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A White Afrikaans rights group’s years of lobbying right-wing US politicians culminated in President Donald Trump on Friday falsely accusing South Africa of seeking to seize land from “ethnic minority Afrikaners” and withholding financial aid to the nation.
The accusation of racist policy against the country that overcame apartheid sparked an unusually united condemnation across the South African political spectrum.
But the fringe groups that have spent years promoting the narrative that the government is oppressing the White minority that once ruled the country said Trump had a point — even as they tried to roll back some of their most alarmist rhetoric in the face of a surprisingly aggressive US response.
“The fact is South Africa has 141 racial laws and race-based statements that are repeatedly made by government officials,” Kallie Kriel, chief executive officer of AfriForum, said in an interview following a hastily-called press conference on Saturday in the group’s office in Pretoria, on a street named after the prime minister under whom apartheid was formalised.
President Cyril Ramaphosa’s party, the African National Congress, blamed AfriForum for its “racist distortions” that “mislead the global community and protect apartheid-era land ownership patterns.”
He signed a bill in December similar to eminent domain laws in the US that allow the government to expropriate land in some cases.
The biggest impact of Trump’s decision will be on R7,5 billion (US$407 million) of funding for South Africa’s longstanding HIV programme that could grind to a halt.
“We did not accuse the government of large-scale race-based land grabs, or distribute false information in this regard,” said Flip Buys, chairman of the White-majority Solidarity Movement that includes AfriForum. “We did not and will not ask for sanctions against South Africa, or the funds for vulnerable people to be cut off by the US government.”
AfriForum, which says it has 300 000 members, opposes South African laws that favour Black people for business ownership and hiring and are aimed at redressing the economic exclusion that formed one of the bases of apartheid.
Over the past few years, it’s taken its lobbying for what it’s called “expropriation as well as the widespread murder of farmers” global, meeting with Republican US Senator Ted Cruz and Trump’s then-National Security Advisor John Bolton in 2018. An appearance on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show at the time helped prompt Trump to weigh in for the first time.
South African officials are “basically threatening White farmers that if they do not voluntarily hand over their land to Black people there would be a violent take over,” Ernst Roets, AfriForum’s then-deputy chief executive, said on Carlson’s show in May 2018.
While AfriForum has said that White farmers have been targeted, crime in South Africa is rampant, with many blaming extreme inequality for rising levels of murders and attacks on residents of all races.
Trump’s top ally, South Africa-born billionaire Elon Musk, has cited the same laws flagged by Solidarity Movement as the reason he won’t bring his Starlink satellite internet service to South Africa, which requires significant Black ownership. It’s one of the few countries regionally where Musk’s company doesn’t already operate or plan to this year, according to the Starlink’s website.
“There’s a renewed focus on South Africa — people were appointed to the White House that were very aware of South Africa and wanted to review the relations,” said Jaco Kleynhans, international liaison head at Solidarity Movement. AfriForum supports Musk’s efforts to avoid the Black ownership laws.
Musk has spent years trafficking the false conspiracy that there’s a “White genocide” in the country. AfriForum and its allies don’t use that language. But they’ve found a ready audience online — where many accounts affiliated with the groups celebrated Trump’s intervention over the weekend — at first on the fringes, before being embraced by foreign White nationalists and right-wing figures that amplify their message. — Bloomberg.
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