Trump’s February 7 executive order “Addressing Egregious Actions Of The Republic Of South Africa” cuts off aid or assistance to the country and “promote[s] the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees.” The stated reasons for the administration’s actions are a new law that, according to White House, will “enable the government of South Africa to seize ethnic minority Afrikaners’ agricultural property without compensation. There are also “aggressive positions” towards the US and its allies, namely Israel, which the administration refers to with regards to South Africa’s genocide case at the International Court of Justice.
More broadly, the executive order states that South Africa is “undermining United States foreign policy, which poses national security threats to our Nation, our allies, our African partners, and our interests.”
While the charge of anti-white racism fits neatly with the empire’s new brand of identity politics, and the retribution for the ICC case against Israel is to be expected from any US administration, what of the other “undermining” of US foreign policy and “threats” to the US and its interests?
As the recent news surrounding the Panama Canal, Greenland, and other areas show, the US is doubling its efforts to control global shipping lanes — likely in preparation for a conflict with China — but this has gone unmentioned in connection to the pressure campaign against South Africa. I’ll explore that here after quickly looking at the plight of the Afrikaners.
Serfs Vs. the “Rising Neo-Feudalism of Silicon Valley”?
The new Expropriation Act allows the South African government to expropriate land from private parties, but only if it’s in the public interest and under certain conditions. More from the AP:
[Trump] said South Africa’s government was doing “terrible things” and claimed land was being confiscated from “certain classes.” That’s not true, and even groups in South Africa who are challenging the law say no land has been confiscated. The South African government says private property rights are protected and Trump’s description of the law includes misinformation and “distortions.”
However, the law has prompted concern in South Africa, especially from groups representing parts of the white minority, who say it will target them and their land even though race is not mentioned in the law.
The law is tied to the legacy of the racist apartheid system, and colonialism before that, and is part of South Africa’s efforts over decades to try and find a way to right historic wrongs.
Under apartheid, Black people had land taken away from them and were forced to live in designated areas for non-whites. Now, whites make up around 7% of South Africa’s population of 62 million but own approximately 70% of the private farming land, and the government says that inequality needs to be addressed.
In reality, the law will likely do little to address it. Here’s TRT World:
In an article titled ‘Land seizure and South Africa’s new expropriation law: scholar weighs up the act’, law professor Zsa-Zsa Temmers Boggenpoel explained that the new law governs the compulsory acquisition of private property by the state for public purposes or in the public interest. It aims to align expropriation procedures with the Constitution and provide clear guidelines on compensation.
She said “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.”
So far, she said, expropriation has not been used effectively to redistribute land more equitably, as part of land reform. “I am not convinced that the act, in its current form, is the silver bullet to effect large-scale land reform – at least not the type of radical land reform that South Africa urgently needs,” said the law professor.
So the Trump administration’s order will largely punish South Africans with HIV — ostensibly over land reform law that does little land reforming. The US is cutting off aid, which includes about $440 million last year and funds 17 percent of the country’s HIV program, which is the largest in the world, helping many of the 8 million people in the country living with HIV.
South Africa also benefits from preferential access to the US market for its exports under the African Growth and Opportunity Act, which the US could use to apply more pressure on the country.
I’m not all that familiar with South Africa’s political scene (hopefully we have some readers who can add some more domestic insight), but the connection to the Silicon Valley crazies is worth a mention here.
The ruling African National Congress (ANC) now appears to be under pressure on the expropriations act from its right — both domestically and abroad — as well as on its left where the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) criticize the law for not going far enough.
I’ve seen the EFF described as a “race-centric” program that overlooks the main source of oppression in post apartheid South Africa (capitalism), as well as the following:
🇿🇦 It is the South African Economic Freedom Fighters which should be credited for reintroducing the property question – the fundamental premise of Communist politics – in the 21st century.
Land represents fundamental economic security and dignity, without which a people become… pic.twitter.com/zcLUzlALqL
— Haz Al-Din 🇷🇺 (@InfraHaz) February 16, 2025
According to Al-Din, this pits the EFF against the “rising neo-feudalism of Silicon Valley,” which has a particular interest in South Africa.
Elon Musk lived in the country until he was 17 and has for years bemoaned what he calls the country’s anti-white policies and made unfounded claims of the government encouraging “genocide” against white landowners.
Billionaire venture capitalist and White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks, left apartheid South Africa when he was five.
Billionaire vampire Peter Thiel spent part of his childhood in South Africa where his father was helping the apartheid regime mine uranium in a secret effort to obtain nuclear weapons. More from the Financial Times:
Southern Africa under apartheid offered an extreme version of some of the main themes of American life today. First, there was tremendous inequality. The mine where Thiel’s father worked was “known for conditions not far removed from indentured servitude”, writes Thiel’s biographer Max Chafkin. “White managers, like the Thiels, had access to a brand-new medical and dental centre in Swakopmund and membership in the company country club.” The mine’s black migrant workers lived in work camps.
To whites of a certain mindset, this inequality wasn’t due to apartheid. They thought it was inscribed in nature. Certain people were equipped to succeed in capitalism, while others weren’t. That was simply the way it was, and it was pointless to try to mess with nature. Two of Thiel’s contemporaries at Stanford in the 1980s recall him telling them that apartheid “works” and was “economically sound”.
Good to know what these techno-feudal lords are using as a template for their adopted home in the US. Due to their wealth and positions in/at the head of the US government, they now have an opportunity to atone for the failings of the fathers in South Africa while also helping drive the US rebrand from a “woke” empire to one decidedly not so. There are also wider strategic implications at play.
Shipping Lanes and China
South Africa has long been a supporter of Palestinians. It’s also a country with close ties to Russia due to Moscow’s help in fighting apartheid. And it’s a BRICS founding member. That’s three strikes in Washington. But the increased pressure from Trump can also be viewed in the context of the US’ renewed emphasis on shipping lanes, which has received a plenty of attention in the effort to purchase Greenland to muscle in on Arctic shipping routes and leaning on Panama for more control over its canal.
In South Africa this focus means a lot more attention for a small outpost in the Western Cape called Simon’s Town, which is home to the South African Navy’s largest base.
Why would Simon’s Town help explain US pressure on South Africa? Here are Dr Frans Cronje, head of the Washington DC-based Yorktown Foundation for Freedom, and Rear Admiral Robert Higgs (Ret), who commanded the Fleet of South Africa from 2008-2010 and served as Chief of Naval Staff from 2011 to 2016 (he was also the first SA Navy officer to attend the US Naval War College), writing at Real Clear World:
Simonstown’s contemporary importance is best understood as one of three points of a triangle that determines the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific.
That triangle is formed by drawing a 5,000 mile line northwards from Simonstown to Djibouti on the African east coast where the Bab al-Mandab Strait narrows the gateway into the Red Sea (and the Suez Canal beyond) to just 20 miles. The balance of power around that gateway shifted in 2016 when China was granted a lease on a naval base just more than a decade after the United States had secured a similar lease.
From Djibouti extend the line 8,000 miles eastward to the Solomon Islands off the east coast of Australia. The Japanese, after crippling the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, sought to occupy the islands to isolate Australia and their retaking was a key allied objective in the liberation of South-East Asia. However, in April of 2022, eight decades after the defeat of Japan, China signed a security pact with the Solomon Islands. As the islands lie east of the confines of the two major “island chains” around which John Foster Dulles’ Pacific containment strategy was conceived at the end of the Second World War the Chinese pact is the starkest challenge yet to the idea of the Pacific as “America’s lake”.
Extend the line from the Solomon Islands back to Simonstown to complete the triangle and territory within sees the passage of more than half of all sea-borne global trade with the triangle’s three points determining access to the Red Sea, the South Atlantic, and the Pacific.
A few maps to help illustrate their point:
More from Cronje and Higgs:
Exacerbating American vulnerability in the Indo-Pacific is that at the triangle’s center is the Chagos Islands archipelago which Britain sought to surrender to Mauritius in October 2024. The archipelago contains the island of Diego Garcia which houses a US naval base (leased from Britain). Flying from Diego Garcia nuclear armed American aircraft can reach Australia, the southern and eastern regions of China, the southern points of eastern Europe, and much of the Middle East.
Whilst the British government provided assurances that the US might strike terms to continue operating from Diego Garcia this is not at all assured and the Trump administration has therefore moved swiftly to force a British about-turn. Mauritius is a signatory to an African nuclear weapons ban which may be employed as a pretext to undermine American activities on the island.
The extent to which America achieves a Monroe Doctrine inspired sphere of hegemonic influence in the Western hemisphere will be determined in part by whether backdoors into that envisaged sphere are left unguarded. The vulnerability at the Solomon Islands might be addressed from Guam and Hawaii whereas the Mediterranean presents a hard obstacle to China’s aims of reaching the Atlantic. Diego Garcia might yet be saved. That leaves South Africa’s Simonstown as the key external vulnerability.
Joel Pollak, another South African native close to the Trump administration who is currently a senior editor-at-large at Breitbart News but is considered the frontrunner to become the US Ambassador to South Africa, recently echoed these claims in explaining why Simon’s Town is of such interest to Washington. From Business Tech, a South African business news website:
“The reason Simon’s Town is important globally is the same reason South Africa has been important for hundreds of years,” he told Biznews. He explained that Simon’s Town is situated near the point where the Atlantic and Indian oceans come together.
“It remains important. Although it is a small port, it can be expanded. It is an important naval station in the Indo-Pacific.”
“There is a real concern that South Africa’s closeness to China could lead to it taking over key strategic assets that are important to the local economy,” he said.
Another possibility is that China can take over military installations that are important to maintain peace worldwide. Pollak said the United States wants to create a peaceful global environment which favours economic growth and prosperity.
That’s one way of putting it. Another is that the US is interested in the ability to shut down shipping lanes in a conflict with China. Reuters reported in December of 2023 how oil tankers from the Middle East crossing the Indian Ocean, as well as other shipments headed to China from Africa and Brazil, would “lack protection in a naval theatre dominated by the U.S.” More:
A dozen military attaches and scholars say that vulnerability is now being scrutinised as Western military and academic strategists discreetly game scenarios about how a conflict with China over Taiwan, or elsewhere in East Asia, could evolve or escalate.
In a major war, Chinese oil tankers in the Indian Ocean “would find themselves very vulnerable”, said David Brewster, a security scholar at the Australian National University…Four envoys and eight analysts familiar with discussions in Western and Asian capitals, some speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic, said this enduring weakness gives China’s adversaries a ladder of escalatory options, especially in a drawn-out conflict, like Russia’s war on Ukraine. These scenarios range from harassment and interdiction operations against Chinese shipping that could divert Chinese naval vessels to the region, up to a blockade and beyond.
So the strategy is to initiate a conflict between China and Taiwan or a country in East Asia like the Philippines and then attempt to isolate Beijing. It worked so well against Russia, why not give it another go against China with its much larger and more interconnected economy?
It’s also a strategy that Beijing is well aware of and has been preparing for for years through its Belt and Road Initiative. By driving Moscow and Beijing even closer together with Project Ukraine, the US made any attempt at isolating China even more impossible — which is perhaps why we now see the Trump administration trying to dictate peace terms as the loser that include Russia scaling back its ties with Beijing.
It deserves a mention that any US Blob dream of “isolating” Beijing would inevitably mean a collapse of the global economy and a contest of who could withstand the pain longer. China, which is striving for autarky and would, barring future developments, have direct land connections to Russia and Central Asia for minerals, natural resources, and other needs, might not get as hurt as some like to believe. The US, meanwhile, would face product shortages — including in a defense industry reliant on China — and inflation that would make recent years seem quaint by comparison.
Nevertheless, the quest for naval supremacy continues. We can see this at work in other Trump administration actions — from Greenland and Panama to others that have largely flown under the radar, such as pressure on India over the International North-South Transport Corridor and the sudden world-threatening emergence of ISIS in Somalia.
On Feb. 1, President Donald Trump ordered the first airstrike of his presidency, against alleged senior Islamic State commanders in northern Somalia. Soon after Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post was out with a story, “The Islamic State has regrouped in Somalia — and has global ambitions.”
Last year, the US signed a deal with the government of Somalia to construct up to five military bases for the Somali National Army in the name of bolstering the army’s capabilities in the ongoing fight against militant groups. According to the Quincy Institute for Responsible Stateraft, the bases are intended for the Danab (“Lightning”) Brigade, a U.S.-sponsored Special Ops Force that was established in 2014.
The US at first funded Danab from the State Department, which contracted with private security firm Bancroft Global. More recently, funding comes from the Pentagon’s proxy war fund called the 127e program, which bypasses congressional oversight by allowing US special operations forces to use foreign military units as surrogates in counterterrorism missions. Neat.
What this history and the supposed recent emergence of IS in Somalia tells us is, one, the result of US counterterrorism strategy is that terrorism continues to magically spread like wildfire in spots deemed important to the US, and two, Somalia will be getting more attention from Washington going forward. Samar Al-Bulushi and Dr. Ahmed Ibrahim on the why:
It is a clear indication of the growing geopolitical significance of the Horn of Africa, and comes at a time of mounting concerns (mostly attempts by Yemen’s Houthis to disrupt global shipping in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza) about securing the flow of international commerce via the Red Sea.
Elsewhere, the US is trying to get tough on the International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC), a land-and sea-based 7,200-km long network comprising rail, road and water routes that are aimed at reducing costs and travel time for freight transport in a bid to boost trade between Russia, Iran, Central Asia, and India.
Last year, India signed a 10-year deal to develop and operate the port of Chabahar on Iran’s southeastern coast. It did so after assurances from Washington that Chabahar would continue to be exempt from sanctions as it had been since 2018. Well, the non-agreement-capable US has now changed its tune as Trump instructs the State Department to “modify or rescind” the waiver for Chabahar as part of the “maximum pressure” campaign on Iran.
We’ll have to wait and see if all these moves are part of Trump’s famous bargaining skills or if they represent a continuation of American efforts at global supremacy. For now, it looks like that although some of the tactics and areas of focus are undergoing a transitional period, the goal remains the same.
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For those who would like detail in their background, there is the SA government’s 2017 Land Audit Report which covers private land ownership in some detail. Also of interest is the commentary on that report in a brief report by the South African Institute of Race Relations.
#TYVM
I always been intensely interested in South Africa as a woman I was long time together with is from there. There is no doubt that agricultural land is still mostly in white hands. (72%). But more than 90% of food crops are produced by them. That although the public infrastructure (roads electricity) is constantly deterioating in SA. And that also although there is no population more at risk to be murdered than white SA farmers. There is a wikipedia page listing the number year after year. The fear is that the current government will use the land issue to distract from the ineptness of the ruling elite. The same ploy was used by Mugabe in Zimbabwe. It resulted in widespread hunger and the land ending up in also few but now black hands. Is this fear (which Musk espouses) justified? I think it is not as clear cut debunkable as Lambert Strether thinks. Here what I believe is a fairly balanced view of the new law: https://wandilesihlobo.com/2025/01/28/a-word-about-the-ongoing-worries-about-the-expropriation-act-in-south-africa/ The law is ambiguous to say the least.
There is no population at greater risk of being murdered than white farmers? Really? I mean this with the greatest respect and understand that you’re perhaps gleaning (mis)information from sources that are pushing a false, politically weaponized narrative about South Africa so as such, i hope your intense interest in our country will naturally drive you to vary your information diet in pursuit of formulating a more informed view of the reality of life in contemporary SA. White farmers are not at greater risk of being murdered (that misfortune falls to poor black people who live in townships), this is patently false and is part of the misinformation peddled by Afriforum and its affiliated co-conspirators.
As regards Zimbabwe, while Mugabe might have bungled the land seizures, it wasn’t land reform that led to widespread hunger but the sanctions that country was hit with in response.
I write this a few kilometers from the HQ of Afriforum, the right wing lobby group that has been agitating for the US government to intervene more directly in domestic affairs here in South Africa. They’ve been snuggling up to the far right in the US and Europe since at least 2018 and bragging about it on social media, getting photo ops and an audience with the likes of Tucker Carlson, John Bolton, Victor Orban and others. The deliberate mischaracterization by this group and the online horde of disgruntled white people of the Expropriation ACT as an indiscriminate land grab targeting white landowners is the latest in a long line of lies and distortions of policies by the South African government designed and promulgated to redress past injustices. With Elon’s dad Errol Musk now emerging from the quiet life he’s been living in a small seaside town of Langebaan, Western Cape to take on the lead role of channeling his son’s lunacy to a local audience, Afriforum and their co-agitators feel emboldened and see the Trump presidency as an unmissable opportunity to put the uppity blacks clamouring for a stake in the country’s economy and wealth firmly in their place, once and for all.
Take this from me as a black South African when I say the reality of post-apartheid South Africa is that not much has changed for those that look like me. We are hemmed in between a corrupt and incompetent ANC government and the majority of white people who never signed up to the reconciliation and nation building project envisaged by Nelson Mandela (and who continue to mount the victim pony with alarming regularity and ride it to western capitals alleging all sorts of mistreatment whenever the issue of their continued privilege is even hinted at). For many white people in this country, a South Africa that works is one where the most important political priority is the preservation of white privilege. The nomenclature used to give this refusal to budge on land and wealth redistribution a veneer of legitimacy sees terms like “political stability” and “policy certainty” thrown about to befuddle the ignorant among us.
The likes of Afriforum have been well coached in packaging lies and misinformation for an international right wing audience, lies that Elon Musk is all too happy to amplify to his aggregated army of sycophants, bots and fanboys. Take everything Elon, his dad, Marco Rubio or Trump says about South Africa with a bucket load of salt, in fact your default position should be to assume they’re lying until proven otherwise.
> We are hemmed in between a corrupt and incompetent ANC government and the majority of white people who never signed up to the reconciliation and nation building project envisaged by Nelson Mandela (and who continue to mount the victim pony with alarming regularity and ride it to western capitals alleging all sorts of mistreatment whenever the issue of their continued privilege is even hinted at).
Thanks for this. So the question for me (southern Caribbean) always boils down to: how to fix corrupt and incompetent governments? It’s a real plague isn’t it? Everywhere in the diaspora. I’d be interested to know if younger people and politicians are trying to move the needle in that regard in South Africa. The Wikipedia entry for politics in South Africa reminds me how horrid duopolies in the west really are. Can’t even get a valid third party in the US … UGH
Young politicians that manage to appear as a blip on the public’s radar tend to be constrained by the need to deploy that resource that has proven to be the tactical nuke of modern politics globally, money. Since they’re not well funded, they’re seen as easy pray by legacy billionaires like the Oppenheimers who entice them with offers of funding but in return they have to dilute their policy positions and centre neoliberalism as the pillar of their campaigns. Voters usually see right through this political chicanery and they don’t do quite well in the polls, leaving us right back where we started.
Thank you for your comments. Shines light on a bad situation.
To your points that white landowners being targeted is a gross fabrication, but that the ANC hasn’t improved things much for blacks, there’s this article from Harper’s from a few years back – https://harpers.org/archive/2019/03/the-myth-of-white-genocide-in-south-africa/
A couple excerpts –
“To the extent that news about land reform in South Africa has reached international audiences at all, it’s been refracted through the lens of a narrative promoted by white conservatives about a supposed “white genocide”—killings of mostly Afrikaner farmers—equating land redistribution with race war. Even though there’s no direct connection between murders of white farmers and land reform, an idea has nonetheless taken hold in the international media of landowners under murderous assault by the black masses, the clearest symbol that in twenty-five years of post-apartheid majority rule whites have become a persecuted minority.”
and –
“Today, fourteen million South Africans live in extreme poverty, often in informal settlements or conditions that are no better. There are a tiny number of whites who live in squatter camps—13,310 of them, according to a 2016 government estimate—and the plight of this minute slice of the South African poor has been very heavily reported on. In 2013, the BBC repeated a wildly inflated estimate by “Afrikaner-rights” activists that up to four hundred thousand whites were living in camps, which is a number that it later became clear the activists had made up more or less on the spot. It has now been repeated countless times, but it’s hard to find much reporting at all about the conditions of the millions of blacks living in camps.”
I haven’t been able to re-read the whole article myself, but I’d be interested in your thoughts if you have time to give it a look.
Thanks Iyman, i’ll give it a read.
Thuto thank you for this information. I had occasion to speak with a gentleman from Eritrea at a gathering of UNIA-510 (Marcus Garvey followers) here in Oakland who shared an overview of South African policy, basically what you wrote but with less detail. Life in the belly of the beast, only different continents.
Thank you for shinning a light upon the fundamental ingrained prejudice concealed behind an arsenal, fabricating self-inflamed distortion’s and lies for the furtherance of the power of its ill-gotten-gains.
I read this twice and still somehow missed the part about the plight of the Afrikaners.
Sorry I should’ve been more clear that my tongue was in my cheek there.
Make no mistake, if Trump did not have so much on his plate right now he would be pressing for regime change in South Africa. Not because of the Afrikaaner population which he does not care about, not because they are hauling Israel into an international criminal court for their crimes against humanity but for geopolitical reasons. The US Navy wants that naval base in Simon’s Town. Like here in Oz, they will graciously let the South Africans spend hundreds of millions to upgrade that navy base for US warships and they probably will demand an air base from the South African Air Force as well. With those in place – and an extraterritorial agreement too – they will be set to down the track shut down the passage of any Chinese commercial ships rounding the Cape along with suspected allied ships. Maybe from there they will organize boarding actions or seize Chinese to Iranian oil ships for sale like they have done in the past. Sure, such actions put South Africa into the middle of all this up to their necks but that will be their problem-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Base_Simon%27s_Town
the strategy is to initiate a conflict between China and Taiwan or a country in East Asia like the Philippines and then attempt to isolate Beijing. It worked so well against Russia, why not give it another go against China
🤣
the ways El Gringo tries to do a mix of maritime blocus + piracy against a landmass of geopolitical bloc stretching from Brest-Litovsk and Murmansk to PingPongYang and Bering Strait is quite hilarious. Trump team just don’t realize how transparent they are.
The Western-most European appendix under the rule of Holy Roman-German Empire in decay is wrecked as a collateral by the former Ukraine operation of the Obamaists, and the Trumpists geniuses want to isolate 3/4 of Asian continent.
Lavrov and its delegation had big smiles in Ryad after the meeting with Cuba Libre Rubio band.
“so here we have Americans doing the Clinton of Eltsin time let-s-be-friend-go-have-a-drink in order to trick us cut ties with China and undo BRICS plans, while at the same time they keep Banderists attacking our oil industry with drones and go rabid amok on our Southern Central Asian flank”
Sorry but this whole “triangle” theory sounds very far fetched and assertions that Trump wants to partner with Russia against China (which won’t work anyway–the trying) are also pure speculation. Surely Trump’s childish peevishness is enough of an explanation along with the great influence of the SA born Musk. After all he’s banned the AP over Gulf of America and still insists when asked on his Trump Riviera scheme.
We are at some kind of turning point between hegemony and world war versus the competing theory that Trump is going in the opposite direction for the greater glory and legacy of Trump. It looks like rushing events will soon reveal which theory is correct.
I take umbrage at criticism of site writers on bogus grounds.
This is not a theory. Trump admin officials have been so dumb as to say it out loud, such as Keith Kellogg just did at the Munich Security Conference. This was Biden policy, he was even explicit with it in one of his phone calls with Putin. Larry Johnson today in both his videos (Nima and Judge Nap) said he personally knows current CIA and other policy advisor types who believe the current relationship between Russia and China is unnatural and weak and we can get in between. Lawrence Wilkerson said similar things on his last talk with Nima. So it may seem far fetched to you but it has a big following.
Bravo!
Seriously Bravo!
Not only have a I learned so much, it is well sourced that it needs to be a foundational read.
Well done Sir!
Afrikaner here. Sharing a local link from the Agricultural Minister of the current GNU (government of national unity) and opposition leader (centre right)
https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2025-02-18-steenhuisen-yet-to-meet-a-single-farmer-who-wants-to-leave-south-africa/?dm_source=dm_block_grid&dm_medium=card_link&dm_campaign=main
I’m not an expert on SA politics, but let it suffice to say that what I’ve seen as a visitor to that beautiful country and reading its history it is hard to be encouraged 31 years after Apartheid. The ANC has been a huge failure; how else can one explain the neoliberalism that has resulted in the GINI coefficient increased under ANC rule and even worse conditions for Africans in the townships and endless shanty towns?
Patrick Bond posted at CounterPunch about the Trump/Musk bullying of South Africa which adds several new angles to complement Connor’s excellent piece: U.S. Rulers Versus South African Rulers – Versus Both Their Peoples and Ecologies . It is well worth a read, as is all of Bond’s work. Bond’s piece also highlight the duplicity vis-a-vis Palestine.
The mass movements, led by militant unions and the United Democratic Front (a popular grassroots organization) had such promise 40-50 years ago. The fall of apartheid coincided with the collapse of the USSR and even the SACP became enamored with “markets”. What followed is sickening; the ANC disbanded the UDF, co-opted the Congress of SA Trade Unions (COSATU) and the SACP. The charismatic Chris Hani was assassinated. Thus became the top-down misleadership of SA.
Mandela worked to tamp down expectations of redistribution and disavowed socialism. Mbeki followed with a bear’s hug embrace of neoliberalism and wacky theories about HIV/AIDS. Zuma doesn’t deserve recall other than hideous corruption and “state capture”. The billionaire Ramaphosa (and former leader of the Mine Workers Union) is best remembered for egging on the cops that gunned down hundreds of striking miners, killing 34, like Zuma he’s totally corrupt.
What else can be said? The deindustrialization is epic; rot appears everywhere. My avocational interest in railroads looks at South Africa almost with tears; a huge, well-run rail system has become a rusted shell of its former self, destroyed by corruption, theft and the neoliberal low of highway transport. Passenger rail has utterly collapsed. While there are modest social housing projects, shantytowns are everywhere and without basic services of any kind. Leafy suburbs and gated communities protect the PMC from even seeing the rot. Former SA corporations re-domiciled to London and New York, speeding capital outflows.
South Africa remains a resource rich country, ripe for more extraction and has a geostrategic location, which kept apartheid alive. The urban workforce is well educated and fully part of the global precariat. No wonder Trump and Musk have targeted.
Cry the Beloved Country, indeed!
A fine comment, to go with the fine post.
The ANC has been following the Kenyan example – “It’s Our Turn to Eat”….
Just for context : Simon’s Town was of great significance during the apartheid era and the Cold War, with the US/UK getting access to its strategic location for various purposes, including listening/surveillance posts, and hence a prime target for Soviet spying:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dieter_Gerhardt
Actually the big issue was the intelligence base at Silvermine, which seems to have been NATO’s main intelligence asset in the South Atlantic.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1984/06/11/south-africans-spying-seen-as-painful-blow-to-west/6d38779b-ebea-452a-9b67-607bc1c56fab/
I don’t believe that there’s much concern for Simonstown as a base, although who knows what the current US regime thinks. By the way, the US has a gigantic and remarkably electronically active (my sister-in-law lives round the corner and her cellphone is routinely jammed) consulate just down the road.
Notice the low per capita GDP and investment levels. Low investment levels limit increasing per capita GDP:
https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/weo-database/2024/October/weo-report?c=199,&s=NGDP_RPCH,PPPGDP,PPPPC,NID_NGDP,NGSD_NGDP,PCPIPCH,GGXWDG_NGDP,BCA_NGDPD,&sy=2017&ey=2024&ssm=0&scsm=1&scc=0&ssd=1&ssc=0&sic=0&sort=country&ds=.&br=1
October 15, 2024
South Africa, 2017-2024
Real GDP, percent change
Investment, percent of GDP
Savings, percent of GDP
Inflation rate, percent change
General government gross debt, percent of GDP
Current account balance, percent of GDP
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1wVNF
August 4, 2014
Real per capita Gross Domestic Product for China, India, Brazil and South Africa, 1977-2023
(Indexed to 1977)
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1DPD0
August 4, 2014
Real per capita Gross Domestic Product for China, India, Brazil and South Africa, 1992-2023
(Indexed to 1992)
Afrikaner here.
Its tiresome reading this back and forth about white farmers being targeted or merely being the product of ‘white nationalist fantasy” or some such.
Its easy to work out. If the number of farmers is around 40000 according to the latest (Transvaal Agricultural Union national census) and the number of murders since 1994 range from 1000 at the extreme low end to the 3500+ claimed by AfriForum and co, it would seem like a high murder rate to me.
Its true that far more people are murdered in black townships. A township with a population of 40000 would be considered tiny however, barely worthy of a small district town. The nature of the crime is also different. The leading method of murder in townships is stabbing, overwhelmingly in the context of drugs and alcohol. This is tragic but a qualitive difference from organised gangs engaging in long term pre planning and targeting of rural persons.
There are townships with murder rates of 35 per 100k annually. This is considered catastrophic.
I’ll leave you to work out the murder rate of white farmers but this is not considered catastrophic. Its considered either a source of joy by the black nationalist left or a story made up by people who (lets face it) are evil and deserve it anyway even if it did happen, which it is not.
The SA government stopped collecting statistics on farm killings in 2007.
They defunded rural security in the 90s
In South Africa it is considered racist if a white person complains about being murdered. Apparently on Nakedcapitalism too.
Thank you for commenting. However, we do ask readers to provide links to substantiate their views. However, it is hard to take your claim that white South Africans are at particular risk in an extremely dangerous country.
First, the overall murder rate for all of South Africa was higher than the 35 out of 100,000 that you deemed catastrophic in particular townships. The national average is 45 per 100,000.
Second, per a BBC account that included considerable on the ground reporting:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cv2jlyl20lzo
Farm murders are real, just as murders in white suburbs are real, but of course murders in squatter-camps and slums are vastly out of proportion to this. There’s no evidence of farm murders being orchestrated. There are land invasions, but they are often assisted by local governments (the land invasions in Cape Town look very much as if they were assisted by the DA, the white supremacist party whose mayor there is a property-developer) with the goal of shifting zoning from recreational to suburban, thus facilitating development in the long term.
The general collapse of South Africa is also real, and is largely due to the austerity policies which have been implemented since 2008, when the corrupt crook Jacob Zuma was installed as President to the cheers of the white-owned media and with funding from white big business. The steady dismantling of the state has immensely enriched the super-rich — mostly whites — in a country which was already the most unequal for which reliable statistics were kept.
There’s no point in denying that the ANC government has overseen the collapse of the country, but every bad decision which it has made has been following the orders of the immense and well-funded neoliberal/white supremacist axis, of which the DA and the Institute of Race Relations and the Free Market Foundation are the most obvious examples. The DA, since taking over the government under the cloak of a “government of national unity” (the ANC is now little more than a rubber stamp) has focussed on defunding social services and privatising infrastructure, alongside its noisy racist campaigns against blacks in schools, blacks in hospitals and blacks owning land.
We are in big trouble, and Trump is doing what he can to empower the corporate crooks and dismantle the surviving opposition to the current disaster.
Thanks for this account. I was never suggesting that farm murders were not happening. That was the straw man to which I was responding.