By Enyichukwu Enemanna
Hundreds of white South Africans on Saturday held a solidarity walk in support of the US President, Donald Trump, who recently signed an executive order stopping financial aid to the southern African country over a land administration law signed by a black President, Cyril Ramaphosa.
They are predominantly from the Afrikaner community, which was Trump’s target in the executive order.
The demonstrators, carrying placards with various inscriptions, including “Thank God for President Trump”, gathered at the US Embassy in Pretoria to claim they are victims of racism by their own government.
They also displayed other messages criticising what they say are racist laws instituted by the South African government that discriminate against the white minority.
The US leader, in the executive order, claimed that South Africa’s Afrikaners, historically believed to be descendants of mainly Dutch colonial settlers, were being targeted by the land administration law that allows the government to expropriate private land.
However, South African authorities say the new law is not tied to race, arguing that President Trump’s claims about the country and the law are full of misinformation and distortions.
Trump accused Pretoria of expropriating land from Afrikaners, whom the order referred to as “racially disfavoured landowners”, but Ramaphosa insists no land has been taken under the law. Trump also announced a plan to offer Afrikaners refugee status in the US. They are only one part of South Africa’s white minority.
Addressing parliament last week, Ramaphosa stated that the forced removal of any people from their land would never be allowed in South Africa again, after millions of black people were dispossessed of property under the apartheid system of white minority rule and hundreds of years of colonialism before that.
“The people of this country know the pain of forced removals,” Ramaphosa said. He emphasised that the land law does not allow any arbitrary taking of land and only applies to land that can be redistributed for the public good.
The Trump administration’s criticism and punishment of South Africa have heightened a long-standing dilemma in the country over efforts to address the injustices of centuries of white minority rule that oppressed the black majority.
According to the government, the land law aims to fairly address the inequality in which the majority of farmland in South Africa is owned by whites, even though they make up just 7% of the country’s population.
An ally of Trump, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who was born and raised in South Africa, has also criticised the country’s government and claimed it has been anti-white for years, although some have questioned his motivations.
He recently failed to obtain a licence for his Starlink satellite internet service in South Africa because it does not meet the country’s affirmative action criteria.
