The truth about white farmers in South Africa - and why the right is obsessed with them

Sign up to our free fortnightly newsletter from The Independent's Race Correspondent Nadine White

Sign up to our free fortnightly newsletter The Race Report

Please enter a valid email address

Please enter a valid email address

SIGN UP

I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice

On one of the darkest days of Donald Trump’s presidency, with his administration once again mired in scandal, the president executed a surprise handbrake turn.

After responding in typically blustering style to the conviction of ex-campaign manager Paul Manafort and admission of guilt by former lawyer Michael Cohen, both charged with a string of financial crimes, Mr Trump suddenly tweeted about the plight of white farmers in South Africa.

“I have asked Secretary of State @SecPompeo to closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers,” the president wrote, apparently citing an item he had seen on Fox News and copying in both the right-wing network and its anchor Tucker Carlson.

Why was the president’s attention suddenly drawn to the issue and what is the truth about the situation in post-Apartheid South Africa?

1. Why is President Trump addressing this now?

   This appears to be another instance of Mr Trump deploying the age-old conjurer’s trick of distraction, cynically diverting attention from the intense media speculation surrounding his entourage and Robert Mueller’s ongoing Russia investigation by resetting the news agenda.

   The tactic has worked for him many times before, most recently when he sought to shutdown criticism of his performance at July’s Helsinki summit with Vladimir Putin by beating his chest on Twitter and threatening Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani.

   Mr Trump leapt on Mr Rouhani’s warning that “war with Iran is the mother of all wars” with an all-caps rant: “NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE.”

   In the past, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un was always a willing opponent on the international stage, a foil Mr Trump could turn to whenever he needed to shift the narrative away from his problems at home.

   Pyongyang memorably responded by branding him a “mentally deranged US dotard” after he had mocked Mr Kim, calling the dictator a “rocket man” over his nuclear ambitions. China and Russia were forced to intervene and urge both parties to cool their rhetoric. All of which neatly pulled focus from domestic press hostility.

   To an extent, Mr Trump's canny media management ploy has worked again this time. We are talking about it right now, after all, and among the slew of insults beneath the president’s initial tweet are plenty of Twitter users sincerely debating the issue he raised.

2. What is the situation in South Africa?

   While Mr Trump’s sincerity about the apparent persecution of white farmers in South Africa might be open to question, particularly because of the sudden nature of his interest, the issue is a serious concern for many.

   Post-Apartheid South Africa is still rife with racial tension and there is a popular view that the redistribution of land to those historically dispossessed is an important step on the road to reconciliation, allowing the country to move on and heal the wounds of racist colonial rule.

   According to official data, white South Africans account for just 8.4 per cent of the country’s population but own 23.6 per cent of the land, a fact that is especially damning given that black landowners account for just 1.2 per cent of the total and the majority of corporate-held land is operated by white executives, putting the white-owned total closer to 73 per cent.

   Political parties like the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) advocate land seizures and redistribution and its leader, Julius Malema, has said the compensatory measure is needed to “teach whites a lesson” - a sentiment that has been roundly criticised as inflammatory hate speech.

   Mbuyiseni Ndlozi, the EFF’s national spokesman, has similarly stated that white farmers, descended from Dutch and English colonial invaders, “have taken [the land] through a violent crime against humanity”.

   Acts of violence have been carried out against white farmers for years, which many right-wing parties around the world have drawn attention to as examples of “white genocide” and “ethnic cleansing”. But the government of president Cyril Ramaphosa insists such crimes are part of the wider social problems facing law and order in South Africa and are not a racial matter. The country's national murder rate is currently 34.1 per 100,000 citizens, according to the South African Police Service.

   White rights groups disagree with Mr Ramaphosa. AfriForum, for one, claimed there were 90 recorded attacks on Caucasian homesteaders in the first three months of 2018 alone, a rate of one every five days.

   It’s worth noting this is extremely high compared with police figures, which report 47 murders and 638 attacks on farm owners (race not specified) in 2017/18. That compares with a high of 140 killings and 1,069 attacks in 2001-02.

   Joe Wallen, reporting for The Independent earlier this year, met with a number of white victims to record their first-hand accounts of the assaults, rapes, torture, home invasions and burglaries they had suffered in isolated rural areas.

   “What is happening to us is torture, it is slaughter, it is brutal – it is revenge. The world doesn’t know what is happening in South Africa,” said Gabriel Stols, whose younger brother Kyle was gunned down by assailants.

   AfriForum argue that a motion President Ramaphosa’s government is considering whether to allow the state to expropriate farmland without paying compensation implicitly encourages violence and the vengeful targeting of white South Africans. They suggest Mr Ramaphosa’s party, the African National Congress (ANC), is toying with the issue to win favour with the EFF with an election due next year.

   Mr Ramaphosa has denied the ANC condones violent land grabs and pointed to the toxic example of Zimbabwe, where similar acts were carried out under Robert Mugabe and led to “anarchy”.

3. Why is the right so concerned with the issue?

   Quite why Fox News chose this precise moment - when all of their major rivals were covering the fallout from the Manafort and Cohen trials in Virginia and New York - to suddenly push a story on this long-running issue, is an interesting question.

   Mr Trump is known to be a keen viewer of the channel, particularly their morning show Fox and Friends, and its output is widely understood to influence his thinking. He is even rumoured to speak with Fox’s star anchor, Sean Hannity, on a nightly basis.

   Politically, the president ordering his secretary of state, former CIA director Mike Pompeo, to investigate the issue allows him to signal to his core white nationalist support base that he is committed to fighting for white rights.

   The situation in South Africa, as the international far-right see it, is a nightmare scenario of murder and colonial revenge being played out on a national scale, threatening the very stability of post-Apartheid South African society, with frightening ramifications for the wider world.

   In truth, though violence is a tragic reality of life there, especially in isolated and impoverished rural areas, there is little evidence to support the fear that this is part of a systematic bid to target Boers on the part of vengeful black South Africans.

   The issue nevertheless remains an obsession among certain right-wing pundits. Controversy-courting columnist Katie Hopkins got herself banned from South Africa in February this year after visit to shoot a documentary on the “genocide”, barred from returning because of her “strong racist views”.

   Several online petitions in the UK are calling for the British government to offer refugee status to Boers facing persecution.

   Australia’s interior minister, Peter Dutton, actually did so, in fantastically crass fashion, causing uproar in March by offering Boers fast-tracked visas because, he said, they require deliverance from “the horrific circumstances they face… from a civilised country like ours”.

   It will be interesting to see how far Mr Trump is prepared to interest himself in the matter.

   Perhaps it depends on what else Mr Mueller might dig out of Washington’s wastepaper baskets.