How the Americans Will Lose South Africa and the Afrikaners

Last week, Donald Trump again accused the South African government of presiding over a genocide in a social media post that went further to say that South Africa would not be welcome to attend the G20 in Miami next year and also that all United States (US) payments and support to South Africa would be cut off.

As best as we can divine it, a read in Washington seems to be that South Africa is a godforsaken hellhole pitted against the West. On that reading, 7/10 voters (the ANC, EFF, MK nexus) are hardline black nationalist Marxists and hate America and wish to do it harm. A further 2.5/10, the DA voters, are soft green-liberal internationalists in the mould of Keir Starmer (and therefore, from the American perspective, even more of a menace than the black nationalists). That leaves only the Afrikaners, an agrarian Christian minority persecuted by the Marxist and liberal hordes, as viable partners for America.

This reading is very wrong.

America and much of the Western world may have become deeply split across a cultural divide that pits the hard left against conservatives, but it is a mistake to extrapolate that framework to South Africa on the assumption that the same has occurred here.

Culture reflects the collective values of people. The great South African social scientist Lawrence Schlemmer said that his polls from the 1980s and 1990s showed enormous cultural common ground between black and white people. Schlemmer was fond of saying that if he was to show an audience data on the values of South Africans, there would be no way of telling if the numbers had been sourced from black or white respondents.

The same is true today. On values questions, and even on practical government policy questions, there is enormous common ground in the views of South Africans across every historical, political, racial, and socio-economic divide.

So great is that common ground that at this newspaper we like to say that South Africa is in many important respects not a multicultural society at all (Henry Kissinger famously told Helen Zille that South Africa was a multicultural society for which reason it was unlikely to make a success of its democracy).

In South Africa those common values align to what Americans might see as the Christian conservative right – and with small enough Cs that definition might extend to 7 or even 8 out of every 10 South Africans. South Africa is therefore a rare thing: a society in which a strong majority of people hold values that align quite closely with those of many of Mr Trump’s own voters in America’s heartland. In fact, if you assembled a group of typical Trump voters out of that heartland, with a group of typical South African voters the two would easily become friends.

That is true for many Afrikaners, of course, but the point is that it is not only true of them. It makes no sense therefore, from an American foreign policy perspective, to zero in on just a fraction of the South African market when common cause might be found with the great bulk of it.

Nor, should Washington wish to find such common cause, would it need to alter the core issues that concern it about South Africa – as these are issues that concern the great majority of South Africans too.

Since early this year, four such issues have stood out.

The first is violent crime, which the White House has distilled into the single issue of attacks on Afrikaners and specifically Afrikaner farmers. The data on farm attacks shows that farmers are both more likely to be attacked than is the case for the balance of the population, and that those attacks are more likely to end in a homicide. So, a special focus on the plight of farmers is perfectly justified – particularly given the extent of past political incitement that farmers be killed. But that plight holds true for black commercial farmers too. They are also attacked on their farms and in their homes and killed in the most brutal fashion. There is common ground here between the black and white experiences that can be built into a political asset. That point extends well beyond the country’s commercial farms. South Africa's murder rate sits at near 40 per 100 000. That is around eight times the global average! Trauma and fear at the constant bloodletting is the one thing, perhaps above all else, that South Africans of every race and background have in common with each other. And South Africans are united in hating their government for not being able to put a stop to it. It should not be hard, for the Trump team, with their own focus on law and order in America, and peacebuilding around the world, to get a message right on this (this newspaper has previously editorialised that were Trump to bring peace to Europe he’d be the greatest global peacemaker in 70 years).

A second American concern is around property rights. That has merit. Under recently adopted legislation, the state could expropriate any asset, fixed or movable, for less than market value. This threatens the future and assets of all South Africans – even if the policy was partly justified by populist politicians as a means to secure vengeance against the Afrikaners. Expropriation is, however, a deeply unpopular idea, with polls showing strong opposition, including in ANC ranks, to the policy (under a third of ANC voters say they support the idea). The ANC did, after all, lose its political majority in the election cycle following the most prominent trumpeting of the policy. Part of the reason for that is South Africa’s history of dispossession. What people want is to accumulate wealth and assets – not have the state, that they trust ever less, afford itself the powers to confiscate the things they worked hard to afford. In the eastern half of South Africa (the fertile half, the west is a desert), more than half of agricultural land by productive value is in black possession but not ownership because South Africa's government does not permit many black landowners title to the property they already hold. There is a great desire within the country for that to change, but the American messaging has again distilled an obvious diplomatic opportunity into a too-narrow focus on the Afrikaners.

The third American issue with South Africa is empowerment policy, which is read by Washington as DEI on steroids (DEI refers to the despised Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies in America that became particularly prominent during the Biden era) that serves as a non-tariff barrier prejudicing American firms and, more broadly, as a key reason for South Africa's low level of fixed investment and hence growth. The American concerns are all justified. But American messaging casts the issue of empowerment policy as something the black majority is fully united around in inflicting on the Afrikaner minority. That's just wrong. The policy has prejudiced Afrikaners but it has also prejudiced vast numbers of black South Africans who were excluded from opportunities because they refused to buy into the corruption that has become a characteristic of how the policy is practiced. As a consequence, the policy in deeply unpopular in black and white communities alike. Less than 1 in 5 black voters support the policy as practiced. Almost 8 in 10 voters believe that firms that pay tax and create jobs should not have any further black empowerment regulations enforced on them. A recent DA proposal (the DA is South Africa’s centrist and multiracial former chief opposition party, that now governs the country in coalition with the ANC) to scrap the policy as practiced has the support of a majority of voters, including a majority of ANC voters – according to polls published a week ago! The view from Washington that the policy pits black against white misses all of this, and thereby another opportunity to find common cause with a majority of South Africans. Even the government is moving against the policy now, following an announcement in Parliament last week of a substantive review of the policy.

In foreign policy, the most central American concern has been South Africa’s ties to Iran in as far as these threaten America’s national security interests. But those very ties, in addition to being quite at odds with South Africa’s centre-right Christian values, sail very close to abetting the terrible slaughter of Africa's Christians by Islamists. The opportunity here to build common ground is obvious – especially as the Iran tie is not broadly supported among the ANC leadership and arises from a very small circle of people. Whilst data shows that the balance of public opinion leans to the West, sympathy for China is rising. This is chiefly because South Africans now believe that China does more for the country than the West does, a view surely being deepened by the tenor of recent US messaging against South Africa.

In none of these four areas could Pretoria stand up and say that American criticisms are truly off the mark – but when the accusation morphs to a genocide then Washington puts the South Africans on a very firm footing to rightly deny that the allegation is baseless. It is a short and easy step from there to dismiss the entirety of America’s concerns at South Africa as equally absurd.

None of this is to say that pressure is unwarranted. The criminal violence in the country is terrible. Property rights are under threat, including those of American investors, and Washington is quite justified in putting Pretoria on notice that threats to the interests of its companies will not be tolerated. The same holds for American firms being forced to surrender equity to invest in the country. Elements of South Africa’s foreign policy, especially viz Iran, pose a serious threat to America’s global interests and it is absurd to suggest Washington should not act in defence of its national security. Pressure breeds reform, and the willingness to bring hard power forward in its foreign policy is a feature of the Trump administration to be welcomed globally. Peace through strength works, and the Trump Americans who are told that their South Africa policy is pushing the country deeper into a Chinese, Russian, and Iranian orbit are right to answer that this situation was already well in train before they came to power, and that only through the exercise of hard power might it be reversed.

But pressure must be practiced with nuance, a sophistication of understanding, and above all, a correct analysis of the situation on the ground, and on those counts America's South Africa policy is failing.

This will also see the policy fail amongst Afrikaners. For all the pressures of crime, expropriation, and hostile rhetoric that they are under, the Afrikaners are also thriving as a fully integrated and respected part of South African society. Their standards of living (although not dollar-based incomes) rival anything an ordinary person might aspire to in the Western world. Relative to the Western middle classes, South Africa’s established middle classes live in great splendour. A political party, the Freedom Front Plus, that champions narrow Afrikaner needs, attracts very modest support. The centrist DA, which won fewer than half its votes from whites in last year's national elections, and which now polls more strongly than the ANC across the country's cities, is where Afrikaners have found their political home. The reason is that it promises them inclusion into broader South African society, which is something they very much desire.

The current American approach offers them the opposite of that – isolation – which is what they fear and they do not want that, which means that if current US and South Africa tensions spiral towards a head, the bulk of South Africa's Afrikaners will disavow the US, especially if its policies harm the South African economy, which is their home, leaving Washington clutching nothing around which to build common cause with South Africans in order to secure its interests in the country (and the broader region, which includes the Indo-Pacific and the southern sea route into the Atlantic). That would be an extraordinary failure of foreign policy given how very easily America might have won the support and admiration of a majority of South Africans and via that, sound relations with both the ANC and the South African government.