South Africa resists the United States
What's behind the accusations coming from Trump and Musk against Pretoria
Dear readers,
As you know too well, the Trump-Musk duo sets into the oval office, the US’s foreign policy gets uglier by the day.
Nigeria, Tanzania and Uganda will be the countries hardest hit by the withdrawal of US aid: these three countries had received more than $300 million in aid by 2023.
An example: In Uganda, with US AID suspended, the authorities have had to ask health workers to do voluntary work… In the wake of the Trump administration's decision to suspend US foreign aid for 90 days, the Ugandan Ministry of Health has proposed that employees in the private funding sector work “in a spirit of patriotism, as volunteers”, while negotiations with Washington take place.
The top French-speaking recipient of US foreign aid is the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), with nearly a billion dollars, half of which is spent on humanitarian aid. This includes emergency food aid programmes, with support for the World Food Programme, for example, and programmes to combat malaria and HIV-AIDS.
With a budget of more than $17 billion by 2025, and with a bleak humanitarian crisis in the east, due to the conflict led by the rebels from the M23 group, the government will need this aid, according to Jacques Mukena, a governance and economics specialist at the Congolese institute Ebuteli. By the end of January, nearly a million people had been forcibly displaced by the conflict in the Goma region.
The Sahelian countries will also be affected: Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso were among the biggest recipients of USAID funding. By 2024, these three countries alone had received more than $827 million. This was enough to fund essential programmes such as food distribution, healthcare, agricultural development and support for displaced populations. A whole network of local aid is in danger of drying up, which will no doubt have a further negative impact on the Sahelian states in their fight against poverty and insecurity.
The decision is also causing concern among those involved in the fight against AIDS, to which the United States is the world's biggest contributor. These concerns have not been allayed by the exemptions announced by the new US administration regarding the provision of treatment and screening.
Another example: in Côte d'Ivoire, the Indigo NGO, committed to promoting inclusive and participatory dialogue, has been forced to suspend its activities, according out the Afrik.com website. Its staff are now technically unemployed.
In 2024, USAID committed $115 million in aid to Côte d'Ivoire. 20 million of this was earmarked for the ‘Resilience for Peace’ project. The freezing of these funds means not only the cessation of vital projects, but also a weakening of social cohesion in the most vulnerable regions.
The Danish Refugee Council is now planning to lay off around 2,000 staff members because of Trump’s suspension of US aid funding, three staff members told The New Humanitarian.
And in the Gambia, USAID has been at the heart of crucial development efforts in providing legal identity to exiled communities or in strengthening governance and civic engagement…
After cutting funds to aid and imposing trade tarifs on partners, after threatening to push 2 millions people out of Gaza and let Russia keep Ukrainian territories, Musk’s influence is getting more obvious in one case: South Africa.
The duo is now lying about the state of discrimination in the rainbow nation: while the economy still favours largely the white minority (less than 8 percent of the population, owning the vast majority of the land), Trump pretends that the South African government discriminates against them… He has even offer Afrikaners to get refugee status in the USA.
Why? Here is the whole story.
South Africa units against Trump’s ‘disinformation'
In South Africa, the government and all the political parties are now united in their opposition to Donald Trump. The American president has announced a freeze on all aid from his country, accusing Pretoria of mistreating its white minority in a recent law on expropriation.
The government and all the political parties in South Africa are now regrouping along their opposition to Donald Trump. The American president has announced a freeze on all aid from his country, accusing Pretoria of mistreating its white minority with a recent law on expropriation. South Africa's President denounces 'propaganda'.
US President Donald Trump decided to freeze financial aid to South Africa and signed an executive order on 7 February.
"The Republic of South Africa recently enacted Expropriation Act 13 of 2024 to enable the government of South Africa to seize ethnic minority Afrikaners’ agricultural property without compensation," his statement published by the White House reads.
Trump added that the US would show support to white South Africans who are, according to him, "disadvantaged" by this land reform in the making in the African nation.
"As long as South Africa continues these unjust and immoral practices that harm our Nation, the statement continues, (a) the United States shall not provide aid or assistance to South Africa; and (b) the United States shall promote the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation."
What’s in the Expropriation Act
The land act was signed in Pretoria last month by President Ramaphosa, to redress land inequalities that persist more than three decades after the end of white minority rule.
Called the Expropriation Act, it has been written to support the state in taking back land that’s in the public interest, with agreement of the current private landlords, to address disparities in ownership over decades.
South Africa’s government is defending this reform as a means to rectify the injustices of the apartheid and colonial times.
Most farmland in South Africa is still owned by white people three decades after the end of apartheid. White farmers own three quarters of South Africa's privately held land, while white people make up 7 percent of the population of 63 million, according to data from 2022.
Afrikaners make up a small proportion of that group, with no exact data on their number. They are descendants of European colonial settlers who arrived from the 17th century, mostly from Holland and France. Other white people have come to South Africa since and gained more land than the natives over the years.
This situation is a legacy of a policy of expropriating land from the black population that endured during apartheid and the colonial period before it.
Pretoria also is pointing out that no expropriations have yet taken place under the law.
"The country and its agricultural sector is doing robustly well in terms of the Expropriation Act," according to economist Wandile Sihlobo.
"It does not target particular people or a certain group of individuals. Property rights are still protected. I think President Trump's statements are very divisive and not representative of what's happening in South Africa," the Chief Economist of the Agricultural Business Chamber of South Africa added.
Trump's persistently attacking South Africa
The Trump administration says the land expropriation law South Africa recently passed is “blatantly” discriminatory against Afrikaners.
Trump added that the South African government was allowing violent attacks against Afrikaner farming communities.
“South Africa is confiscating land, and treating certain classes of people VERY BADLY,” he wrote on his own network, Truth Social, on Sunday. “The United States won’t stand for it, we will act.”
Trump also cited Pretoria's genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice as a reason to cut the aid.
His ally Elon Musk, who was born in apartheid-era South Africa, has also accused Ramaphosa's government of having "openly racist ownership laws".
In Pretoria, parties are now uniting against Trump
In response to Trump's attack, the South African president wants to launch a major international campaign to clarify his policy.
"The work that we do and what we stand for does need to be explained, especially to our trading partners," President Cyril Ramaphosa said.
He wants to send delegations to several capitals, including Washington, to set the record straight on the expropriation law.
Ramaphosa had said in a national address on Thursday his country would not be "bullied" by the United States.
The government in South Africa condemned a "campaign of misinformation" from Trump from Saturday.
"We are concerned by what seems to be a campaign of misinformation and propaganda aimed at misrepresenting our great nation," the government said.
Trump's claims are disputed not only by the South African government but by most political parties in the country now.
The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), led by Julius Malema, accused Musk of being behind Trump's stance, notably in a post on Musk's social media network, X.
On Monday, the party of former president Jacob Zuma, MK, filed a treason complaint against the group AfriForum, a pressure group championing the white Afrikaner minority in South Africa, which raised a complaint saying that they are being persecuted.
The MK party is accusing AfriForum in a criminal complaint of lobbying against the law in US media and political circles, adding the group is spreading misinformation to influence Trump.
Afriforum expressed its "great appreciation" to Trump on Saturday, while stressing that Africaners' place was in their home country.
Meanwhile, even the mostly white-led Democratic Alliance (DA) - top coalition partner in Ramaphosa's unity government - joined the call against Trump…
The party had said on Monday that it had filed a court challenge to the act, calling it unconstitutional. But the party has since decided to support Ramaphosa's plan to send an envoy to the US, and criticised Trump's remarks.
One quote to remember: South Africa's foreign ministry said that, "It is ironic that the executive order makes provision for refugee status in the US for a group in South Africa that remains amongst the most economically privileged, while vulnerable people in the US from other parts of the world are being deported and denied asylum despite real hardship."
Musk’s white-supremacist views resurface, and seduce Trump
As even CNN puts it, “South Africa does have a history of racist land inequality. Just not in the way Trump and Musk are portraying”.
“Apartheid, dismantled in the 1990s, left a deep-seeded legacy of land inequality after centuries of policies pushed non-White South Africans off the land to the benefit of White people. An act in 1913 limited Black ownership to just 7% of the land, later revised to 13%.
Now, more than 100 years later, Black people make up 81% of South Africa’s population of 63 million, yet only own 4% of private land, according to a government land audit conducted in 2017.”
So, Trump is lying… Once more. But he might have never addressed such a sacred part of the history of the decolonial movements if it was not for his newfound ally, Musk, whose father, Errol, is a white South African mine-owner, businessman and politician.
Elon’s maternal grandfather, Joshua Norman Haldeman, a Canadian chiropractor and political activist who moved to South Africa in the early days of formalised apartheid, publicly expressed racist, anti-Semitic, and anti-democratic views at many point through the course of his life, also promoting a number of conspiracy theories, and publicly supporting South Africa's apartheid system. The family even learned Afrikaans, spoken by the descendants of Dutch settlers in SA.
Here is more on this character, in this piece from September 2023 written by Joshua Benton in The Atlantic:
Elon Musk’s Anti-Semitic, Apartheid-Loving Grandfather
“The billionaire has described his grandfather as a risk-taking adventurer. A closer read of history reveals something much darker.”
Haldeman believed that apartheid South Africa was destined to lead “White Christian Civilisation” in its fight against the “International Conspiracy” of Jewish bankers and the “hordes of Coloured people” they controlled.
Elon Musk has for long hated his father, a violent man who only supported him reluctantly in his ventures, but has only expressed admiration for his maternal grandfather, though he died when Elon was only two years old...
Musk’s grandfather spelled out his beliefs most clearly in a 1960 self-published book with the weighty title The International Conspiracy to Establish a World Dictatorship and the Menace to South Africa, first reported by Jill Lepore in The New Yorker.
Now, the world’s richest man, a member of Trump’s inner circle, has described his birth nation as having “racist ownership laws,” accusing its government of doing too little to stop what he has referred to as a “genocide” against white farmers…
If you need more:
The South African Oligarchs Surrounding Trump, from Elon Musk to Peter Thiel - Democracy Now
In such levels of chaos, this is impressive acts from the South African government, once again courageously voicing necessary resistance against fascism from the world’s most powerful, from Israel’s PM Benjamin Netanyahu (more on this here in a previous post) to Donald Trump and his (for now, and for how long?) favourite billionaire.
As a reminder that the fight against disinformation ins’t over, and that the history of decolonisation matters more than ever, you can check my article on the ‘After the End’ exhibition I mentioned earlier in January, here:
Post-colonial artists reimagine the future in new Pompidou exhibition in Metz
After The End is an exhibition at the Pompidou Centre in Metz, showcasing artists from the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, and other post-colonial regions. Through their work, these artists from former colonies seek to present a fresh perspective on the world, offering new ways of imagining the future and inspiration for navigating today’s multiple crises.
Issued on: 08/02/2025
By: Melissa Chemam
Bringing together the work of 40 international artists, After the End - Cartographies for Another Time seeks to question Western narratives rooted in old colonial systems.
To do this, it offers stories that are new or ancestral, popular or modern, while promoting a better appreciation of the world's diversity.
The exhibition is curated by the Spanish art historian Manuel Borja-Villel and is organised around artists who explore the diaspora and question our so-called modernity, with the aim of imagining "other worlds beyond the end of time, beyond our own time," as the team describes it, while highlighting the importance of communities.
He wanted to show western audiences that they live in terror of what is outside their zone of experience, things that are designated as 'other'.
"We need somehow to liberate our frame of thinking. And the only way to liberate ourselves of our way of thinking is together with others. So this is more or less what we are proposing here in this exhibition," he said.
Connecting different parts of world history, and different sides of the globe, the show aims to demonstrate that all these parts are related, and that the border is a colonial structure.
Read on from here: https://www.rfi.fr/en/culture/20250208-post-colonial-artists-reimagine-the-future-in-new-pompidou-exhibition-in-metz
Thanks for reading.
Stay strong.
Focus on the little beauties brought by each day, and stay informed, prepared, kind, calm and humanly intelligent, the only way to beat the destructive powers we currently face.
All the best wishes from me,
melissa
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Melissa Chemam
Journalist, Podcaster & Writer
Blog: https://melissa-on-the-road.blogspot.com/
YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@MelissaChemam
The fight for freedom gets harder and harder, but at least they voice the reality of the situation. South Africa is yet another test of T&M ambitions for oppressive world domination. All eyes are on South Africa.