SA provides all the ammunition that Donald Trump needs

By R.W. Johnson

Donald Trump never leaves alone the matter of white Afrikaners as ‘victims of genocide’ for very long. He seems to have returned to it with fresh tirades while entertaining Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia. Each such tirade is met with furious denials and denunciations from Pretoria – and, indeed, from many ordinary South Africans as well.

Yet the whole matter is rather more complicated than it seems. Farm murders, which are a key part of this matter, have indeed been horrendous and very numerous. In many cases the victims have been tortured as well as killed, revealing a pathological cruelty of motive which lifts such crimes beyond the ordinary category of violent robbery into a category of their own.

Moreover, the government has never paid this category of crime the attention it deserves. The farm commando system was broken up and banned, yet it had been effective and nothing was put in its place. If anything, the government has simply averted its eyes from the whole phenomenon.

Added to this, the government continues to allow Julius Malema and his followers to chant the refrain of “Kill the Boer, kill the farmer” – and absolutely shamefully the Constitutional Court has refused to regard this as hate speech. In any civilised country no government, let alone its supreme court, would tolerate such odious targeting of any minority group and anyone who persisted in such behaviour would be heavily fined and, if they repeated it, jailed.

The fact is that there was always a strong racist (anti-white) element in the ANC’s struggle history. The enemy were always termed “die Boere” and even today there is a tolerance of African politicians who attack whites, who want to “cut the throat of whiteness” and so on, although this is clearly contrary to the values of the Constitution.

Beyond that there has been a clear spitefulness towards Afrikaners and, specifically, their culture and language. The ANC has been responsible for the shrinkage in the number of Afrikaans-medium schools, and many ANC and EFF politicians openly attack the Afrikaans language, insist that monuments like the Voortrekker Memorial should not even exist, and other historic Afrikaans monuments are attacked and vandalised.

Afriforum has recently catalogued the situation in their document “The continued persecution of minority communities in SA”. Yet Afrikaans is the third most spoken language in South Africa, and is one of only two South African languages with a large literature and in which it is possible to study a wide range of subjects at a higher level.

This hostility towards Afrikaans is, of course, extremely damaging to the Coloured community, who actually created the Afrikaans language. Coloureds today number 5.3 million – considerably more than whites – and are predominantly Afrikaans-speaking. Hurting the Afrikaans language makes upward social mobility harder for Coloured people, and also makes it quite clear that the ANC government does not care about them at all.

Afriforum and the wider Solidarity movement are bonny fighters for Afrikaans-speaking people and their culture, and there is no doubting their intense loyalty to South Africa. They have repeatedly made it clear that they do not agree with Trump’s characterisation of the treatment of Afrikaners as a genocide, and they have also emphatically made known their wish that Afrikaners should not take up Trump’s offer of refugee status in the US. They want Afrikaners to stay in South Africa and fight for their place in their beloved country.

Despite this, these two civil society associations have frequently been denounced by government spokespersons as traitors to South Africa, unpatriotic, and so on. Essentially, they are accused of having fed or encouraged Trump’s misconceptions about South Africa – despite the fact that they have publicly and repeatedly made clear that they do not agree with his accusations of genocide.

At the heart of this is ANC resentment of the fact that their own relationship with the US is in shreds, and yet delegations from Solidarity and Afriforum are assured of a warm welcome in Washington and clearly have good connections with a number of people and departments in the Trump administration.

In effect, they feel, the Trump administration is treating the South African government as illegitimate, and instead is openly preferring their opponents whom they regard as spokesmen for “the old South Africa”. Given the ANC’s insecurities about its own electoral future, this blow to their sense of their own legitimacy hits them on a tender spot.

But in fact, of course, the ANC has only itself to blame for its bad relations with the US. It was repeatedly warned both by the South African media and by Americans that its foreign policy was clearly hostile to the US, and was putting South Africa’s trade and investment relationships at risk. All such warnings were ignored.

There was no doubt that the reason for the ANC’s enthusiasm for BRICS was precisely that it saw it as a vehicle for building an anti-Western alliance. Moreover, the ANC has always one-sidedly relied on its contacts with the Black Congressional Caucus, a pressure group within the Democratic party rather than on a proper relationship through the State Department.

When Ebrahim Rasool was South Africa’s ambassador in Washington, he spent an inordinate amount of his time on Islamic politics, including relations with many Islamic groups deeply hostile to the US. And since Rasool was thrown out of the US as unacceptable in that role, no one has been appointed in his place. And this at a time when negotiations over trade have reached a critical point.

Now Trump has removed tariffs from a wide range of agricultural goods, much to the relief of South African farmers, but this was in no way the result of South African diplomacy. Instead Trump found himself under fire over rising food prices, and decided to abandon tariffs on food imports wherever the US was itself unable to provide sufficiently for the market.

What this amounts to is nothing less than a dereliction of duty on South Africa’s part. And this despite the fact that the US has been providing $440 million a year in aid benefits to South Africa. In effect the ANC decided that it could have its cake and eat it – it could receive generous aid from the US while simultaneously neglecting its own proper representation in Washington and conducting a foreign policy hostile to the US. The Americans have been remarkably tolerant and generous in putting up with this ever since 1994, but now their patience has snapped.

Ramaphosa’s response was to insist that the problem lay entirely with mistaken perceptions by the US, but this condescending attitude has, unsurprisingly, been brushed aside by Washington. The fact is that to placate Washington Ramaphosa needed to denounce Malema’s racist hate speech and make at least some relaxation of BEE which, heaven knows, is a deeply damaging policy in any case. But in effect Ramaphosa is unable to stand up against the ANC’s racial prejudices.

Meanwhile, Trump continues to return obsessively to all the bad things ANC South Africa stands for. It is doubtful that the ANC really understands this. Trump is, after all, a deeply ignorant man. Probably the only South Africans he’d ever heard of when he was elected were Gary Player, Ernie Els, Trevor Immelman, Charl Schwartzel and Louis Oosthuizen. It is doubtful that he’s ever heard of Jan Smuts or Paul Kruger, and he knows nothing about South Africa’s history or politics.

But that is not the point. What looms large in Trump’s mind – and that of his followers – is that the US is forecast, on present trends, to lose its current white majority within a decade or so. In Trump’s mind this means that America’s whites, in the phrase he always uses, “won’t have a country any more”. His absolute hostility to illegal Hispanic immigration and his mass deportations are an attempt to set back the clock on this epochal change. Even so, the lower white rates of family size and the continuing inflow of legal immigrants from Asia and elsewhere mean that he is playing King Canute.

So what Trump is trying to do, even as his popularity flags, is continually to re-charge his MAGA base by raising the spectre of the WASP America of Washington and Lincoln being submerged beneath a flood of black, yellow and brown-skinned people. And he needs a frightening example of what happens to a country where that occurs.

South Africa provides just that example: once it was a decent Christian country, producing the Gary Players, Charl Schwartzels and Elon Musks. But now it has a black government, everything has gone to the dogs, and whites are persecuted and discriminated against. This, he warns his MAGA base, is what awaits you unless you ensure that I and people like me are endlessly re-elected to hold back this barbarian tide. You will “lose your country” and “you won’t have a country any more”.

As may be seen, it is futile to point out the errors in Trump’s depiction of South Africa. What he needs is a bogeyman, and post-apartheid South Africa, with its decline into corruption, violence and stagnation, serves the purpose very well. And Trump knows that even if he’s got certain elements of his story wrong, the Afrikaner ‘refugees’ he admits to the US, let alone the likes of Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, will spread an extremely dark picture of contemporary South Africa to Americans they meet.

This is, indeed, something the ANC should reflect on. When it came to power in 1994, the national narrative was overwhelmingly in their favour. They were led by the extremely attractive figure of Nelson Mandela – a heroic yet compassionate figure, intent on forgive-and-let-live, and a determined foe of racialism of any sort. The ANC itself was seen as a proudly non-racial movement which had fought a long and heroic struggle and which would now build the New South Africa in line with these high moral principles. What the world wanted to see was a New South Africa pulling itself up by its own bootstraps, making education its No.1 priority and achieving “a better life for all” its people.

Internationally there was a positive hunger for such a narrative. Indeed, it was very noticeable that foreign visitors to South Africa even in the late 1990s were keen to imbibe all the mythology of “Mandela magic”, the “Rainbow Nation” and so forth, long after these phrases had become somewhat timeworn domestically.

So the two related questions which the ANC must face are, first, how did it so completely lose control of this national narrative when at first the whole world was positively delighted to believe it? And secondly, how did the narrative of the New South Africa move so decisively in less than a generation from a miracle country of high moral principle and a determined refusal of racism of any kind – to a dire example of corruption, racism and violence, to be avoided at all costs? For that is what it now is, not only for Trump but for many foreigners in general.

In 1994, an American president was so keen to witness Mandela’s inauguration that he flew across the world to be here – even though Mandela publicly made jokes at his expense. Contrast that with the boycott of the G20 by the US president and vice-president today, not to mention the other world leaders who are staying away.So much has been squandered – and for what?