Make South Africa Great Again?

Earlier this month, President Trump issued an executive order to freeze all U.S. aid to South Africa and to grant refugee status to white Afrikaners who want to leave the country. According to the White House, and to Elon Musk, the South African government is discriminating against white South Africans, specifically by enacting a land-reform bill in January. That bill allows the government, in certain circumstances, to take privately held land—a majority of which is still held by white people, who make up less than ten per cent of the population—for public use. Musk, who grew up in South Africa, has made even more extreme statements on X, including claims that Black South African politicians plan to carry out a genocide against the country’s white minority.

To understand what the land reform bill is really about, and why it has become so central to far-right activists around the world, I recently spoke by phone with William Shoki, the editor of Africa Is a Country, and a member of Amandla! magazine’s editorial collective. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why the far right intentionally misinterprets the last three decades of South African history, the strange roots of Elon Musk’s flirtations with antisemitism, and the real disappointments of the post-apartheid era.

What is the state of Black-white relations in South Africa in 2025?

It’s very difficult to capture. Up until Trump’s issue of this executive order and the revived Afrikaner nationalism that it provoked, I would have thought that Black-white relations in South Africa had reached a period of settled cohabitation, where it didn’t feel as if it was the most decisive fault line in South African politics. Obviously, it still looms large, but I think that the 2024 elections demonstrated that some of the political fault lines that would be decisive in South Africa’s future largely occurred among and within the Black majority itself. [In last year’s elections, for the first time since the end of apartheid, the African National Congress lost its majority, hemorrhaging Black support to other political parties.] It felt as though South Africa was this country that, thirty years after the end of apartheid, was coming into its own. Race and race relations, although still prominent in shaping political and social life, were no longer the dominant lines of social polarization.

The population is eighty-one per cent Black African, with a population of multiracial people considered “coloured” making up another eight or so per cent. I would’ve understood the white population in South Africa as being largely reconciled to Black majority rule. What’s alarming about this recent escalation is that it’s demonstrating the extent to which that might not be the case anymore.

What has happened within South Africa since the Trump-Musk escalation to make you think it’s less settled?

Trump and Musk obviously have been amplifying this narrative that white South Africans, and in particular white Afrikaners, who are about half of the white population—which, in total, is 4.5 million people—are a besieged minority and that they are the victims of a slew of race laws that are denying them economic opportunities. And that now, with the passage of the Expropriation Act, they are facing threats of dispossession à la Zimbabwe in the early two-thousands.

Giving legitimacy to that politics means that it’s now expressed in the open. Over the weekend, for example, there was a rally at the U.S. Embassy, convened by a far-right influencer, that had participants numbering in the low thousands. People were expressing a desire for white self-determination. The old apartheid national anthem, “Die Stem,” was sung. There were large banners saying Make South Africa Great Again. And you wonder what it means to make South Africa great again. So I think what were once dismissed as extremist and fringe views are now entering the political mainstream. And there’s a freedom that has been endowed by Trump and Musk to these voices to push and advocate for this racial grievance politics, which is completely unmoored from South Africa’s social reality.

What was the land reform bill trying to do?

The Expropriation Act of 2024 provides the legal framework for the expropriation of property in South Africa, for public purposes or in the public interest. It’s meant to regulate the process of expropriation compensation, and identify instances where no compensation may be justified. And this is the most controversial part of the bill. The way a lot of these far-right forces read that provision is that it gives the state carte blanche to dispossess Afrikaners of their property automatically without grounds for doing so. But, in reality, it doesn’t provide for that. It only provides for no compensation in specific conditions where zero compensation may be considered fair. And courts have the final say about whether the decisions are equitable.

The act is meant to replace an apartheid-era law that provided for expropriation using what’s called a “willing buyer, willing seller” model. Basically, the state could only expropriate land if it was able to meet the market value of the piece of land that it wanted to expropriate. Market value was preponderant in determining the value of the piece of land that the state deemed worthy of expropriating. And what this dispensation says is that it has to be just and equitable. So market value isn’t preponderant in determining how compensation should be arrived at, and you have to consider a whole range of other factors, including current use and history of the property, state investments and subsidies in the property, and the purpose of the expropriation. And so part of what this act allows the states to do is to support land reform. This is part of what’s most alarming to right-wing forces internationally. They see this and it invokes the spectre of expropriation in the style that Zimbabwe pursued.

This was when the government of Robert Mugabe confiscated land in Zimbabwe in a very aggressive way. But Mugabe was a dictator and the process was very different from what’s happening in South Africa now, correct?

Absolutely. South Africa is a constitutional democracy. Each case of expropriation is subject to judicial review and is also bound by the constraints of not only the act but the African constitution itself, which, although it does provide for land reform on the one hand, doesn’t provide for the arbitrary deprivation of property. There’s an entire section of the constitution dedicated to property. And so what the right has done internationally is stir up a panic, and they have used this discourse as a cudgel to try and beat down the policy—which is aimed at historical redress—and reduce it to another instance of D.E.I. using American terminology.

My understanding of the three decades of post-apartheid South Africa, during which the African National Congress has run the country, is that broadly speaking the A.N.C.—which had ties to Communist organizations inside the country and abroad—has not engaged in any extremist policies in terms of overturning South African capitalism or going after the people behind apartheid. Essentially, there have been moderate, pro-capitalist governments. And people like you have written critiques of the A.N.C. along these lines and about the government’s corruption scandals. Viewing the country and this land-reform bill as really being about radical Black people trying to overturn the status quo is just a complete misreading of the last thirty years.

That’s correct, and I think that was what was extremely ironic about this gathering that took place over the weekend. It was convened by this far-right influencer by the name of Willem Petzer. They were handing a memorandum to the United States Embassy, in Pretoria, and he delivered a thirteen-minute speech trying to historicize the memorandum and the claims that had been made, trying to provide theoretical underpinnings for why these aggrieved groups have the read of South African history that they do. Petzer gets up behind the podium and says that the A.N.C. is not Marxist and that its Black economic empowerment and all of its affirmative-action policies have not benefitted the vast majority of Black South Africans. It has only cultivated a Black élite.