The events that unfolded n 21st May 2025, have generated praise for Team Ramaphosa’s performance from big business and ANC loyalists, and condemnation from the most activists, left formation and trade unionists. It has raised a number of questions and allegations of(i) white genocide (ii) white famer land expropriation (iii) racial discrimination against whites by laws like Black Economic Empowerment and Employment Equity. They also raise the question of why Trump has singled out SA for this particular form of attack; and the ANC-led Government of National Unity’s (GNU) approach. Most important of all these events raises the question of what conclusions the working class must draw internationally and in SA and what action should be taken. The MWP addresses these questions over a series of 3 articles.
Part One
US President Donald Trump’s exhibition of the most brazen imperialist arrogance during SA President Cyril Ramaphosa’s White House visit has rightly been greeted with outrage amongst the majority in SA and worldwide. It surpassed, as a spectacle of the grotesque, even his despicable humiliation of US-led NATO puppet Ukrainian President Zelensky. Trump’s team opened the sluice gates to flood the scene with political sewage in a stage managed ambush. It unapologetically used racism as a weapon to inflame racial animosity in SA and to reinforce it in the US itself. Over and above the 30% reciprocal tariffs already imposed on SA, one of aims was to force the ANC-led SA GNU to surrender to Elon Musk’s insolent demands to change its laws to grant him a license for his satellite internet Starlink.
These events are a stark demonstration that it is not just in the economic sphere, through the wrecking ball that Trump swung at the rest of the world and the global economy with the Tariff War he declared on “Liberation Day” on 2nd April 2025 that the Trump 2.0 regime has detonated global turbulence. It is also in the political and ideological sphere. His economic arsenal consists of political and ideological weaponry, including a brazen assault on democratic rights and bourgeois democracy itself. It has been used in pursuit of its decades long imperialist designs in the Middle East and the neo-colonial world, particularly brazenly in defence of Israel’s genocidal war on the Palestinian people that began 19 months ago. This weaponry has now been trained on SA.
It is an audacious attempt on another front by the fraction of the US capitalist class Trump represents to reclaim the position it has lost globally. It is no longer the world’s sole economic and political hegemon in the new multi-polar world. Foreign policy is a continuation of domestic policy. The same racist, and xenophobic policies that have been deployed in the US to divide the working class have been trained on SA. It aims to buttress the intensified neo-colonial subjugation through the punitive tariff economic assault and aid cuts already in place to force the rest of the world to march in step with the US ideologically and politically.
This side of Trump’s second coming has emboldened racists and xenophobes and the far right worldwide. They see in Trump a messiah, a point of reference and legitimacy from the most powerful presidential office in the world. SA is no exception. In 1996, barely 2 years after the historic defeat of apartheid by the mass movement of the working class and installation of the ANC in power, it went onto its knees before imperialism. It consented to the country’s economic subjugation by imposing the neo-liberal Growth, Employment and Redistribution (Gear) policy imported from the Washington consensus. Gear has catapulted SA to the position of world’s most unequal society triggering a massive transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. The ANC is now going on its belly not only begging for mercy on the tariffs offering the US a gas deal, but it is also mimicking Trump’s anti-immigrant populism more openly than over the past few years.
Much more stridently xenophobic statements from senior ANC leaders like Gauteng Premier Panyaza Lesufi, have now been followed the by a new bill before parliament to “regulate” the employment of foreign nationals. The xenophobic Patriotic Alliance leader and Government of National Unity cabinet member, Gayton Mackenzie, singled out Ramaphosa’s White House delegation member, Afrikaner billionaire Anton Rupert’s for praise over his statement that crime in SA is caused by “uncontrolled immigration.” Judith February’s Freedom Under Law reports: “While addressing the chairpersons and CEOs of all Department of Sport, Arts and Culture entities, he is quoted, inter alia, as saying: “Some of you here [have] the audacity to hire foreigners instead of South Africans.”; “I don’t care how you used to do it. But for as long as I am the minister, there will be no foreigner that will work in an entity while a South African can do the same thing … foreigners needed to be “out in three weeks. I said it, I want them out, get them out.” ActionSA has proposed the constitution which declares SA belongs to all who live in it, be amended to exclude foreign nationals from its protection.
ANC succumbs to Musk on Starlink and BEE
Most despicably, it has become clear since the White House visit, that the gifts in Team Ramaphosa’s sack of supplication were meant not just for Emperor Trump but also Musk. The SA billionaire and world’s richest man in the world, has been rewarded for his insulting support for the white genocide myth and accusation that his Starlink satellite interservice had been denied a license to operate in SA because he is not black. He accuses the ANC of having over 100 racist anti-white laws including Black Economic Empowerment (BEE). Ramaphosa must have made the promise to Musk in a private meeting during his February US visit.
The Democratic Alliance, the GNU’s second major coalition partner, and the biggest recipient of big business funding in the 2024 elections, is acting as Musk’s de facto agent in SA. It is taking the government to court over BEE. However, BEE was not developed by the ANC. It is the programme of the DA’s financial backers – big business. As political commentator and businessman Moeletsi Mbeki (former president Thabo Mbeki’s brother) points out, BEE was developed by big business as part of the negotiations strategy to end apartheid. Its aim? To incubate and coopt a black capitalist class to collaborate in the preservation of capitalism.
Capitalism was under threat from a working class amongst whose leading layers the ideas of socialism predominated in the 1980s. Their conception of the revolution was that apartheid and capitalism were inextricably bound with each other. The revolution would thus proceed from the overthrow of apartheid without interruption to the overthrow of capitalism. With the help of the SACP’s bankrupt Stalinist two-stage theory, a barrier was erected between the dismantling of apartheid and the overthrow of capitalism. Big business threw crumbs at the aspirant black capitalist class in the form of shares in major companies and named this BEE. Ramaphosa, the billionaire is a product of this social engineering.
“We will not be bullied” Ramaphosa had stated in an uncharacteristic tone of defiance in response to Trump prior to his departure. It was clearly meant to deceive the masses in SA. No sooner had they returned from the US, the DA Communications Minister tabled regulations diluting BEE licensing compliance requirements. “Bringing Starlink into SA’s airspace is in the country’s national interest because it will help meet its developmental goals,” said Deputy Minister of the Department of International Relations and Cooperation, Alvin Botes.
BEE policies have long been diluted. If the aspirant black capitalist class the ANC represents had no respect for itself as a class in 1994, when BEE became law, it has even less today. Foreign companies had been compelled to allocate 30% equity shares to “previously disadvantaged individuals to invest.
Less than 10 years later the ANC had to ward off accusations that the discredited BEE policy was a self-enrichment scheme for the politically connected. It then amended BEE in 2003. Foreign investors no longer had to give away 30% shares to “previously disadvantaged individuals.” Instead, equity shares were replaced with “equity equivalents.” Foreign investors could “henceforth sidestep the 30% Black ownership law with “initiatives” such as local partnerships, job creation, or supporting small businesses, in lieu of equity stakes.
BEE became BBBEE – Broad Based Black Economic Empowerment — to “advance economic transformation, enhance the economic participation of black people, and address historical inequalities.” One deception – that “empowerment” in BEE was for all blacks – had been substituted with another. BBBEE applies to all multinational investors, including the 600 US companies already in the country. Even this is too much for Musk. He demanded, and the ANC is prepared to give him a license unburdened even with the pretence of social responsibility. Popular outrage could, however, compel the ANC to abandon this abject capitulation.
The background to the White House ambush
The roadmap to the White House theatrics of 21st May 2025 was drawn in the Executive order Trump signed on 7th February 2025. Titled: “Addressing the Egregious Actions of the Republic South Africa”, it sets out under in Section 1, Purpose, the following:
“In shocking disregard of its citizens’ rights, the Republic of South Africa (South Africa) recently enacted Expropriation Act 13 of 2024 (Act), to enable the government of South Africa to seize ethnic minority Afrikaners’ agricultural property without compensation. This Act follows countless government policies designed to dismantle equal opportunity in employment, education, and business, and hateful rhetoric and government actions fueling disproportionate violence against racially disfavoured landowners.
In addition, South Africa has taken aggressive positions towards the United States and its allies, including accusing Israel, not Hamas, of genocide in the International Court of Justice, and reinvigorating its relations with Iran to develop commercial, military, and nuclear arrangements.”
As a 2010 editorial in the D+C (Development and Cooperation) publication pointed out: “If you can’t count it, it doesn’t count. Literally. All politicians like to quote statistics to support their positions.”
The D+C continued “Winston Churchill once reportedly said that “the only statistics you can trust are the ones you have falsified yourself.” His predecessor as British prime minister in the 19th century, Benjamin Disraeli, allegedly said there were “three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics”. (24/06/2010). Trump did not even bother to go beyond muttering “thousands” and “death, death, death” to support his white genocide myth.
The claims in the bundle US deputy president Vance, mimicking a document dispenser, handed to Trump to wave around gleefully, were debunked within minutes, not only in SA, but worldwide. Turning the White House into a theatre of the absurd, Trump’s team dimmed the lights to play videos of further “evidence.” The pictures of dead people were from the DRC. The crosses next to a rural road in one of the videos do not mark a grave site and have long been taken down. They commemorated the deaths of both black and white farmers following the murder of a white farming husband and wife couple in 2020. Their son, now living in Australia, told the Times that he was outraged when he witnessed the cynical debasement of the event on tv. The murderers were convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment in 2022.
In foregrounding the white genocide conspiracy theory, Trump set out to humiliate and insult an obsequious Ramaphosa on the day. But Trump succeeded in emerging from this encounter reeking of the stench that wafted through the White House. Trump has inflicted even more damage on himself in his second coming than in his first. Even an otherwise compliant media endorsing the US sponsored Israeli genocide in Palestine has ridiculed him. Ramaphosa, however, grinned like a minstrel in a craven capitulation to this imperialist hectoring. Trump nonetheless succeeded in making an even greater but more dangerous fool of himself than he is increasingly seen to be worldwide.
The televangelist, Mark Burns, that Time magazine describes as Trump’s favourite pastor has himself repudiated the white genocide mythology. Burns says astonishingly that Trump, who endearingly refers to him as his “bulldog”, does not have a racist bone in his body. Currently on an inter-faith southern Africa tour, Burns has barked back at him. Afriforum and Solidarity are distancing themselves from the myth like arsonists fleeing the scene of the fire they ignited. Afrikaner groups have pledged they are not going to the US or anywhere. Farming organisations have themselves rubbished the claims. The white genocide myth is dismissed with derision by the overwhelming majority in SA, whites included.
Amongst those in the US taken in by Trump’s promises to defend the country from “invasion” by immigrants promising the biggest deportations in history, there has been a questioning. The contradiction between the treatment of people of colour deportees, and the importation of white Afrikaner “refugees” is simply too stark. Deportations have been accompanied by racist insults and violent kidnapping by, amongst others, Gestapo-like methods. Masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers in plain clothes, heavily armed squads moving now in armoured vehicles have violently “disappeared” victims. They have been flown to places they have never been to. This includes South Sudan, teetering on the brink of an intra-elite factional war. He is treating El Salvador like a penal colony with the connivance of its self-described “world’s coolest dictator” President Bukele Ortez, feted like a personal friend at the White house. The 59 Afrikaner “refugees”, in contrast, were imported on a special chartered flight, their citizenship expedited and offered free fully furnished housing through special legislation designed just for them.
This is an insult to the intelligence even of the base he is attempting to appease who include the 1m US homeless. To this insult has been added the injury of Musk’s culling of 280 000 jobs and counting, the forced recovery through garnishee orders from students owing a combined $1.5 trillion in debt. The working class faces the prospect of tariff induced increases in the cost of basic consumer goods. At the same the “Big Beautiful Budget Bill” Trump is attempting to pass, provides for savage cuts in healthcare, tax reductions for the rich, a lowering of the minimum wage, and an increase in military spending.
Insulting the suffering of the Palestinians under Israeli genocide
Even more striking is the vulgarisation of the meaning of genocide. Trump has saw it fit to parrot a white genocide myth in SA that exists only in the rabidly fevered imagination of a lunatic fringe in SA and the US. Yet the world is witnessing a real genocide playing out in Palestine live on television screens worldwide, financed and armed by the US.
For the 59 Afrikaners there was a Statue of Liberty-like welcome with the words on its base: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.” For the Palestinians there is a new Nakba, with US made and supplied bombs raining down in explosive potency 5 time those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the most intense bombing since World War 2. This modern Holocaust has claimed, based on the Lancet’s estimates, in all likelihood in excess of 200 000 lives from direct and indirect causes. For US supporters of Palestinians of any nationality, including US citizens, Trump has un leashed a medieval witch-hunt with arbitrary arrests, kidnapping, detention without trial and deportations. The deportees are n being swept out like refuse from Trump 2.0’s political shores teeming with racist, xenophobic and anti-working class reaction.
The coterie of billionaire sycophants surrounding Trump know that claims of a white genocide in SA are fictitious. But that is not the point. Fake news has been the staple diet of this fraction of the US ruling class that has captured the state. It’s confidence has been bolstered by its domination of the trifecta of the Senate, House of Representative and the Presidency, the majority Trump has secured through his Supreme Court bench appointments.
This oligarchy that financed and ideologically framed Trump’s presidential campaign may be pleased that the return on their investment is a presidency determined to rip away the mask of bourgeois pretences of the “greatest democracy money can buy.” They have deployed Trump to attempt the conversion of the presidency into an authoritarian institution, mimicking the military police dictatorships they have installed worldwide especially in the neo-colonial world. They have exported this “democracy” through coups, assassinations and genocide in over 200 military and/or covert interventions including in Angola, Namibia and the DRC since 1945.
The speeches of the first president elected despite being a convicted felon – found guilty of sexual assault — are characterised by incoherent ramblings. Out of his mouth pours a ceaseless toxic effluent of megalomaniac fantasies including that he is the architect of a “Golden Age” for America, laced with rabid xenophobic, racist and misogynistic vitriol.
The White House meeting was not a diplomatic meeting between two heads of state of sovereign nations accompanied by the customary posturing at such events under bourgeois democracy. This was a Trump kangaroo court in which not just the SA president and his delegation were on trial, but SA’s black majority – 80% of the population. On its own this was insulting enough. The orchestrators of this charade held the intelligence of millions on tv worldwide equally in contempt.
The “evidence” Trump presented was not based on intelligence briefings and/or diplomatic notes from the US ambassador in SA. It started with a bundle of sheets of falsified claims – articles photocopied from far right social media blogs and right wing rags. They included tv broadcasts “proving” the toxic myth of “white genocide” and widespread land dispossession.
Speeches and chants by Economic Freedom Fighters’ Commander-in-Chief, Julius Malema, and the former ANC and SA president Jacob Zuma’s Umkhonto we Sizwe Party were torn from their context and presented as reflecting the outlook of the majority.As a slogan “Kill the Farmer, Kill the Boer” originated in the armed struggle that played a very subordinate role in the mass working class movement that overthrew apartheid over 30 years ago. It was understood as a call for the overthrow of the white minority regime rather than a literal call for the slaughter of white people and a racial civil war. The Equality Court and the Constitutional Court have ruled against AfriForum’s attempt to have the chant declared hate speech. Team Trump 2.0 knows this.
The method in Trump’s madness
Irrespective of Trump’s cognitive competence, which there is good reason to doubt,here is method in the madness of the MAGA propaganda machine. The white genocide myth is a desperate attempt to discredit SA’s International Court of Justice case of genocide against Israel at the same time as it the attempted imperialist subjugation of the rest of the world with the “liberation Day tariffs wrecking ball.There is even in Trump’s White alternate universe a recognition of the growing worldwide revulsion against the US-sponsored Israeli Nazi-style genocide including in the US itself where a majority oppose it.
It is the fact that the ICJ case was brought by the ANC-led government that has earned it worldwide support and lends it the weight it has. The apartheid regime was defeated firstly and foremostly by the working class in SA in an independent movement that liberated the country from apartheid and installed the ANC in power. The mantle on the ANC’s shoulders as the “party of liberation” from apartheid that is has soiled with corruption and betrayal, was bestowed on it by the working class.
Its ICJ case, driven by those in the ANC whose principles have at least in part survived the degeneration of the past 31 years, has served to distract attention from its betrayals in SA. The ANC’s leadership has been hypocritical in pursuing the ICJ genocide case. It has continued to be a major coal supplier remaining so even after Colombia, the biggest supplier ahead of SA, cancelled the contract in solidarity with the Palestinian people. The ANC-led GNU is also resisting calls for the severance of diplomatic relations, the expulsion the Israeli ambassador and the closure of the embassy.
But the ANC has dipped into the well of international goodwill that still exists from the worldwide movement, galvanised around uncompromising opposition to racial oppression that played a significant role in isolating the apartheid regime and turning into the skunk of the world. The competently argued ICJ case was backed up by devastating evidence. It has contributed to putting to bed the genocide denialism sheltering the Israel regime in the west especially. Working class and youth worldwide especially in the US, played a significant role in the US’s defeat in the Vietnam and the abolition of apartheid. Both the antiwar and anti-apartheid solidarity movements serve as a point of reference and inspiration for the Palestinian solidarity movement worldwide today.
In the view of millions worldwide, Isreal represents the reincarnation of the apartheid regime, magnified in its barbarism several times over. It is the impact that this growing worldwide mass movement of opposition to the genocide, hatred for the Israeli regime and the recognition of the US ‘s role in enabling the genocide, that partly drives the desperation of Trump’s white genocide mythology. The mass opposition has begun to produce divisions within the US’s EU allies and genocide co-enablers. Trump is also (mis) calculating that the white genocide myth will appeal to his MAGA base.
