Last week, President Donald Trump signed an executive order stopping all aid to South Africa and offering refugee status to white South Africans.
The order decried “government-sponsored race-based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation” and accuses South Africa of a “shocking disregard of its citizens’ rights.” It specifically called for the resettlement of white Afrikaners, who are predominantly descendants of Dutch settlers and part of the country’s white minority.
Trump’s order focuses on a South African law, the Expropriation Act of 2024, which passed last month and allows the South African government to seize ethnic Afrikaners’ farm land without compensation when it is not being used, or when it would be in the public interest.
The act is meant to address inequalities that have plagued the country since colonial rule and enshrined under apartheid, a system of legalized racial segregation and discrimination, when Black residents were dispossessed of their land. Even though apartheid ended in the early 1990s, the inequalities persist. White South Africans make up about 7 percent of the country’s population — and own around 70 percent of the country’s private farmland.
Trump and his ally Elon Musk — himself born and raised in South Africa — have repeatedly accused the South African government of anti-white racism, a charge South African President Cyril Ramaphosa denies. Ramaphosa, Afrikaner rights groups, and critics of the land reform act have said that Trump’s order is based on misinformation and that private property rights are protected.
Cutting aid to South Africa would stop nearly half a billion dollars a year in funding, most of which pays for the world’s largest HIV/AIDS program. Today, Explained host Noel King spoke with Jonny Steinberg, a South African writer and senior lecturer on African politics at Yale, about why the Afrikaners have gained Trump’s attention.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
Can you tell us what apartheid was like?
Apartheid is famously one of many brutal regimes in the 20th century. Many millions of people were displaced from their homes. In the political struggle against apartheid, many thousands of people were killed and detained. It was a long, bitter, bloody, difficult struggle for democracy, which miraculously ended peacefully in a negotiated settlement in 1994.
What happened in ’94?
Well, four years earlier, in 1990, the last president of apartheid, F. W. de Klerk, released Nelson Mandela, unbanned his party, the ANC, and decided that apartheid would end by a negotiated settlement with the people who were once his enemy. That settlement took four years.
In the course of those four years, de Klerk went to the white electors and asked them if they wanted him to continue. There was a referendum in 1992 and 68 percent of white people said yes. So it was really a process of mutual consent. A lot of people died in those four years — there was a lot of violence. It was a complicated process, but it was in the end a peaceful settlement that both sides agreed to, bringing in democracy in April 1994.
The Afrikaners went from having all of the power and from having this system, apartheid, that basically kept them in power. After the negotiated settlement, what happened to this group?
It was a pretty gentle settlement on white people. Afrikaans people were about just over half of the white population. Most people carried on living their lives pretty much as they were before, to be honest. That’s a simple version of the story.
When you scratch underneath, more complicated things are happening. One of the things happening is that crime rates absolutely soared in the late apartheid and early post-apartheid era. And white people became victims of crimes in ways that they didn’t know under apartheid, which was very frightening.
Another thing happening: a policy of land redress was introduced in the mid-1990s. And to explain what happened, it’s necessary to go back to 1913 when a law was passed disallowing Black ownership of land in South Africa. Many, many people were displaced from their land in the decades after that.
By the early 1970s, several million people had been displaced from their land. And a policy of redress was set in place in the mid-1990s and, among other things, it allowed people who could show that they had had their land taken away from them after 1913 to get it back. But not by confiscating land, not by taking it away from those who owned it, but by buying it back at market prices. So that was the core of the land reform scheme, just stated at its most simple.
So in the mid-1990s, there’s this process of land reform, and it’s now 30 years later. Is that process still underway?
It is underway, and I think many white people’s grievances about that process are less about the policies themselves than the way that they’ve been implemented. Black and white South Africans are both enormously frustrated with South Africa’s government for its levels of inefficiency and its corruption. And very often anger at that melds with anger over the substance and the content of policy.
A fair amount of land has been redistributed. It has not been a particularly successful or a particularly well-managed process. It has left both poor Black people and white landholders and others dissatisfied. So a lot has to do with the corruption and inefficiencies of the process itself.
President Trump doesn’t always speak with a great deal of accuracy. When he talks about South Africa now, as he has been doing recently, he will say things like “the land of white South Africans is being stolen.” Is this an idea that Donald Trump just came up with himself, or is this idea prevalent in South Africa also?
If you look at South Africa’s response to Donald Trump, nobody has agreed with him. Land has not been stolen from anybody in South Africa since 1994. A lot of land has been bought at market prices and redistributed but not stolen.
As for where these ideas come from, there have been South African organizations that have lobbied Trump very vocally, very persistently, for a number of years on matters of land redistribution, but also on matters of crime, of the extent to which people who live in rural South Africa are vulnerable.
Many white farmers have been victims of very violent crime, and Trump has heard about all of that from a very vocal, very articulate lobby that says that violent crime against farmers is not coincidental, that it’s organized, that there’s something behind it — it’s an attempt to push them off the land. He has been told that by pretty extreme forces in South African society, not mainstream ones.
Could I ask you to dig in a bit more on violence against white farmers? What does that mean? What does that look like?
Farmers generally live in remote areas. They’re far from police. There are a lot of guns in South Africa. There’s a lot of unemployed young men in South Africa, a lot of people making a living from crime. People enter a remote property and hold up the people at gunpoint to take their possessions, sometimes kill them.
Levels of violence in South Africa are extreme. In a country of 62-63 million people, there are 20,000 murders a year. That is breathtaking. It’s a violent place. And it’s absolutely understandable and natural that the white farming community would feel under siege, would feel vulnerable, would feel scared.
But it’s another thing to say that there’s an organized plot against them, that this is a manifestation of a deeper attempt to throw them off their land. If you look at who is killed in South Africa, if you look at per capita murder rates, those most vulnerable to being killed are unemployed young Black men. And that’s not for a moment to say that white farmers should not feel afraid and should not take action to defend themselves. But the idea that they’re especially victimized is untenable.
So, responding to this, President Trump has made this offer to help resettle Afrikaners in the United States. Have any of them said, “Yeah, we’d like to go”? What’s the response there?
People are pretty bewildered by the offer, including the people who’ve been lobbying Trump. Nobody has taken him up on it. The head of Agri South Africa — a pretty mainstream, perhaps a center-right organization — said, “We’re farming here and we’re farming successfully.”
The day after Trump made that announcement, I was on a flight from Johannesburg to London, and boarding the plane. It was full of white South Africans who were joking about it saying, “Well, let’s divert our flights to New York.” It was really an object of fun.
Here in the United States, the cutting remark is, “Donald Trump is finally sympathetic to Africans, but they’re white Africans.” Is that acknowledged at all? That Donald Trump seems to have sympathies for a certain type of African?
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there’s great irony in the fact that a successful, reasonably well-off farming community are those being given preferential access in a continent where there’s a great deal of poverty and strife. The irony is obvious and everybody sees that.
Why do you think President Trump is making this offer? Do you have any sense of what is really behind this?
Well, I think it’s because it’s easy for him because there’s no downside. He gets to perform a very powerful and entertaining anti-DEI performance in front of the world. He also potentially gets a middle-sized country to change its foreign policy or certainly be under enormous pressure to do that. So, South Africa becomes an exemplar. It becomes a lesson to the world in what American power under Trump might mean.
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