Trump’s simultaneously economic and political offensive against SA is not unique. It is US imperialism’s modus operandi against a legion of countries. The political attacks on SA have not fallen from a clear blue sky. Trump ordered an inquiry into alleged white farmer killings and mass expropriation as long ago as his first presidency initially in line with his broader domestic agenda to divide the US working class on racial, gender and national lines. Trump 2.0 has lifted the civil rights era prohibition on separate amenities – resurrecting in the US a law that even the SA white minority regime, seeing the writing on the wall for apartheid, had abolished in 1992.
Racism and the promotion of white supremacy is embedded in US capitalism’s DNA from slavery. This is not its firs intervention in SA to promote it. In 1932, the US-sponsored Carnegie Poor White Study was the basis for the white welfare state aimed at converting the poor predominantly whites into a social footrest for the exploitation of the black working class. The colonial ruling class considered the Afrikaners, bitter over their defeat and their treatment by British imperialism in the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902 as at risk of class miscegenation with black workers – the primary source of their wealth. Approximately 116,000 Afrikaners, mainly women and children, were incarcerated in concentration camps by the British. Estimates suggest that around 26,000 of them died in these camps, mostly from disease and starvation. Racist record keeping meant precise numbers of black prisoners and deaths are not known. But it is estimated that around 12 percent of the 107,000 Black Africans interned died, approximately 12,840 people.
The colonial regime was at risk of losing its social base when greater trade union organisation and militancy by black workers, threatened to break the racial barriers between white and black workers. The class divisions in white society had been accentuated by the brutal crushing of the white mineworkers strike in 1922. The official inquiry into the revolt recorded 153 deaths, but some sources suggest a higher number, potentially between 180 and 220, according to The South African Archaeological Society. Eighteen of the strike leaders were sentenced to death and four executed; the remainder were granted clemency. The impact of the Great Depression had plunged swathes of the white population into poverty. The Carnegie report warned that the “poor white problem” posed a threat to the “racial order”. But what they meant was that it threatened the pre-apartheid colonial class foundations of the capitalism based on the exploitation of the black working class. The report recommended state interventions to uplift them to ensure no identification on a class basis between white and black workers. This laid the foundation for apartheid’s white welfare state whilst intensifying the class exploitation and national oppression of the black population.
By April 2025, SA had been publicly attacked 14 times the Daily Maverick’s Trump Tracker counted. The US expelled SA’s US ambassador, Ebrahim Rasool. During a Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflections’, an SA think tank, webinar Rasool stated that Trump and the MAGA movement’s politics were partly the result of a “supremacist instinct.” Following US far right Breitbart senior editor-at-large, Joel Pollak’s report, Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared Rasool a persona non grata on social media – a highly unusual sanction for a senior diplomat.
Rubio has also cited SA’s non-aligned position on the Russia-Ukraine war and relations with Iran, to frame SA’s foreign policy as “not aligned to US national security interests” that is, not marching fully in step with the US’s drumbeat of imperialist dictates. Since the White House visit, the US has issued a travel advisory urging US citizens to “exercise increased caution in SA due to crime, terrorism, civil unrest, and kidnapping.” It also warns about “the risk of terrorist violence” and urges US Mission staff to use fully armoured vehicles.
Pollak is one of a group of right-wing whites either from or connected with SA who have insinuated themselves into Trump’s Maga inner sanctum. Their past time is the contamination of the political climate with libertarian far right authoritarian ideas and encouraging such forces worldwide. This group includes the repugnant, fascist saluting Elon Musk; former PayPal Chief Operations Officer, David Sacks, venture capitalist, Trump’s AI and Crypto czar and Chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology since 2025 as well as Musk’s fellow Pay Pal co-founder billionaire Peter Thiel. Thiel has written: “I have come to the conclusion that freedom and democracy are incompatible.”
The white minority, Afrikaners and farmers in post-apartheid SA: The Facts
The sharpened class divisions that followed Gear, have widened inequalities within every population group including whites. But the socio-economic features of post-apartheid SA remain largely like what they were under white minority rule. The average household income, according to StatisticsSA 2nd quarter 2024 figures, the average white-headed household income is 1.5 times higher than that of Indian, 2.5 of Coloured and 5 times that of African households. African unemployment is 47%, Coloured 32%. Indian 22% and White 10%.
For the white working class, the loss of their apartheid-sponsored relatively privileged lifestyle has come as a shock. Many would be asking themselves: “If a black majority government cannot look after its ‘own’ what about us”? It is from these layers that Trump has recruited his Afrikaner “refugees”. Only one of the 59, claimed to be a farmer – by leasing a farm for threeyears.
Social media in SA has subjected the Afrikaner “refugees” to scorn and derision as unreconstructed racists yearning for the fleshpots of apartheid. They have been referred to, amongst other as “Voetsekkers” on a “Great Tsek”, a derogatory play on the Great Trek when Dutch settlers, known as Voortrekkers, migrated from the Cape Colony to SA’s interior between 1835 and the early 1840s to escape British rule and establish their own independent homeland. “Voetsek” (go away) is normally used for dogs.
Many of them are undoubtedly gullible and susceptible to the racist propaganda of the likes of Musk and AfriForum deluding them into believing that the loss of the apartheid privileges is due to race rather than class. But they are driven just as much if not more by the fear of falling into the same destitution as the black working class. They are after jobs and economic security more than a belief in the fantasy of the resurrection of a US-style apartheid paradise.
They are being politically exploited – hapless victims of the far right populism both of the Afrikaner elite in SA and the cynical Musk/Trump billionaires. They will get caught in the crossfire between Trump and the mass opposition his policies will ignite from even amongst his voters. Trump voters will discover that they have voted against their own interests.
For all his boasts of “millions of votes,” only 52% of the eligible voting population participated in the elections, as our US co-thinkers, the International Socialist Group reported. 100m either chose not to vote or are not allowed to. Thus only 27% of the eligible voting population voted Trump. Only a small fraction, not easy to quantify, that is committed to Trump’s overall agenda. For 81% the economy was the main issue.
Expropriation of land without compensation – a manufactured hysteria
“Never did any Law appear more moderate and gentle, especially being enacted against so great an Oppression and Avarice: for they who ought to have been severely punished for transgressing the former Laws, and should at least have lost all their Titles to such Lands, which they had unjustly usurp’d; yet they were order’d notwithstanding to receive a Gratuity, for quitting their unlawful Claims, and restoring their Lands to those right Owners, who stood in need thereof”. (Plutarch, Fourth Volume, The Lives of the Gracchi, Tiberius and Caius). Tiberius died in 133 BC. Most famous for his attempt at Land Reform, an effort to redistribute land from wealthy land owners and the state to the poor in Rome in the second century BC.”
Rhodes University Professor Fred Hendrick in a 6th May 2025 lecture used this quote during a Defend Our Democracy webinar on the 2024 Expropriation Act. It accurately sums up the ANC’s abject failure on land reform and restitution. It also completely debunks the hysteria manufactured around a harmless amendment to the Expropriation Act.
In an article published in the Sunday Tribune (29/05/2025) a group of agricultural economists, authors of a book titled The Uncomfortable Truth about South Africa’s Agriculture, point out that “official data – the agricultural census 2017, as well as the official land audit of 2017 – all provide an incomplete picture of the real state and structure of South African agriculture’s political economy’’. The incomplete and inaccurate official data provides fertile ground for radical statements by the left and the right – and novices on social media. The two latest agricultural censuses (2007 and 2017) are incomplete as they restricted the sample frame to farm businesses registered to pay value added tax. Only firms with a turnover of one million rands (US$55,500) qualify for VAT registration. Not all white commercial farm operations are “large-scale”, and not all black farmers are “small-scale”, “subsistence” or “emerging”. Most farm operations can be classified as micro, or small in scale. Indeed, we are a country of two agricultures with black farmers mainly at small scale and accounting for roughly 10% of the commercial agricultural output. A Community survey estimates that there are 242,221 commercial farming households in South Africa, of which only 43,891 (18%) are white commercial farmers.
SA’s white population is 4.5m (7.3% of the total of 63m), 2.7m of them Afrikaner. Of SA’s 80% agricultural land only 11% is arable and used for production. SA has an urban population of close to 70%. Per head of population more whites are in urban areas than black.
Trump’s claims that there no black farmers is just typical moronic, ignorant, racist babble. There are in fact more black farmers today than white ones, the overwhelming majority, small holders, they point out. This change has not come about through land seizures, legally or otherwise. Land invasion is a predominantly urban phenomenon – the occupation of vacant land for informal settlement resulting from the mountainous housing backlog.
The reduction of the number of White commercial farmers from 94 000 in 1990 to 36 000 (excluding families in their households) today is not the result of expropriation. It is the outcome of the neo-liberal Normative Economic Policy (NEP) the apartheid regime initiated in 1988 and continued under the ANC’s imposition of the Growth, Employment and Redistribution policy (Gear) in 1996. It resulted in privatisation of state-owned enterprises and the dismantling of the extensive state support white farmers had enjoyed under apartheid.
Under apartheid, white farmer prosperity had been assured by guaranteed profits from price control boards amongst others. The NEP cleared the way for big business to become the overwhelmingly dominant force in agriculture, accounting for 91% of all food produced. With state subsidies removed, the cost of complying with post-apartheid legislation recognising farm labour tenant rights and wage legislation became unaffordable – a problem the famers “solved” by mass dismissals. Dismissed black farm workers migrated to the cities in massive numbers.
The programme under which nearly 4m hectares of farmland at a cost of at least R58-billion to compensate or restore ownership to black communities dispossessed of their ancestral property during colonisation has been a dismal failure. The highly inadequate post-restitution Recapitalisation Grant introduced belatedly in 2015, has been paralysed by incompetence and corruption and continued to fail just as abjectly as the period since 1996.
The remaining white farmers are massively in debt owing billions to the Land Bank and commercial banks. The chill winds of neo-liberal market forces unleashed by the apartheid regime white farmers had supported, continued under Gear, its post-apartheid incarnation.
The victims of the SA’s horrifying crime levels are the direct result of the socio-economic disaster that Gear, supported by all parties in the first, 1994 edition of today’s Government of National Unity, set into motion. The murder victims of an average 70 a day, are overwhelming black. Both obviously in absolute numbers and per head of population whites suffer significantly less. Trump’s pastor, Burns, says he met Afrikaners farmers who expressed shock at the white genocide claims. The statistics they provided him with showed that of the over 5,200 murders in the last reporting quarter, only 12 were farmer related, only 3 of them white.
Race and class in SA today – an Irish coffee society
One of the striking features of post-apartheid SA is that it socially still resembles apartheid in e.g. residential settlement patterns. Black people continue to be housed in dormitory towns and suburbs far out of the white city in enclaves formerly controlled by apartheid security forces. Most glaring of all is the persistent inequalities in distribution of wealth. Today, SA is an Irish coffee society: black coffee with a sprinkling of chocolate floating on the cream at the top.
The preservation of capitalism was the strategic aim of the negotiated settlement at the Convention for a Democratic SA (Codesa). As the representatives of the aspirant black capitalist class, the ANC’s aim was to be assimilated into the commanding heights of the economy to enjoy the fruits of the exploitation of the working class alongside the white capitalists.
The ANC defends BEE as aimed at “including the ‘previously disadvantaged’ in the economy from which they had been excluded under apartheid.” Ramaphosa himself explains: “It is the partial and exclusive ownership of the means of production in our country that is holding this economy from growing,” In the report on the impact of BEE the ANC commissioned Wits University Professor William Gumede to undertake, he puts figures to the widely known fact that it has benefitted only few politically connected individuals: R1trillion amongst 100 individuals since 1994. The ANC has yet to respond.
Representing the aspirant black capitalist class, the ANC accepted responsibility in the negotiations that codified the post-apartheid political and economic order for their strategic aim – the preservation of capitalism. Mandela made this abundantly clear in in his article “In our Lifetime” in 1956, emphatically repudiating the claim that the Freedom Charter was a “blueprint for socialism. The Freedom Charter, Mandela explained, aims to create the conditions for the development of a “prosperous non-European bourgeoisie…”
In 1996, barely two years after gaining power, the ANC imposed the neo-liberal Gear policy in 1996. It laid a slab over the grave where the Freedom Charter and its social democratic and nationalisation clauses lie buried. Gear set into motion a massive transfer of wealth that has catapulted SA to the World Bank’s ranking as the world’s most unequal society. The top 10% owns 84% of the wealth in assets and income. The bottom 50% has negative wealth.
The ANC not only engaged in a colossal betrayal of the black working class in particular; it has failed dismally to fulfil the aspirations of its own class. Although African capitalists (using the Black Consciousness Movement definition as encompassing Coloured, Indian and African) make up just under half of the wealthiest top 10%, only 1% on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange’s companies was, until this year, wholly black-owned. Only African Rainbow Capital’s owner, Ramaphosa’s “swaer “(brother-in-law) and Confederation of African Football president Patrice Motsepe, was previously listed but has now delisted from the JSE citing low liquidity and difficulties attracting international funding. The ANC’s claim that 30% (of the top 50) is black-owned is an attempt to hide its shame through manipulation of statistics, “blackwashing” as economist Duma Gqubule describes it. Motsepe is rumoured to be interested in throwing his money into the contest for the ANC presidency to succeed his swaer.
Nil Compensation – no threat to private ownership of commanding heights of the economy
The hysteria around “nil” compensation is much ado about nothing. The 2024 Expropriation Act is an amendment of the 1975 apartheid act. The ANC left it intact for 30 years bar the removal of its racist terminology. There has not been a single act of expropriation since the ANC came to power. The 2024 Expropriation Act will not provide redress for colonial and apartheid dispossession. The various pieces of legislation on land reform and restitution have been a complete failure. The ANC set itself a miserable target of 30% ownership for the black population of 80% through restitution by 2030. It stands at 20% today.
The 2024 Expropriation Act is in fact the first amendment since 1994. Expropriation will now be carried out “in the public interest”, not only for a “public purpose” such as building dams. The public interest wording is to bring the Act it into line with the Constitution’s commitment to a post-apartheid just and equitable SA. Only land held for speculative purposes, and not being used by the owner; or land held by an organ of state not being used for its core functions and is not likely to be required for future use, and where an owner has abandoned the land can be expropriated.
The loud protestations over claims around “nil” compensation are much ado about nothing. It is common under bourgeois law worldwide e.g. the US’s Eminent Domain law. The circumstances under which no compensation will be paid is highly circumscribed. It requires processes so onerous, including the right of owners to legally challenge it, that it would take years for the expropriation to be legally ratified if it can be at all.
The hysteria over “expropriation without compensation” is completely manufactured. The 2024 Expropriation Act poses no threat to houses, mineral resources or water rights. Nor does it dispense with the practice of state land acquisition on a “willing buyer, willing seller” basis that the left populist opposition in and outside the ANC like the EFF and MK have been demanding should be abolished. The confusion this has caused in the left populist ranks is shown by the fact that although both the EFF and MK demand an end to “willing seller willing buyer”, MK voted with the ANC whilst the EFF joined the DA in opposing it.
The ANC has amended the Expropriation Act to give the impression that it is doing something about the failure of land reform. Whereas amending the Constitution’s Section 25 – the property clause – requires a two-thirds majority, the Expropriation Act requires a simple majority. It was sufficient to get only the Umkhonto we Sizwe Party (14.8%) for the ANC (40%) to get it passed.
The ANC, however, has steered well clear of Section 25 of the Constitution where the private property that matters – the commanding heights of the economy i.e. the banks, mines, factories and big commercial farms – is firmly insulated from and against the democratic claims of the working-class majority.
Section 25 in fact has a double fortification against the democratic will of the majority. To amend it requires firstly, both a two thirds majority in the national assembly, as well as 6 of the 9 provinces. Secondly, even if the ANC secured a two-thirds majority, expropriation of such property would be challenged by invoking the Bill of Rights in the constitution which can only be amended by a 75% majority. Some constitutional experts regard the protection the Bill gives private property as so fundamental that even with a 100% majority it cannot be amended.
The strategic objectives of Codesa – the preservation of capitalism
The message of the strategists of capital to the working class at the Convention for a Democratic SA (Codesa) negotiations to end apartheid was: “You can have a vote and install a government with a simple majority of 50%+1, but you cannot touch our property.” Private ownership of the commanding heights of the economy is the cornerstone of SA’s post-apartheid bourgeois democratic constitutional dispensation – the preservation of the economic dictatorship of the capitalist class hidden behind the mask of parliamentary democracy.
The preservation of the economic dictatorship of the capitalist class did not rely only on constitutional manipulation. It was buttressed by the manipulation of the elections themselves. Capital and imperialism feared that the working class would put the ANC under pressure to nationalise the commanding heights of the economy as the Freedom Charter provided for should it achieve a two-thirds majority. The 1994 election results were therefore massaged downwards. The preservation of apartheid as a political system to protect capitalism had become a threat as the working-class mass movement saw apartheid and capitalism as two sides of the same coin, with the guiding layers in support of a socialist SA. “Socialism”, the 1987 Cosatu congress banner read “means freedom.”
ANC committed to private ownership of the commanding heights of the economy
The ANC leadership does not have the slightest intention of touching Section 25. If it so wished it could have called a bye-election and assured the additional 0.31% votes needed to get 66.6% by campaigning on such a programme after the 1999 elections. But with Thabo “call me a Thatcherite” Mbeki who had officiated at the funerals of the Freedom Charter and Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) and had spearheaded the imposition of Gear poised to become the country’s president, that was ruled out.
1999 was the vertex of the ANC’s post-apartheid electoral parabola – the point where it started pointing downwards to 2024’s 40% of the vote. 12m registered and unregistered eligible voters did not vote. Today it therefore represents a derisory 28% of all who have the right to vote.
The hysteria over the Expropriation Act reflects the paranoia of the capitalist class’s political representatives. They fear that, despite the ANC prostrating itself before them on the question of property ownership at Codea, their humiliating defeat in 2024 could lead left populist attempts to recover its support by resurrecting the Freedom Charter’s nationalisation clauses. Ramaphosa’s pleadings about SA’s commitment to the constitution was intended to assure imperialism of the ANC’s continued commitment to capitalism.
