Does Trump have a point?

South Africa’s relationship with the United States, and with its mercurial President, has been one of the country’s dominant stories over the past few weeks. It’s a complicated matter, and I remain inclined to think that this is fundamentally the mass homecoming and roosting of South Africa’s foreign policy chickens. It scorned America as an enemy, and now that’s been reciprocated. But I think it’s also clear that President Trump has linked some of South Africa’s domestic politics to the diplomatic confrontation.

Trump and his government have taken a particular interest in the supposed persecution of minorities – specifically Afrikaner farmers – and the associated threat of land seizures. This has been met with a predictable outcry in South Africa. This was a lie informed by misinformation, comes the response. White Afrikaners and farmers face no greater threat than anyone else (a low bar in South Africa, but until another standard presents itself, that’s the one available). Indeed, the argument went, they enjoy a privileged position in society. As for the new Expropriation Act, it’s bog-standard legislation for countries worldwide. (According to taste and audience, this could be paired with stating that the enhanced powers over property were essential for land reform.) 

Social media diplomacy

In a recent post on Truth Social, Trump flighted a short video of clips, mostly of Julius Malema and the Economic Freedom Fighters leading renditions of “Kill the Boer”, demanding the seizure of land, and speaking of the necessity of killing in pursuit of the revolution.

https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/114321989500112442

This sort of rhetoric has been a long-standing staple in South African political discourse. “Kill the Boer, Kill the Farmer” achieved its initial fame (or notoriety, according to perspective) in the early 1990s under Peter Mokaba, the President of the ANC Youth League. This caused an enormous stir at the time: the country was in turmoil and groping its way towards a settlement. Sentiments such as those Mokaba was venting called up some of the worst impulses in South African politics, and were bound to inflame tensions. It’s hard to imagine that this was not his intention. There were no doubt some within the ANC who found this an inconvenient distraction from the task of concluding a transition agreement, and some who were genuinely discomfited by it; but it also served the ANC, in that it kept its identity as a revolutionary organisation firmly in focus, even as it sought the institutional respectability of government office.

The ANC has thrived on being multiple things at once. This is a part of its identity and political strategy. It is at once a liberation movement and a government. It claims to represent the interests of businesspeople and communists, a modern middle class and traditional leaders, evangelical Christians and militant secularists. It is both the impeccable embodiment of non-racism and the expression of a visceral racial nationalism. It has thus proven itself adept at holding numerous contradictory opinions at one time. It may wholeheartedly believe in individual and society liberty, and also in the need to “discipline” the population. Business may be a valuable partner in development, or a rapacious interloper to be confronted and controlled (not to mention a source of patronage to tap). A professional, capacitated public service is recognised as essential to the developmental state to which South Africa aspires, though this competes with (and typically loses to) the imperatives of demographic representivity and party loyalty. And the white minority may be as unapologetically South African as anyone else, or a malignant settler presence with whom a reckoning might one day be necessary.

Mixed messaging

James Myburgh, editor of Politicsweb, was on to something in a social media post of his own. His contention was that the ANC has conducted two lines of communication – “frequencies” as he calls them. Domestically, it is the party of the National Democratic Revolution, a friend of autocrats, dismissive of institutional restraints and scornful of the claims of minorities. For international audiences, it is the party of the Rainbow Nation, a champion of non-racism and a leading global exponent of human rights. Trump and his government, said Myburgh, had merely switched its attention from the latter to the former.

I would argue that this is somewhat over-simplified; there are a lot more than two frequencies, and the thrust of the message – domestically or internationally – might resemble either of those that Myburgh describes, depending on the nature of the audience and the identity of the speaker. But in the sense that it conveys entirely contradictory messages, he’s entirely correct.

For its part, the ANC’s leadership has never seemed to appreciate the risks in its mixed messaging – as if interlocutors would politely avert their eyes from the material that was not intended for them. Maybe that even worked for a while. But for some years it has become apparent that the invective against the US which was a standard of ANC communication was being noted. Other pathologies in our politics were unlikely to remain unaccounted for.

This was especially the case, as the ANC and the government it headed have seldom been shy about focusing on the failures of other societies. Or, at least on the failures of those societies which it regards with hostility. There is a certain symmetry between President Trump’s remarks on the state of South Africa, and President Ramaphosa’s remarks on the killing of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests.

One line of argument is that Trump is doing this cynically. There may be something to this, especially if I’m correct in my take that the current state of things arises from South Africa’s geopolitical positioning. I suspect that what he is doing is trying to knock South Africa off the moral perch it has occupied (more by inertia than by virtue in recent years, it must be said). This may be a precursor to some tough negotiations, or perhaps a part of using South Africa as an object lesson of what becomes of small countries who set themselves against the US.

Still, it’s worth asking a tough question for internal consideration: does Trump perhaps have a point?

Now let me be very clear here. I’m not buying into any sort of dog-whistle to white identitarianism, to white genocide mythology, or even suggesting that there is a programme of land confiscation unfolding right now. Indeed, I’ve said before that I was rather dismayed at his intervention, as it skewed debate about a critical matter – the question of property rights, which are under threat – so as to make it all about Trump. There’s a certain type of keyboard intellectual in South Africa who is positively aroused at the idea that he or she gets to “fight Trump”.

What I am getting at is whether it’s justified to take umbrage at him or at any of his entourage who point to the sort of rhetoric that he uses. “Kill the Boer” and so on. This rhetoric is a reality in South Africa. And it’s a reality that is calculated to foster division and insecurity. That is its purpose, however much its apologists may twist themselves into knots to claim that it’s really an art form, or a celebration of our priceless heritage. (Funny that, since we don’t celebrate all aspects of our heritage, like killing suspected witches, debarring women from participation in public life, or, for, that matter, the Great Trek.)

Malema

One could also argue that the prime mover behind this is Julius Malema. He’s at least the most public face of this brand of politics. And he’s not a part of the government. That’s a reasonable point. But it ignores the fact that the EFF is a prominent participant in the country’s politics; and there is no broadly held political cordon among the “centrist” parties to keep extremism out of government. (This is in contrast to, say, Germany, where an informal agreement exists among the political mainstream to keep the Alternative für Deutschland out of coalitions.) The EFF has in fact successfully gained executive positions at subnational level, and might well have succeeded in entering a national coalition last year. Many in the ANC – including the premier of Gauteng and also the Deputy President – would prefer to work with that party than with the Democratic Alliance. They still do.

The EFF is not a marginal presence, and its views and style of politics are not unknown in the ANC. Indeed, it was in the ANC that Malema and the EFF-style politics gained traction, with overall acceptance of this by the ANC. Nor was he alone in it. Our current Minister of International Relations and Cooperation, in a previous incarnation as the Deputy President of the ANC Youth League, was coldly “prophetic” in 2012: “I am just giving a warning to white South Africans: They must voluntarily bring back the land, and voluntarily bring back the mineral resources … there will be a moment when these service-delivery protestors will invade the land of Mr Van Tonder and Mr Van der Merwe and we can no longer be able to guarantee the continued safety of Mr Van der Merwe.”

He went on: “The land question will not be won through romantic acts. We need to an act [sic] as forceful as a war to bring back the land to the majority of South Africans because this land was taken through forceful means and there was no apology from the Afrikaners and British colonisers. And we must never suffer under the illusion that now it’s democracy we will be able to reclaim the land through peaceful means, through peaceful acts.”

In other words, white people would be held responsible for state failure. And in any event, “peaceful acts” were overrated and at some point, well, who knows…

This was part of a longer-term narrative about farmers – specifically white, commercial farmers – as a problem population. They were abusing and raping and murdering their workers, they were the archetypal land thieves, the arbitrarily evicted vulnerable people, they were sabotaging land reform (though I would have thought the relevant state agencies were pretty much doing that for themselves), and their ultimate rehabilitation would come with their disappearance. “Class suicide” in the pompous pol-sci vocabulary.

Nor were the expropriation and land reform measures always presented in such benign and legalistic terms as the government now wants the US to accept. On the contrary, President Ramaphosa invested enormous energy and political capital in the so-called EWC drive (Expropriation without Compensation for those who haven’t been paying attention since 2018). “We are going to take land and when we take land we are going to take it without compensation,” he declared in May 2018. There was an almost millenarian fervour about this: he once said it would turn the country into a Garden of Eden.

My point is that it is the government, the ANC and its sympathisers who have created the background for Trump to make the claims he has. He may well have his own motives for doing so, he may be making distorted claims about South Africa’s realities, but Trump did not create this narrative, he merely leaned into it and repurposed it for his own ends. And in the view of his detractors, he wasn’t supposed to. The bombast and threats (overt and implied) were meant for the South African ecosystem, not the international one. But bombast and threats they were, and they were never going to be limited by borders.

Something deeper

There is something deeper to all this, something that stands apart from Trump. How has South Africa – a constitutional democracy, a society founded on the rule of law, and the enjoyment of an equal, civic citizenship – come to a point where all of this was possible? In other words, to a state of affairs where a prominent politician leads supporters in chanting “kill”?

In large part, it arises directly from the ANC’s revolutionary self, a party never entirely resigned to the workaday business of managing a constitutional democracy, and the complications that involved – and has never excelled in doing so. That three decades after the transition, it can still frame its appeal as a “revolution” tells us a great deal. Indeed, its acceptance of constitutional democracy has never been total.

Expressions of this have existed since the transition. They were in Dullah Omar telling Parliament that opposition parties were permitted to operate by the generosity of President Mandela. They were in the counter-constitutional suborning of state institutions for party benefit, aka cadre deployment. They were the soft-soaping of corruption and malfeasance, and the frequent  deployment of charges of racism when critics pointed to this. They were in the sinister suggestions that opponents were doing the bidding of foreign powers. They were in the “Kill for Zuma” rhetoric that accompanied his rise to power. As one-time Cosatu Secretary-General Zwelinzima Vavi put it “comrades should be ready to defend one another, and when necessary, that may involve killing”, and there was a “general principle that taking up arms is always a possibility”. They were in dark warnings that the “Boers” would bring back apartheid. They were constantly invoking  “our people”, something pointedly expressing a distinction between “us” and “them”, a direct South African equivalent to the populist messaging seen abroad. This bothers so many of our deep thinkers.

This was hardly unusual, nor confined to a class of untidy street activists. It’s the kind of rhetoric that has extended towards the presidential office.

Last year, Elon Musk caused a stir – as he’s wont to do – by posting on X a rebuke to President Ramaphosa for his silence while crowds chant “Kill the Boer”.

Musk is as divisive a figure as Trump, so predictably he came in for a shellacking both in the US and South Africa. Coverage in the American media owed more to its domestic concerns that anything taking place in South Africa, so I attempted to set the record straight, writing to both the New York Times and Washington Post. Neither published my contributions.

Nevertheless, to the Washington Post, I wrote: “For a country with South Africa’s factious politics and scale of socio-economic problems (including a murder rate of some 42 per 100 000; the US rate is around 7 – World Bank data for 2021), incendiary rhetoric and the debased politics it signifies augurs badly for the country’s future as a constitutional democracy. In this sense, Elon Musk may be right: why would the country’s president avoid taking a position on this?”

I stand by that. President Ramaphosa is President of a constitutional democracy, and of all its citizens – citizens, not mere subjects – irrespective of race or political affiliation. It’s hard to see why he would not intervene to say that language like this is unsuited to the type of constitutional order South Africa has, and deleterious to the type of society it aspires to be. “Killing”, whether used as rhetoric or as a direct call to arms, has no place in its politics. In reality, I fear that the distinction between words and reality may not always be a clear one.

In the event, the President did not intervene. He would not. He could not. Nor should one expect him to.

Nor, it should be said, did most of civil society. Herein, I fear, lies the rub. At the time of the transition, many activists, church leaders, intellectuals and journalists – good, solid proponents of human rights and all the elevated stuff that the New South Africa promised – hitched their hopes to the ANC. The ANC was seen as the embodiment of all that was new and good and hopeful about the coming society. If the National Party and Inkatha Freedom Party represented compromised and sectarian interests, the ANC was for the country, pure and whole. So went the thinking, with only a small amount of parody. Effectively, the country willingly turned a blind eye to the concerning signals coming from the ANC. Diplomats might have done so to maintain relationships; domestic constituencies chose not to see these signals, or to ignore them when they did.

Corruption and poor service provision were of course public obsessions, but there was little probing of how the operations of the ANC and post-apartheid governance engendered them. Cadre deployment, for example, received scant attention. Bodies like the Treatment Action Campaign, which performed great services to South Africa in shifting policy around HIV, nevertheless made it absolutely clear that its commitment to the ANC was rock-solid. One representative of the organisation even said that it would be difficult to accept life-saving treatment from a government controlled by the DA. It had to be from the ANC.

What was wanted was the “good ANC”, not the ANC as it existed, and certainly not the use of citizen agency to look for an alternative. That was never going to end well.

Language that flirted with violence could be explained away through tortuous academic arguments (he doesn’t mean white people; he means something called “whiteness” etc), or ignored entirely. Sometimes, it was even given some gentle support. Vavi’s comments on the “general principle” that violence was always on the table was contained in a statement issued jointly with the SA Human Rights Commission. And as far as I can tell, it did absolutely nothing to damage his reputation. He remained celebrated as a respected voice for justice and human rights. The Human Rights Commission retain the dubious honour of having distributed one of the clearest justifications for political violence in post-apartheid South Africa,

Things have moved on somewhat. Thankfully. There is now infinitely more willingness to call the ANC out, and to recognise its manifest failings. But great damage had been done, and an acceptance of the pathologies of South Africa’s political culture remains strong.

Professor Thuli Madonsela – well respected as Public Protector, and who struck among the first blows against state capture, and is now holder of a Chair in Social Justice at Stellenbosch University – remarked that the 2024 election results had delivered a two-thirds mandate for “transformation”, implying that a hookup between the ANC, EFF and uMkhonto weSizwe Party would be the best option. That this would look remarkably like reassembling a state capture coalition.

Never fear, she also helpfully said that South Africa’s problems arose from excessive investor-friendliness (probably a surprise to those businesses that choose not to put their money here): “An approach that is primarily driven by investor friendliness is why the ANC is in this mess in addition to the corruption exacerbated by state capture which impacted on energy security and other service delivery issues. To the ANC, please do not let the investor-friendly narrative determine your choice. Please apply systems thinking consider all factors, central being the wellbeing of all the people of South Africa beyond the interests of the rich. Otherwise, when the people abandon you, some of the same rich will fund the people to dislodge you.”

And so, it goes on.

At issue here is not Trump, not Musk, and not just how South Africa’s politics impact its increasingly ineffective projection abroad. It’s whether South Africa as a whole, its government, its politicians and its people, are really striving for the society they seem to hope the rest of the world will acknowledge. I doubt it.

I hasten to add – because one needs to add these things – that I’m not after banning the singing of songs or proscribing parties. I am resolutely opposed to that. These are political and social questions and should be met on those terms, not with a legal jackboot. What I am concerned about is that far too many of us who should know better would rather avert their eyes when they should pay attention. What concerns me is not that Julius Malema can lead a chant of “Kill the Boer”, but that communities of rights activists will shuffle by with a nothing-to-see-here attitude – when xenophobia or online invective should prompt energetic responses.

This is not even solely about “Boers”. It is about the cohesion and common-sense of belonging that all should be entitled to. (Those who think this is of no concern as “Boers” have it coming anyway might bear in mind that hatred and scapegoating, like any disease, jumps borders. They may be more sympathetic to the next target.) It is about the acceptable limits of political practice in a constitutional democracy. And it is (or it should be) about drawing a hard line that makes it clear that violence has no place at all, in language or practice, in our politics.

We, as an enormously challenged society, owe this to ourselves.

Maybe this doesn’t matter to Trump. It should matter to us. 

[Image: Sambeet D from Pixabay]

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