Adding to an ever-increasing list of executive orders, President Donald Trump signed an order halting all aid to South Africa and offering refugee status to White South Africans.
The February 7, 2025, executive order wrongfully accuses the Republic of South Africa of enacting a law “to enable the government … to seize ethnic minority Afrikaners’ agricultural property without compensation.” Afrikaners are mostly European descendants of early Dutch and French settlers and they own the majority of South African farmland.
The order also says the Trump administration, through the Secretary of State and Secretary of Homeland Security, would “take appropriate steps … to prioritize humanitarian relief, including admission and resettlement through the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program for Afrikaners in South Africa who are victims of unjust racial discrimination.”
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa wasted little time in responding. According to Sowetanlive.co.za, Ramaphosa threw “down the gauntlet to U.S. President Donald Trump,” declaring that his country will not be bullied and will stand up for its national interests and sovereignty.
“Delivering his State of the Nation Address in parliament … Ramaphosa began his speech by directly responding to Trump’s claim that SA was confiscating land,” the website reported.
Mr. Ramaphosa said, in part, “Black South Africans were (historically) deprived of land, of capital, of skills, of opportunities. Our economy was starved of the potential of its people. And that is why we need to transform our economy and make it more inclusive.”
He added that South Africa stood for peace and justice, for equality and solidarity. “We stand for non-racialism and democracy, for tolerance and compassion … . We stand for our shared humanity, not for the survival of the fittest.”
He added, that for decades, the economy has been held back by the exclusion of the vast majority of South Africans, reported Sowetanlive.co.za.
The passing of South Africa’s Expropriation Act 13 of 2024, followed a parliamentary process that began back in 2020, This new law governs the expropriation (or compulsory acquisition) of private property by the South African government for public purposes or in the public interest.
According to theconversation.com, “The act repeals the apartheid-era Expropriation Act 63 of 1975 and aims to align expropriation law with the constitution. It sets out the procedures, rules and regulations for expropriation.
Besides setting out in quite a detailed fashion how expropriations are to take place, the act also provides an outline regarding how compensation is to be determined.”
“In South Africa’s colonial and apartheid past, land distribution was grossly unequal on the basis of race. The country is still suffering the effects of this. So, expropriation of property is a potential tool to reduce land inequality.
This has become a matter of increasing urgency. South Africans have expressed impatience with the slow pace of land reform,” the website noted.
In the new book, “Beyond Expropriation Without Compensation: Law, Land Reform and the Future of Redistributive Justice in South Africa,” it states, “Racially skewed land ownership remains both a symbol and a practical expression of deep-seated inequalities in South African society that are rooted in its past.
Because of this, ‘land’ continues to serve as a galvanizing force in national and local politics. Public tensions and, at times, outright conflict over the inequitable land distribution, as well as major disagreements over how to give force to constitutional provisions aimed at redressing the inequities, have not eased.”
In Sol T. Plaatje’s 1916 book, “Native Life In South Africa,” the author chronicles events after the implementation of the 1913 Native Land Act, that gave rise to the displacement of indigenous South Africans.
That act institutionalized the exploitation of South Africa’s native population like the American system of exploitation called sharecropping which grew out of the need for former slave masters to exploit the labor of their recently freed slaves.
“There were two reasons for the introduction of the Natives’ Land Act: Black farmers were proving to be too competitively successful as against White farming and there was a demand for a flow of cheap labor to the gold mines,” Plaatje wrote.
After the African slave trade, the Industrial Revolution needed raw materials and labor to fuel a new economic engine. “The advent of the machine was transforming the (European) continent into the workshop of the world,” according to the documentary “The Scramble For Africa.”
In South Africa not only were Black farmers forced off of the land of their ancestors, but if they stayed they were required to labor exclusively for their new masters.
Before the new law, Blacks paid 50 percent of their harvest for the right to live on the land. Afterward, they could no longer benefit from the cattle they owned since the law said livestock was now under the control of the White landowner.
Plaatje explained that native Black South Africans were expected to give Whites free labor but Whites also wished the natives could in addition “breed slaves for them.”
In post-apartheid South Africa, the majority Black population continues to own a small fraction of farmland nationwide more than 30 years after the end of the racist system that oppressed them. The majority of farmland remains in the hands of the 7% White minority population.
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