Americans paying attention to Donald J Trump’s recent social media posts, may have seen him posting on Truth social media platform and X about South Africa, no doubt one of the countries he had in mind when he called Haiti and African nations “shithole countries” in 2018 during his previous stint as president. In the recent post about South Africa, he had this to say:
“South Africa is confiscating land and treating certain classes of people very badly. It is a bad situation that the Radical Left Media doesn’t want to so much as mention. A massive human rights violation, at a minimum, is happening for all to see. The United States won’t stand for it, we will act. Also, I will be cutting all future funding to South Africa until a full investigation of this situation has been completed.”
The South African presidency has already responded to Trump’s claims, clearly stating that no land confiscation has or will be taking place and that South Africa is not the only country with laws that allow the expropriation of land in the public interest. Expropriation is the redistribution of property by a government or local authority, for the public good. However, arguably, the damage is already done in terms of furthering long standing misunderstanding and fear mongering surrounding South Africa’s laws on the expropriation of land.
The interesting question to ask is why it is that the incumbent president of the United States of America, who had previously so flippantly disregarded nations he deems as lesser than, has suddenly taken an interest in such a specific policy issue in an African country? Could it have anything to do with his new memer-in-chief and key donor to his successful presidential campaign, Elon Musk, who infamously hails from said country? Yes, but it has even more to do with the actions of lobbying groups within South Africa.
What Trump is signalling, and not for the first time, is an ideological solidarity with a particular brand of white ethnonationalism, one that perpetuates myths such as the great replacement theory, a conspiracy that white people are being replaced by non-white people, usually as it pertains to white majority countries. in order to appeal to its base and push forward its divisive policy strategy.
Indeed, the lobbying group Afriforum has for years been peddling its own version of great replacement mythology by fear mongering around farm murders, which they claim are racially driven disproportionate targeting of white minority land owning farmers by the black majority, resulting in high murder rates. This brings us back to Elon Musk, who tweeted in 2023 that “they are openly pushing for genocide of white people in South Africa” and that “they are actually killing white farmers everyday”. However, the statistics on crime provide an altogether different, more nuanced image of violence in farming communities. To give an idea of how misinformation has colored this issue, in 2017 farm murders made up 0,3 % of all murders in South Africa, and the killing of white farmers a fraction of that.
The point is not just the factual inaccuracy of both the great replacement myth and the land grab misinformation being espoused by Donald Trump or Elon Musk, but that they came about as a part of successful lobbying efforts by Afriforum, who have since walked back or obfuscated their role in garnering international attention for the interests they spent years lobbying for. They called the responses of the likes of Trump and Musk, and the media frenzy that followed, the “consequences of the government’s actions”.
This is somewhat dishonest, as this is the media frenzy they set out to facilitate around land expropriation as a part of a campaign they called “the world must know” beginning as early as 2020, the very same year the bill was drafted. Stated in that campaign’s mandate was “mobilising… foreigners with interests in South Africa to swing into meaningful action”. Yet Afriforum wants to have it both ways, and claim they only meant for their campaign to specifically punitively target the leaders of the African National Congress, the former ruling party of South Africa.
This backpedalling alludes to an awareness that the lobbying group has now tread a precarious line between international lobbying and inviting leaders of foreign nations to directly and unduly interfere in the politics of another democratic and independent state. Given the woeful recent history of US interventionist policy abroad, justified by a self-proclaimed mission of global democratization, and given the history of the outcomes of neo-colonial Western intervention in global South countries, it is not an exaggeration to call what Afriforum pushed for entirely unconstitutional at the very least, and undemocratic at the most. Some South African political figures have gone as far as to call Afrforum’s lobbying of the international community on this matter “treasonous”.
Whilst many South Africans saw the lobbying efforts of Afriforum for what they were, the danger is that this misinformation campaign will be damaging to international relations and the image of South Africa abroad, as although its status as hegemon is in dispute, the United States remains a powerful global political power, and one whose leader continues to intensify his image as an impulsive strongman, whilst his party continue to follow him down the beginning of a potential path to state capture.
“Either America will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States.”
― W.E.B. DuBois
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