Donald Trump has lengthy been preoccupied with South Africa’s most fraught and emotional home coverage challenge: land.
In his first time period the US president directed his then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo — by way of Twitter — to “intently examine the South Africa land and farm seizures” and the supposed “large-scale killing of farmers”.
This week he repeated these pet theories in an Oval Workplace encounter with South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa, who at one level closed his eyes and appeared to will himself to remain calm. Trump’s key declare was that “officers” in South Africa had been saying “kill the white farmer and take their land”.
South Africans know the image on the bottom may be very completely different. The newest land confiscations there came about below apartheid, when 87 per cent of South African land was reserved for white individuals, who accounted for below a fifth of the inhabitants.
Brutal evictions compelled some 3.5mn Black individuals off their ancestral land, which was often expropriated with out compensation and offered at low costs to white farmers.
By the point the nation grew to become a multiracial democracy in 1994, white farmers nonetheless held about 77mn hectares of the nation’s 122mn hectares of land.
These apartheid-era seizures formed right now’s South Africa.
“These divides very a lot persist,” stated Ayesha Omar, lecturer on the College of Witwatersrand. “There was a profound method through which individuals had been stripped of their land . . . and naturally there was the entire query of dignity.”
At this time, white farmers nonetheless personal roughly half of the nation’s land though solely 7 per cent of residents are white. An absence of formal entry to land has stopped the Black majority and different traditionally deprived teams from tapping into the enterprise prospects, together with borrowing in opposition to collateral, that such possession brings.
Nelson Mandela’s newly inaugurated authorities in 1994 sought to redress this steadiness. It aimed to redistribute a 3rd of land to traditionally deprived teams, together with Black individuals, via a “keen vendor, keen purchaser” scheme to buy land at market costs.
The brand new democracy’s structure permitted land expropriation in change for honest compensation. This has lengthy been an explosive challenge, as some politicians argued it must be amended to particularly permit land to be seized, in some instances, with out compensation.
“The structure itself centrally addresses the questions round confront the historic injustices of the previous on the land query,” stated Omar.
A regulation handed in January opened up the likelihood for seizures with out compensation, however there has not but been a single such case. The Democratic Alliance, a celebration within the governing coalition, has launched a authorized problem arguing it’s unconstitutional.
Progress in direction of the redistribution purpose has been far slower than the post-apartheid authorities hoped. The state has to this point purchased out some 3.9mn hectares, or 2.5 per cent of the nation’s landmass.
That has been used for numerous functions together with farming, forestry, tourism and hospitality, stated Mzwanele Nyhontso, minister of land reform and rural improvement.
“The acquisition of land from earlier homeowners, specifically white homeowners, is predicated on negotiated agreements,” he added.
Authorities targets for land redistribution have been repeatedly pushed again over twenty years to 2030. The sluggish tempo of land reform below Ramaphosa’s African Nationwide Congress is one in all many causes that South Africa stays among the many world’s most unequal societies. Progress has additionally been hobbled by corruption.
“The South African state doesn’t have the capability to do what it needs to do. It’s clearly a lot greater than a land switch,” stated Jonny Steinberg, creator of Winnie & Nelson, a guide that re-examines the post-apartheid legacy.
Potential new landowners wanted “experience and capital and market help”, he added.
One other drag on the method is the historic transformation by the white minority of the Black majority into an industrial proletariat, severing their hyperlinks with the land.
Alongside together with his views on land, Trump has claimed white farmers face large-scale assaults. However there isn’t any proof that they face extra focused assaults than every other group amid South Africa’s excessive charges of violent crime.
Within the first quarter of 2025, there have been six murders on farms, of which one was a white farmer and the remainder Black individuals, based on police figures.
Final yr, 26,232 individuals had been murdered in South Africa, a price of 45 per 100,000 in opposition to 5.8 per 100,000 within the US. In that interval, the Transvaal Agricultural Union, a non-public agricultural group, stated there have been 32 murders on farms, affecting each Black and white individuals.
With reform progressing slowly, populists akin to Julius Malema — the unconventional chief of the Financial Freedom Fighters occasion, who was proven singing the apartheid-era battle music “Kill the Boer” in the course of the Oval Workplace assembly — have seized on rising resentment amongst Black residents.
Corne Mulder, a pacesetter of the Afrikaner curiosity Freedom Entrance Plus, a minority occasion within the governing 10-party coalition, in the meantime blamed Ramaphosa for not addressing variations with Trump behind closed doorways, calling the Oval Workplace assembly “an absolute diplomatic disaster”.
However he claimed Trump had used the “genocide” claims “strategically” to spotlight violence in opposition to white farmers.
Trump has repeatedly cited a regulation enacted in January that permits the federal government to expropriate privately held land — the overwhelming majority of which stays white owned — for public use. Consultants have in contrast the laws, handed with out a constitutional change, to a US authorities energy often called “eminent area”.
This regulation operates via a separate mechanism from the federal government’s broader land reform coverage. Analysts say it’s extra doubtless for use in instances involving, for instance, deserted inner-city buildings the place the proprietor can’t be discovered.
It specifies that the place courts deem it “simply and equitable”, no compensation must be paid. Up to now, that provision has not been invoked.
Urged by his South African-born billionaire adviser, Elon Musk, Trump has claimed this regulation goals to grab land from white individuals, and launched a refugee plan to resettle members of the Afrikaner minority within the US. Washington has claimed the group, who hint their roots to the primary Dutch settlers in 1652, are “victims of unjust racial discrimination”.
However few Afrikaners have expressed curiosity in relocating. “All we all know is we’re being inundated with individuals, with white farmers from South Africa,” Trump stated, referring to 59 Afrikaners his administration swiftly organized to fly to the US this month.
Inside South African industrial agriculture, which competes globally with international locations together with Australia and Brazil, farmers are way more involved in regards to the US proposal for 30 per cent blanket tariffs on their nation’s items.
Removed from fleeing the nation, predominantly white Afrikaans farmers have helped increase exports — primarily consisting of fruit and wine — from $2bn in 2001 to just about $14bn in 2024. The trade total exported $13.7bn of produce final yr.
Agriculture stays one of many few South African industries that’s flourishing at the same time as total financial development has slowed to lower than 1 per cent yearly, and a 3rd of persons are out of labor.
The agriculture sector was presently backed by financing of some 220bn rand ($12.3bn) from industrial banks, stated Wandile Sihlobo, chief economist of the Agricultural Enterprise Chamber of South Africa.
“That financing exhibits the extent of confidence within the present land reform course of,” stated Sihlobo, additionally an financial adviser to the president. “In a sector below siege, you wouldn’t be promoting $14bn of merchandise.”
Further reporting by David Pilling in London
