The Dangerous US Misread of South Africa

During an episode of Makin Sense, the flagship podcast of The Common Sense, Frans Cronje argued that the United States (US) has an enormous opportunity under President Trump to find common cause on values with South Africa’s multi-racial centre-right, Christian, conservative majority. However, American analysts may be getting their read and strategy on the country wrong. A key mistake, according to Cronje, is to approach South Africa as if it were as deeply divided along extreme left and right ideological positions as has become the case for the US and many countries in Western Europe.

Cronje explained that in as far as it does think so, Washington is mistaken to think that right of centre Christian conservative values are the unique preserve of South Africa’s Afrikaners. Cronje, who chairs one of South Africa’s leading polling groups, said that such values were common to comfortably 7 out of 10 South Africans of all races, backgrounds, political views, and economic circumstances. 

He said the idea that South Africa is a deeply divided society, let alone split between a hard left majority and a small right oriented minority, is simply false. Instead, he described the country as having a broad, culturally conservative centre where most people hold overlapping values across racial lines.

Cronje said there is a danger that Washington is coming to see South Africa as a country in which 75% of people leaned to the hard Marxist black-nationalist left, 20% were in the comfortable Western liberal centre, and the balance were people with whom the Trump administration might find common ground on values.

The Trump administration recently justified its boycott of the G20 summit, taking place in South Africa this week, on the grounds that South Africa is persecuting Afrikaners.

Cronje told Making Sense that crime data numbers were being produced that would show that farmers in South Africa were more likely to be violently attacked in their homes or businesses than was the case for the balance of the population, and that those attacks were more likely to end in murder than attacks on the balance of the population, but that this was not unique to Afrikaners, and that black commercial farmers suffered equally horrific levels of violence. Likewise, Cronje said that threats to property rights applied to black and white South Africans alike – with millions of black people still being denied titles to the properties they occupied, in addition to facing new threats of expropriation. He also said that it was a misnomer to think that Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) regulations benefitted blacks and harmed whites saying that the extent to which those policies have been misapplied to justify corruption and state capture has caused great difficulty for black people.

The Trump administration has taken a very hard line towards South Africa with respect to violent attacks in rural areas, threats to property rights, and BEE policy but Cronje says it’s a misread to say that the policies are driven by one race against another and that the reality of public opinion on the ground is that all races are predominantly opposed to these ideas, and that all races suffer the consequences (polls show, for example, that majorities of ANC voters oppose expropriation policies, BEE, and the chanting of the murderous chant, “kill the Boer”).

Cronje concluded that a constructive long term relationship between Pretoria and Washington would require the US to recognise South Africa as it is, a society with a large values driven centre common to what you might typically find in Republican voting districts of the US, rather than one defined by a leftist ideological extreme. The opportunity for both America and South Africa he said was to find each other on that common ground and that a very strong bond could then be established between the two countries.