Donald Trump is throwing his weight into the racial politics of South Africa, the country where Elon Musk grew up as the son of a wealthy property developer under apartheid. The president announced this week that he would withhold all aid from the country as punishment for a law intended to address persistent racial disparities in the formerly white supremacist state, particularly the fact that white landowners control three-quarters of its freehold farmland despite making up just 7% of the population.
The law Trump has taken issue with would make it easier for the government to expropriate land “in the public interest,” in hopes of undoing some of the injustice of the apartheid era in which the government seized Black people’s land and forced them to live in designated areas away from the white population. In Musk’s telling, it’s white South Africans who are now facing injustice, and he endorsed and shared an X post Tuesday from a user who suggested that the U.S. should encourage white-only immigration from South Africa.
Although the Expropriation Act, which was signed by South African president Cyril Ramaphosa in January, includes safeguards against abuse, Trump proclaimed that “South Africa is confiscating land, and treating certain classes of people VERY BADLY,” and vowed to order an investigation by the U.S. government.
It’s an allegation that is popular among white nationalist and far-right figures in both the United States and South Africa, and one that Musk has echoed. After Ramaphosa clarified that the law merely “ensures public access to land in an equitable and just manner as guided by the constitution,” Musk accused him of imposing “racist ownership laws.”
In response to the killings of some white farmers in 2023, Musk said that the South African government was leading a “white genocide.” While there are fringe currents in South African politics accused of hate speech against the white population, experts concluded that there was no evidence of a genocide and that the killings were part of high violent crime rates in general and mostly related to farm robberies. White people in South Africa generally maintain a much higher standard of living than average, with only one percent among them living in poverty compared to 64 percent of Black people.
Trump’s vow to halt aid would affect $400 million a year that the U.S. sends to South Africa, with most of the money going through USAID’s HIV/AIDS program — a program which in any case is still being held in limbo by Musk’s DOGE agents. He could also remove South Africa from the AGOA trade agreement, which gives South Africa and other African nations tariff-free access to the U.S. market.
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