While Donald Trump quickly shut the door to immigration in his new term, he recently made a surprising and ironic exception: white South Africans. The initiative came as part of an executive order that cuts funding to South Africa in response to a new law allowing the government to expropriate land without compensation for the purposes of ongoing land restitution to Blacks.
Trump’s assertion that South Africa is treating whites “very badly” and confiscating their land echoes a longstanding false narrative among right-wing groups in South Africa that white farmers are being singled out for dispossession and persecution. His close ally Elon Musk, who was born in South Africa, has repeated this narrative, even accusing the government of standing by as left-wing South Africans advocate genocide against whites.
South Africa’s new land law has undergone years of debate and has driven a wedge between the ANC and its main coalition partner, the white-led Democratic Alliance party. But President Cyril Ramaphosa has pushed back firmly against the insinuation that white farmers are facing systematic violence or losing their land through confiscation. “South Africa is a constitutional democracy that is deeply rooted in the rule of law, justice, and equality,” he wrote on X. “The South African government has not confiscated any land.”
White South Africans agree. In fact, most have reacted to Trump’s executive order with a mix of humor and disdain.
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Across the last 30 years, South Africa has placed millions of acres of land into the hands of Black communities dispossessed under apartheid to meet the democratic promise of restitution to the country’s Black majority. Throughout this time, the country has acted with restraint on land reshuffling. It has consciously chosen not to follow the path of neighboring Zimbabwe, which spent the early 2000s confiscating white-owned commercial farms at a massive scale, driving violence and economic carnage.
At the end of apartheid and decades of removals of Blacks from their lands, whites made up 11% of the country’s population and held 86% of all farmland. The apartheid government crammed millions of Black South Africans into cramped regions of the country it created to contain dispossessed communities.
Most white South Africans have reacted to Trump’s executive order with a mix of humor and disdain.
Land restitution became the central plank of symbolic and material reparations as the African National Congress party and Nelson Mandela swept into power in 1994. The ANC promised to deliver 30% of the country’s farmland back to Blacks.
Since then, the party has had to defend itself repeatedly for moving too slowly to meet its promises on land restitution. Progress has lagged in part because it has abided by market value land compensation and struggles to negotiate with and pay landowners for their land at a sufficiently large scale to meet popular demand. Some of the largest land transfers to date demonstrate the measured nature of its land policies and the effort to foster collaboration between landowning whites and dispossessed Black communities.
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Last year, I spent time with communities in the Mpumalanga region that were part of one of the largest land transfers in South Africa since the end of apartheid. That project remains a success and serves as a model for land restitution across the country.
The land handover began in 2007. At the time, South Africa’s Minister for Agriculture and Land Affairs traveled to the Tenbosch sugarcane farm in Mpumalanga to return it to a set of Black communities that had endured forced removal from the land under apartheid. “The dispossession of land rights,” she noted, “stripped the communities of their dignity and rendered them landless and second class citizens in the country of their birth.” The government paid white farmers nearly half a billion dollars for 150,000 acres of land that included the Tenbosch farm.
Today there is a farming and revenue partnership between several of the Black communities and RCL, the successor company to the main agribusiness that sold back the land. RCL has helped train and now works with members of these communities in joint sugarcane ventures. “You have to have two characters,” one beneficiary of the restituted land who is now a farm manager recently told me, “one as an employee of RCL and another as a beneficiary. … It’s so challenging, but it’s so exciting to work in that place knowing that you are giving something back to the community that raised you.”
Reflecting on the historic land transfer, the company’s former director of agricultural operations told me that it was clear at the end of apartheid that forging a community partnership would be the best path forward.
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The arrangement in the Tenbosch area, which is replicated in other parts of the country, is a sharp contrast to Trump’s accusations of land confiscation and racial discrimination against whites. Even so, Trump’s pressure on South Africa over its land struggles is in keeping with a long pattern of American efforts to influence how land transfers hands around the world. From the time of Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution and its radical land expropriation to Vietnam during the Cold War, Zimbabwe in the 2000s, South Africa today, the United States has sought out allies and identified its foes in part on the basis of how countries treat landowners and property.
The example of Zimbabwe continues to discipline the ANC’s approach to land returns. Legal commentary on South Africa’s new expropriation act indicates that it is rather narrow. Land confiscation still must take place in accordance with the constitution, which is broadly protective of private property.
Even if the new law survives a court challenge, it will at most move the country closer to Brazil’s model of land reallocation, which has been shifting private lands into the hands of peasant social movements for decades by purchasing unproductive large landholdings for reallocation to the landless. The ANC’s biggest challenge will remain how to do more — not less — on land restitution. Yet, like many other longtime American allies in the developing world, it is going to have to chart that path more independently in the coming years.
