later U.S. president) was the founder and director of the Chinese Engineering and Mining Corporation, which shipped some 50.000 Chinese laborers to South Africa to work in South African mines. The scheme was abandoned in 1911. Mention of it was recently deleted from Wikipedia, most likely in 2018.
Both countries were united during the Cold War through anti-communism. South African officials studied McCarthyist legislation in the United States and applied it at home through the Suppression of Communism Act. In both countries, “anti-communism” became a way to defy demands for civil rights. Although white racism in South Africa became the focus of international condemnation after the official adoption of apartheid in 1948, the United States and other Western countries systematically opposed sanctions against South Africa for decades until the rise of the international anti-apartheid movement resulted in the congressional override of President Ronald Reagan’s veto to pass the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986.
That success came after decades of campaigning in the United States and around the world, with heightened international attention coming in response to resistance in South Africa itself. The Treason Trial from 1956 to 1961, in which Nelson Mandela and 135 other leaders of the African National Congress were charged, evoked widespread anti-apartheid actions in the United Kingdom and other countries. The Sharpeville Massacre in 1960 and the Soweto Youth Uprising in 1976 precipitated even larger waves of protest, fueled by new media options. Resistance reached a new peak after the formation of the United Democratic Front in 1983.
Following the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990, and the first non-racial election that brought him into office, there was worldwide celebration at the end of political apartheid. In later years, it became clear that only a minority of Black South Africans had joined the elite at the top of a still sharply unequal society. Disillusionment and discontent over high rates of unemployment and poverty arose among the majority of Black South Africans.
But that is a very different sentiment than the nostalgia for the old apartheid order among white South Africans who left the country as well as many who stayed in South Africa.
The right wing in the United States as well as Great Britain, Canada, and elsewhere, has held a fascination for apartheid and has regretted its abolition. The global anti-apartheid movement unleashed unprecedented demands by citizens to rein in corporate activity that supported apartheid. In the same way that climate activists studied divestment, so too have conservative lobbying groups studied how to block divestment groups. The sympathy that even liberal Robert F. Kennedy expressed for South African white pioneers on a hostile frontier evokes the common ideology of legitimizing settler conquest. Trump’s Executive Order can only be understood in that context.
Trump and South Africa on collision course
The row centers on a new land seizure law prompting the White House to cut off aid
Responsible Statecraft, Feb 12, 2025
President Donald Trump’s attack on South Africa has brought relations between Washington and Pretoria to their lowest point since sanctions were imposed on the previous apartheid government in 1986.
It is also likely to reduce or eliminate White House participation in this year’s G20 meeting, hosted by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in Johannesburg in November. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced last week that he will not attend the G20 foreign ministers’ preparatory meeting in protest.
In South Africa, this row comes seven months into a coalition government that is testing the ability of the former liberation movement, the African National Congress (ANC), to work with its partner, the strongly pro-Western Democratic Alliance (DA), which represents about 90% of white voters.
Ramaphosa’s ANC chose the DA over the third and fourth largest parties, which are black, anti-Western breakaways from the ANC that accuse the president of failing to address historic black land claims. Under this intense political pressure, the ANC produced an Expropriation Act it hoped would satisfy all sides.
The coalition government’s success depends on whether it can restore economic growth and reverse rising joblessness after 15 years of stagnation.
The spat began when Trump charged that “terrible things are happening in South Africa, they’re confiscating land and actually they’re doing things that are perhaps far worse than that.” At the same time, U.S. billionaire and the head of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency Elon Musk, who was born in South Africa, has accused Pretoria of doing little to stop a “genocide” of white farmers.
Trump followed up with an Executive Order on Feb. 7, charging that the new law allowed government “to seize ethnic minority Afrikaners’ agricultural property without compensation.” As a result of these “unjust and immoral practices,” the order froze all U.S. aid to South Africa, and promised to “promote the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination.”
Ramaphosa denied his government discriminates. “There is no single group that faces persecution,” he told Parliament.
“We are witnessing the rise of nationalism and protectionism, the pursuit of narrow interests and the decline of common cause,” he said. “But we are not daunted. We will not be deterred. We will not be bullied. We are a resilient people.”
Trump’s attack appeared to be prompted by the new law, under which no actions have yet taken place. A lobbying group campaigning against it only cited one previous example from 2018 of a farm being taken by a local official, who was forced to return it under a court order.
The DA has gone to court to review the constitutionality of the Act. It has a solid record of winning most of its court challenges. But all major parties backed the government in this fight against Trump, in part because it followed immediately after Trump froze USAID’s PEPFAR program, which supports HIV/AIDS treatment.
The medication for six million patients is paid for by South Africa, but PEPFAR contributes a crucial 17% of the cost in the form of nursing staff, quality monitoring, and other essential components.
Soon after an outcry from medical personnel who warned that AIDS patients who discontinue their regular medication may die, Rubio announced a waiver, but checks with program implementers indicate that the program has not yet resumed.
Behind the war of words is one of the most serious unaddressed maladies inherited from the apartheid past. Like its northern neighbor, Zimbabwe, getting land back taken under white governments was one of the primary missions of the anti-apartheid movement.
But both post-liberation Zimbabwe and South Africa did too little to implement those policies until a wave of popular sentiment made it political unavoidable. In Zimbabwe, the government was coerced into responding to a grassroots call for land by approving land invasions that led to about eight farm murders. A quarter of a century later, the economy of Zimbabwe has not recovered.
Most South African political parties and interest groups recognize that land reform is imperative.
Chris Burgess, editor of the Afrikaans language farmers’ magazine Landbou, agreed that there has not been land expropriation so far, and he is not especially concerned about the wording of the new law. “Farmers are less worried about the act as written than the spirit in which it will be implemented,” he told RS.
Burgess is especially concerned about the high rate of farm murders, though he has not seen evidence that white farmers were targeted for political reasons. Whites make up seven percent of the population, but only 2% of murders. Causes vary, and more employees are murdered on farms than white farmers.
Washington-based Genocide Watch’s Dr. Gregory Stanton, a professor of human-rights law, told The Spectator that “for all the tragedy of farm murders in South Africa, there is no evidence of a planned extermination.” There are instead, “opportunistic crimes,” sometimes acts of revenge by workers who are owed wages or feel aggrieved with their employers. Or there are just attacks carried out by thugs out for money.
Stanton’s research in South Africa shows that white people, urban or rural, are much safer than their black counterparts. Farmers are often vulnerable, isolated and easy targets, but that doesn’t make it genocide.
South Africa is in the throes of a crime wave that saw 69 murders per day nationally, and farmers have long agitated for better protection. Official figures showed 50 farmers (black and white) were killed in 2023, and 26 by November of 2024, according to South African Farmers’ Weekly.
“There is deep distrust of the state ability to do something constructive and effective about both crime and land reform,” said Burgess.
The new Expropriation Act replaces an apartheid-era law. It provides for expropriation for eminent domain, but also to reverse centuries of discrimination, most notably in the 1913 Land Act, which deprived black South Africans of access to the majority of farm land in South Africa.
The Act provides for compensation to be determined by specific criteria. If land is unused, improperly acquired or owned by the government, compensation could be less. In some circumstances, it could be handed over without compensation.
Trump first heard about the controversy during his first administration, after a lobbying campaign by a white South African farming group, AfriForum, who met with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and made an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show.
In 2025, about 70% of the land remains in the hands of whites, who constitute 7% of the population.
Soon after Trump’s criticism, AfriForum made it clear that it was opposed to Trump’s punitive measures, and joined most farmer organizations in saying they prefer to stay in South Africa and fight this battle to keep their land.
Ramaphosa has attempted to talk to Trump and announced a delegation will soon be going to Washington to try to ease tensions. But the argument about white farmers might be easier to resolve than another source of Trump’s displeasure.
The Executive Order also complains of South Africa’s “aggressive positions towards the U.S. and its allies, including accusing Israel, not Hamas, of genocide in the International Court of Justice (ICJ), and reinvigorating its relations with Iran to develop commercial, military and nuclear arrangements.”
Ramaphosa is known as a skilled negotiator from his days as a trade union leader and in his negotiations with the white government that led to a democratic constitution. But if the demand is that he drop South Africa’s case at the ICJ, this might be politically difficult, because the ANC’s historic sympathy for Palestine is deeply entrenched since its days when it too was the underdog.
The coalition government has not yet come up with an agreed foreign policy, and the DA has historically been strongly pro-Israel, but some ANC leaders see Palestine as a deal breaker for the coalition.
Ramaphosa still hopes for a resolution with Washington. Before this clash, he announced his invitation to Trump for a state visit ahead of the G20. He still hopes to persuade him to come, but that too is hard to imagine after Trump and Rubio’s rebuke.