The latest Oval Office danse macabre saw President Donald Trump accuse South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa of some sort of complicity in genocide against white farmers. “This is sort of the opposite of Apartheid,” the American president claimed on Wednesday.
The charge misses both the target and the issue. Trump is wrong in saying there is an organised genocide of white farmers in South Africa; the real problem is the wilful sacrifice of rural communities to the interests of racial ideology, a subtext to nearly everything that has occurred in South Africa since its origin.
Before the political transition in 1994, reservist army units — styled commandos in the Boer tradition, supported by a sophisticated military-area radio network and helicopter back-up — ensured stability and security in rural communities, black and white alike. As a 17-year-old conscript, I had tangential experience of the system’s workings through its rapid-response teams.
One of the first things the ANC government did when it came to power was to scrap this system. It was concerned it was too white and that it might become a basis for “counter-revolution”, despite the fact that the South African Defence Force had been the ultimate guarantor of the country’s peaceful political transition.
The state, typically, failed to replace the commandos with effective policing. Enter rural warlords, private security forces, and both black and white vigilantes, each contributing to a spiral of rural violence and counter-violence. This long trail of state failure and a mounting body count of the innocent was grist to Trump’s mill, culminating on Wednesday in the bizarre show-and-tell in the Oval Office during which Trump displayed video clips of South African opposition figures calling on supporters to “Kill The Farmer, Kill the Boer”, an old struggle chant from yesteryear, together with images of a symbolic arcade of wooden crosses representing the dead farmers.
In reality, such firebrands made up 24.1% of the vote in last year’s election, and the number of white farmers killed in the last 10 years is a fraction of the total number of South Africans slaughtered in the same period, most of them black. This is hardly compelling evidence of mass support for genocide, let alone state complicity, but still worrying in the sense that the ANC has done little to challenge the provocateurs or prosecute them for incitement, a point made by Trump to an unsettled Ramaphosa.
But Trump’s J’Accuse largely missed the mark. His real target should have been the ANC’s long-standing policy of racial preferment in employment, public tenders, study opportunities and government work. This self-styled policy of Black Economic Empowerment (BEE), or, as it is less generously known by its detractors, Black Extortion and Embezzlement, has seen an unrestrained flow of wealth and opportunity from the traditional wealth-creating and -holding classes into a new elite of conspicuous wealth consumers and destroyers. Nearly 150 new pieces of legislation are in the Statutes directly or indirectly based on racial profiling and preferencing in the conduct of state and private business.
The consequences for economic growth have been catastrophic. The country’s historic skills base has been either marginalised or expatriated on racial grounds, with the failing state educational and training system unable to produce substitutes, let alone replace institutional memory. Young white people who were not even born during Apartheid are penalised for the sins of their fathers, two-thirds of whom in any case voted in a referendum in 1992 to surrender power to black South Africans.
Under the guise of “empowerment” and the other weasel word, “transformation”, has arisen endemic corruption, malfeasance and incompetence. Worse, even as Ramaphosa pleads with Trump to retain or even increase American investment in South Africa, his government is doubling down on the very policies that repel the Trump administration and deter investment. It plans to employ 50 more commissars of race-based employment, and now prescribes race quotas in various sectors irrespective of skills availability. Not even Ramaphosa’s famed skills in the art of obfuscation will get him out of that inescapable contradiction.
Recently, my local civic organisation asked black officials from the municipal electricity department about 40% vacancies in departmental staff. This was at a time when power infrastructure and supply were literally collapsing around us. “Do you know of 12 qualified and experienced young black women engineers available for immediate employment?” one demanded. We admitted we did not. “Well neither do we. And until we conjure them up, we cannot fill the posts.”
This insane race- and gender-based ideology would have been an infinitely more credible subject for Trump’s ambush. He might even have swotted up on a bit of recent South African history.
“This insane race- and gender-based ideology would have been an infinitely more credible subject for Trump’s ambush.”
In 1977, as Apartheid began to wane, the US government adopted the “Sullivan Principles”, which effectively compelled US companies doing business in South Africa to ignore the race-based employment laws of the Apartheid government. They did, while the Afrikaner government turned a blind eye. As a freshman journalist in the Eastern Cape, I reported on the flowering of the trade union movements in plants such as Ford, General Motors and Goodyear. Later, together with civic organisations and the churches, they would provide the impetus for the peaceful political revolution of 1994. Meanwhile, the ANC virtue-postured in exile and waged a truly pathetic “armed struggle” long on rhetoric but with painfully few military successes.
Now it appears the Sullivan Principles may be returning to the White House. By a supreme twist of historic irony, just as the US government once enjoined US companies doing business in South Africa to stop discriminating against black people, it may now instruct them to stop penalising white people. And, once they comply, the door is open for a wholesale abrogation of race-based laws by employers. It happened half a century ago; it could happen again.
The Bakongo tribe of Angola fashion wooden fetishes to protect the family; nails and bits of steel are driven into the wood for every familial tragedy to ward off malign spirits. And the navel of each fetish boasts a mirror to deflect malign forces. Those bizarre moments in the Oval Office this week may be regarded as South Africa’s Bakongo moment.
With the true skill of the impresario, Trump transformed South Africa’s complex issues and racial passions into simple binaries and, like the Bakongo’s mirror, reflected its malign forces. Before the world and to South Africans themselves, Trump displayed in the starkest terms the schism between the pre-modern and racist extremists of the video clips and the moderates represented by Ramaphosa’s Government of National Unity (GNU) — an arrangement forced unwillingly on him by his loss of an outright majority in last year’s election.
Here, too, was glimpsed the subtle balance of racial power in South Africa that lies hidden behind the diversionary rhetoric and the destructive race-based policies of the ruling party. It was not by chance that the majority of the South African delegation that Ramaphosa chose to bring to Washington was white. Nor that the most insightful interjection during the tableau was by John Steenhuisen, white leader of the liberal official opposition, who said the reason why his party was in the GNU, the reason why they needed US investment, was to keep out of power “the rabble” just seen on the video clips.
Trump giving Ramaphosa the Zelensky treatment has thus had an outcome, which was either intentional, if you see Trump as a Machiavellian figure, or unintentional, if you see him as a clown. Either way, it has affirmed the importance of the white minority in underpinning South Africa’s economy, bolstering Ramaphosa’s fragile GNU, and mediating between the ANC and international players — roles which the ANC’s ideologists have refused to acknowledge. It is still early days, but perhaps Trump’s theatre will force an ANC review of the policies that have enchained South Africa’s economy and dramatically interrupted the country’s long march to modernity for far too long.
