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.

I’m watching this, and I’m thinking, my gosh, somebody could interpret Petzer as being on the cusp of a Damascene awakening where he understands that the A.N.C.’s post-apartheid class project was precisely to cultivate this coterie of Black capitalists and that its economic policies have been incredibly neoliberal, and have only worsened inequality. They’ve made a handful of Black South Africans rich at the very top, but the vast majority are languishing in poverty and are systematically denied inclusion in the economy. But he doesn’t come to that conclusion. His grievance isn’t some universalist objection to the fact that the A.N.C.’s redistributive policy has failed to target the groups who should be the beneficiaries. It’s illustrative of the fact that these people don’t oppose social hierarchy, per se. Their grievance is the fact that the character of social hierarchy has changed, and it’s no longer white South Africans who are in a position of economic and cultural hegemony.

They make these claims that white South Africans are denied economic opportunities, but they’re unable to cite concrete material evidence for that. They always have to piggyback off of the fact that the affirmative-action policies of the A.N.C. have not, in fact, trickled down to the vast majority of Black South Africans, which is precisely the case. But they have come to the conclusion that somehow this means that white South Africans are excluded from the economy, when they’re simply not. Black poverty in South Africa is sixty-four per cent. White poverty is one per cent.

You said that the A.N.C. has created a new Black élite at the expense of the old white élite. But even with that being the case, white South Africans still own more than fifty per cent of the country’s land, correct?

Yeah. The most recent land audit, which was conducted in 2017, found that white South Africans own nearly three-fourths of South Africa’s freehold farmland. So land ownership in South Africa is still incredibly white. If you look at wealth inequality figures, that’s still heavily racialized. And so the pattern of generational economic privilege, which is a product of apartheid, still remains. And there’s a refusal on the part of these groups to countenance that. The simple reason for that is they want to make South Africa great again. We should believe them when they say that. And what that means is restoring racial hierarchy.

You referred earlier to the white people in South Africa and divided them into Afrikaners and non-Afrikaners. Can you talk more about that division?

This is a very long, complicated, and contested history, but, in short, South Africa’s white population is either descended from Dutch-speaking settlers or English-speaking settlers. And there’s always been a very stark division between those two groups. South African colonialism was this revolving door of either British control and dominance or Dutch/Afrikaner control and dominance. During the Boer War, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century—which resulted in defeat for the Afrikaners against the British and culminated in the union of South Africa, in 1910—there was this rapprochement between the Afrikaners and the British. But I think Afrikaners have historically felt as if they were subjugated and subservient to respectable British élites in this country. And apartheid as a social and economic policy was fundamentally about engineering Afrikaner uplift. In the early part of the twentieth century, Afrikaner poverty was widespread and there were a lot of fears about the possible regression of Afrikaners to the status and economic position of the so-called native Bantu.

And so apartheid was effectively a policy of affirmative action for Afrikaners. And one that also built a mythology around Afrikaners as a persecuted group who arrived in a strange and foreign land, and who were met with resistance from the native populations, but also confronted an outside occupier, i.e. the British, and through a series of trials and tribulations, were able to establish themselves.

Those tensions still persist. Afrikaners as an ethnic group have a stronger sense of cultural identity, of folkish attachments to the land. In their civic organizations—the key one being AfriForum, which is a lobby for what they call the preservation of Afrikaner culture and identity—land ownership is viewed as key. Whereas descendants of the British are much more classically viewed as cosmopolitans.

In post-apartheid South Africa, the political party that represents both groups has been the center-right Democratic Alliance, which is classically liberal. They oppose affirmative action policies because they view themselves as advocating for a disappearing meritocratic center. But increasingly, Afrikaans-speaking whites have been pivoting further right to another political party called the Vryheidsfront Plus, or the Freedom Front Plus.

What have you made of Musk’s behavior in the last few years through the prism of South Africa?

No one has quite been able to trace a clear relationship between his upbringing in late-apartheid South Africa and how that has influenced his politics now. Obviously, I think a relationship exists, but it seems apparent to me that a preoccupation of Musk’s, currently, that aligns with Trump is a real discomfort with what South Africa symbolizes. And what it symbolizes is that it’s a country where settler colonialism did not ultimately succeed. Unlike in the United States, Canada, or Australia, white rule in South Africa was never fully consolidated into a permanent settler order. The edifice of apartheid’s legal order crumbled in 1994. And although economic disparities persist, the country remains this unfinished colonization project rather than a sealed victory for settler power.

I think that’s probably the key to Musk’s obsession with it. You also have people from South Africa around Musk, like David Sacks and Peter Thiel. There’s a real fear about the eroding hegemony of whiteness internationally.

Musk has also been criticized for making strange and disparaging comments about Jews. The A.N.C. worked very closely with the South African Communist Party to oppose apartheid, and many members of the South African Communist Party were Jewish. Despite the fact that the apartheid government actually had a real alliance with Israel, I was curious about the degree to which negative opinions about Jews would’ve filtered down to people like Musk, or were part of apartheid propaganda, just because of the role of Jews in South Africa in opposing apartheid.

It’s hard to know the extent to which it filtered down, but the technologies of repression deployed by the apartheid government included the Swartgevaar, which was the black danger, which argued that any Black-majority political rule was inherently threatening to the bodily security of white Africans. And the other was Rooi Gevaar, the red danger. Communism, which was viewed as the preoccupation of national liberation movements, was a threat. So were the perceived allies of communism, chief among them Jewish South Africans. And so there was this classic antisemitic association of far-left ideology with Jewish radicalism, which of course did not impede warm relations between South Africans and Israel. Israel becomes, in this world, almost de-Judaized, so to speak. It occupies muscular folkish nationalism at the same level of Afrikanerdom.

They’re able to treat Israel as transcending Jewishness, basically. Jewishness still represents disloyalty and waywardness, and a thing that is in concert with natives and their aspirations for national liberation.

What has been the mainstream response from South African political figures to Trump and Musk in the last couple of weeks?

For the A.N.C., which is still for all intents and purposes the ruling party, the approach has been increasingly escalating. The President, Cyril Ramaphosa, gave a state-of-the-nation address in which he said, “We will not be bullied.” Most South Africans are reacting to this with a mixture of disgust and ridicule. The Democratic Alliance, the center-right party, which is in a coalition with the A.N.C., have struggled to craft their position because they understand that white South Africans are their base. And so they’ve expressed their consternation about the Expropriation Act, but have also said that Trump should not interfere in South African politics.

Even the main Afrikaner civic organization, AfriForum, said that Afrikaners are unlikely to take up Trump’s offer to resettle in the United States. So I think the South African government is unlikely to backpedal. What would it mean to repeal the Expropriation Act, or to walk back our support for Palestine at precisely the moment when Trump concocts resettlement plans for Gazans? I just don’t see South Africans budging on their domestic- and foreign-policy positions. And I think most people have been rallying in support of the government to say however much you might disagree with South Africa’s policy to be bullied by the White House is just simply unacceptable. ♦