Donald Trump has long been concerned about the question of the heaviest and most emotional internal policy in South Africa: the earth.
During his first mandate, the American president ordered his Secretary of State then, Mike Pompeo – via Twitter – to study closely the land and agricultural crises of South Africa “and the supposed” large -scale murder of farmers “.
This week, he repeated these pet theories during an oval office meeting with the president of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, who closed his eyes and seemed to be calm. Trump’s main statement was that the “civil servants” in South Africa said “killing the white farmer and taking their land”.
South Africans know that the image on the ground is very different. The most recent confiscations of the land took place under apartheid, when 87% of the South African land was reserved for whites, which represented under a fifth of the population.
Brutal expulsions have forced some 3.5 million blacks from their ancestral lands, which have often been expropriated without compensation and sold at low prices to white farmers.
As the country became a multiracial democracy in 1994, white farmers still held around 77 million hectares of the country’s 122 million hectares.
These apartheid convulsions have shaped South Africa today.
“These divisions persist a lot,” said Ayesha Omar, lecturer at the University of Witwatersrand. “There was a deep way in which people were stripped of their land … and of course, there was the whole question of dignity.”
Today, white farmers still have around half of the country’s land, although only 7% of citizens are white. A lack of formal access to the land prevented the black majority and other historically disadvantaged groups from drawing from commercial perspectives, including the loan against the guarantees, which such a property provides.
The newly inaugurated government of Nelson Mandela in 1994 sought to repair this balance. He was aimed at Redistribute a third fields to historically disadvantaged groups, including blacks, through a “voluntary and voluntary seller” regime to buy land at market prices.
The constitution of the new democracy allowed the expropriation of the land in exchange for fair compensation. It has long been an explosive question, because some politicians have argued that it should be modified to specifically allow land to be seized, in some cases, without compensation.
“The Constitution itself centrally addresses questions about how to confront the historical injustices of the past on the earthly issue,” said Omar.
A law adopted in January opened the possibility of seizures without compensation, but there has not yet been a single case of this type. The democratic alliance, part of the governing coalition, has launched a legal challenge arising that it is unconstitutional.
Progress towards the objective of redistribution has been much slower than the post-Apartheid government hoped. To date, the state has bought some 3.9 million hectares, or 2.5% of the country’s land mass.
This has been used for various purposes, including agriculture, forestry, tourism and hospitality, said Mzwanele Nyhonso, Minister of Agrarian Reform and Rural Development.
“The purchase of land from previous owners, in particular white owners, is based on negotiated agreements,” he added.
Government objectives for land redistribution have been repeatedly postponed over two decades in 2030. The slow rhythm of the agrarian reform of the African National Congress of Ramaphosa is one of the many reasons why South Africa remains among the most unequal societies in the world. Progress has also been hampered by corruption.
“The South African state does not have the capacity to do what it wants to do. It is obviously much more than a land transfer,” said Jonny Steinberg, author of Winnie and NelsonA book that re-examines the post-Apartheid heritage.
The new potential landowners needed “expertise and capital and market assistance,” he added.
Another trail on the process is the historical transformation of the white minority of the black majority into an industrial proletariat, by breaking their links with the earth.
In addition to his opinions on earth, Trump said that white farmers were faced with large -scale attacks. But there is no evidence that they are faced with more targeted assaults than any other group in the high rates of violent crimes in South Africa.
In the first quarter of 2025, there were six murders on the farms, of which we were a white farmer and the rest of the blacks, according to police figures.
Last year, 26,232 people were murdered in South Africa, a rate of 45 per 100,000 against 5.8 per 100,000 in the United States. During this period, the Transvaal Agricultural Union, a private agricultural group, said that there were 32 murders on the farms, affecting blacks and whites.
With the reform progressing slowly, populists such as Julius Malema – the radical leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters party, which was shown by singing the wrestling song of the apartheid era “Kill the Boer” during the meeting of the Oval Office – seized an increasing resentment among black citizens.
Corne Mulder, a leader of the Afrikaner Interest Freedom Front Plus, a minority party in the coalition 10 governess 10, has pending Ramaphosa for not responding to differences with Trump behind closed doors, calling for the meeting of the oval office “an absolute diplomatic catastrophe”.
But he said Trump had used the “genocide” claims “strategically” to highlight violence against white farmers.
Trump has repeatedly cited a law promulgated in January which allows the government to expropriate private land – the vast majority of which remains owned by the Whites – for public use. Experts compared the legislation, adopted without constitutional change, to a power of the American government called “eminent domain”.
This law operates through a mechanism distinct from the government’s agrarian reform policy. Analysts say that it is more likely to be used in cases involving, for example, abandoned buildings in the city center where the owner cannot be found.
He specifies that when the courts judge him “fair and fair”, no compensation should be paid. To date, this provision has not been invoked.
Invited by her billionaire advisor of South African origin, Elon Musk, Trump said that this law aims to grasp the land of the Whites and launched a refugee plan to reinstall members of the Afrikaner minority in the United States. Washington said that the group, which regained its roots to the first Dutch settlers in 1652, “victims of unjust racial discrimination”.
But few Afrikaners have expressed their interest in moving. “All we know is that we are flooded with people, with white farmers from South Africa,” said Trump, referring to 59 Afrikaners, his administration has grown in a hurry to go to the United States this month.
Within South African commercial agriculture, which competes worldwide with countries like Australia and Brazil, farmers are much more concerned with the American proposal for general prices of 30% on the goods of their country.
Far from fleeing the country, Afrikaans’ white predominance farmers have helped stimulate exports – mainly made up of fruit and wine – from $ 2 billion in 2001 to almost $ 14 billion in 2024. The industry exported $ 13.7 billion in products last year.
Agriculture remains one of the few South African industries to prosper even if overall economic growth has slowed down to less than 1% per year, and that a third of people are without work.
The agriculture sector was currently supported by the financing of some 220 billion rands ($ 12.3 billion) of commercial banks, said Wandile Sihlobo, chief economist of the South African Agricultural Affairs.
“This financing shows the level of confidence in the current process of agrarian reform,” said Sihlobo, also an economic advisor to the president. “In an assisted sector, you would not sell $ 14 billion in products.”
David Pilling additional report in London
