Donald Trump’s Executive Order (EO) on ‘Addressing Egregious Actions of the Republic of South Africa’ (07/02/2025) is not a new development but a continuation of racist United States policies implanted on South Africa dating back decades. America is and has remained the godfather of oppression of Africans, Indigenous People and others within its borders, and these heinous policies were exported to South Africa to strengthen subjugation and ‘apartness’. Therefore, Trump’s EO is not an anomaly but a reflection of embedded patterns in US foreign policy regarding global racial discrimination and economic dominance.
When F.W. de Klerk, the last apartheid president, denied apartheid’s classification as a crime against humanity, many South Africans fell into debate instead of examining the deeper implications of his denialism. De Klerk’s statements were not mere rhetoric: they underscored the reality that South Africa’s post-apartheid democracy lacked global protection, just as apartheid had been supported internationally by key Western powers. Trump’s threats on South Africa exemplify Western attitudes on the eradication of apartheid residue and maintenance of the status quo.
The UN declared “apartheid a crime against humanity” in 1966. Also, they adopted the 1973 resolution on Suppression and Punishment of the Apartheid Crime meant little in the bigger scheme of things. The white races in Western Europe, North America and elsewhere cared less about what had happened in South Africa. The mythical West opposed all resolutions on apartheid and decolonisation in the General Assembly. Its UN Security Council permanent members did all they could to prevent South Africa’s expulsion from UN membership, but the UNGA suspension prevailed in 1974.
The De Klerk Foundation’s assertion that the UN’s classification of apartheid was a conspiracy by the Soviet Union and the ANC reflects how South African white communities have historically leveraged international networks of white solidarity. Even decades after apartheid’s official end, groups like AfriForum have successfully lobbied for positions within international bodies like the UN, where they perpetuate a narrative of white victimhood under the blacks in South Africa. This narrative is used to challenge affirmative measures, such as land reform, as well as to push back against international condemnation of past apartheid-era injustices. Thus, civilisational illogic does not permit pagans to rule the superior race, and this largely frames Trump’s view of the world.
AfriForum’s role in the international arena is crucial in understanding Trump’s EO. The group, with its ‘special consultative status’ at the UN, has used this platform to push for policies that protect white minority interests. AfriForum’s CEO, Ernst Roets, has stated that the group intends to influence global discourse on issues such as land expropriation, farm murders and minority rights. This status, granted just two years after de Klerk dismissed apartheid as a crime, reflects the ongoing international validation of apartheid-era ideologies, culminating in Trump’s support for AfriForum’s causes.
The decision to grant apartheid denialists a seat in the UN seems to vindicate Roets and De Klerk. AfriForum also flirted with the idea of reporting South Africa to Washington: a new opportunity presented itself with the installation of a bigoted and openly racist Trump administration in early 2025. Trump’s EO on South Africa is an outcome of not just AfriForum actions as it always claimed, but the embedded racist Anglo-Saxon policy on promoting white crimes in South Africa and elsewhere, including in Israel.
This article argues that the white racist groups such as AfriForum are succeeding in running parallel state in South Africa along the lines of apartheid. The only difference from the apartheid rule is that the new arrangement makes the actions of white supremacists legal, and these now enjoy support of the so-called international community. Trump’s comments and policies demonstrate a pattern of hostility toward post-apartheid South Africa and portray the country as a site of anti-white persecution. This is not at all surprising as history does not leave blank pages.
South Africa’s Poor White Problem Re-Visited
The United States’ influence on South Africa’s apartheid system is well-documented. Its racist policies nurtured colonial apartheid in South Africa, beginning with the exportation of its native reserves and Jim Crow policies, which relegated its indigenous and Black populations to second-class status. The creation of Bantustans and racial discrimination in South Africa, resembling Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, are direct outcomes of American efforts to uphold white dominance both domestically and internationally.
Nevertheless, a document titled The Poor White Problem in South Africa: Report of the Carnegie Commission (1932), which investigated poverty among white South Africans, “made recommendations about segregation that some have argued would later serve as a blueprint for apartheid.” This initiative demonstrates that global white solidarity has long been a means to position European settler communities above native populations in South Africa. The illogical rationale behind this is rooted in the belief that poverty is a condition reserved solely for natives. Apartheid was created abroad but perfected in South Africa.
Roets and De Klerk’s ideas about apartheid were correct. Apartheid was never a crime in the eyes of Europeans and Americans. In Waste of a White Skin: The Carnegie Corporation and the Racial Logic of White Vulnerability, Tiffany Willoughby-Herard reasons that the attitudes of the white race in South Africa fall within a continuum of “Anglo-Saxon solidarity in the British colonies and dominions.” It was also clear how the so-called global community responded to Zimbabwe’s land reform programme. Trump’s EO adds to this colonial framework that treats world’s dark skinned populations as “shit holes”.
In short, global whiteness perpetuates triumphalism and uncaring attitudes in places such as South Africa. Global whiteness also “normalise[d] the legal practice of white immigration to places where white skin counted for access to legally protected affirmative action for whites.” Whites in South Africa are products of the global white nationalisms, which protect rampant Afrikaner nationalism at all times. Washington’s handling of the South African legislation on land expropriation follows this thinking, which must now be fiercely resisted and rejected.
South Africa is “a white man’s country”
Trump’s EO is a significant victory for AfriForum and South Africa’s white minority, but it also reveals deeper patterns of global white supremacy. The end of apartheid was not so much about ending internal slavery and oppression of Africans, but it was about testing how far the post-WWII global could go. Now that the American domination is under pressure, the seemingly erratic behaviour does not come as a great surprise.
Starting with a neoliberal constitution which was less interested in social redress and to restore the dignity of the Africans who had been under the heavy boot of Europeans for over four centuries, the writing was on the wall that the ‘international community’ did not care about the plight of the black majority in South Africa. Legal scholars like Mogobe Ramose and Joel Modiri point out that the constitution is a manifestation of the multi-faced injustice of conquest in an unjust war perpetrated against Indigenous peoples.
Former Zimbabwean ambassador to the US, Machivenyika Mapuranga, once commented that South Africa, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Zimbabwe were initially identified as places for white settlement overseas. Mapuranga adds that these territories are referred to as “white man’s country.” Colonialists such as Cecil John Rhodes and Lord Salisbury were adamant in their belief that these countries were for the British and the broader white race.
American historian Carroll Quigley suggests that Rhodes, for example, even drafted wills where he “left his fortune to form a secret society, which was to devote itself to the preservation and expansion of the British Empire.” So much was done to consolidate British power and Anglo-Saxon racist lineage in the former colonies. The policy of ‘whitening’ these selected territories was predicated on two critical pillars. First, the British settlers who went to these countries would eventually outnumber the Africans. The aim was to have whites as large majorities in these countries.
Mapuranga argues that this policy was well on its way to success in South Africa and Zimbabwe. The ratio between the natives and Europeans drastically changed over the years in favour of the settler communities. For example, the ratio in South Africa is presently around 1:10 as opposed to 1:19,000 about three centuries ago. In Zimbabwe, the ratio was 1:17,000 in 1894, dropping to about 1:13. Many years later, the settler control is on economic dominance as a remnant of the British empire.
Second, the second pillar had to do with the land alienation, and this entailed forced removal of Africans from their lands to the native reserves. For example, the Land Act of 1913 resulted in an unfair allocation of land where Africans settled in as little as 13% of the country’s surface. These were later granted self-rule as homelands, which controlled largely non-arable lands. In the long run, the Africans in South Africa would depend on food produced in white owned farms. Today, the white farmers boast that they feed Africans since they own the means of production and agriculture.
Zimbabwe had a similar arrangement, with whites owning most of the land and Africans residing in reserves. Unfortunately, independence in 1980 did not alter land ownership as Britain insisted on compensating white landowners, mirroring South Africa’s ‘willing seller, willing buyer’ policy. When the government disrupted white dominance through land reform, Zimbabwe faced severe economic sanctions, showing the persistent grip of colonial interests. Harare’s USD 3.4 billion compensation to white farmers underscores the pressures to reverse land redistribution, suggesting that lifting sanctions remains contingent on restoring economic privileges to British descendants. Like Congo under Leopold, Zimbabwe’s independence was constrained by the Lancaster Agreement, ensuring continued white economic control despite formal African rule.
South Africa’s situation is uniquely complex, with Africa’s largest European settler population. Besides Zimbabwe, other territories with significant European communities included Angola, Mozambique, Namibia and Algeria, where French colonial aggression led to brutal atrocities and chaos. In South Africa, the transition was managed to prevent full-scale conflict, but the “peaceful settlement” of apartheid ultimately preserved white economic dominance. Whites retained their ill-gotten wealth, while Africans remained dispossessed. Today’s white attitudes stem from this victory—one that left the African majority “politically free” but significantly economically marginalised.
Colonial South Africa and the ‘world community’
Former president Thabo Mbeki aptly described South Africa as one nation with two economies. AfriForum and similar groups seek to preserve this imbalance by portraying themselves as victims in a system designed to uphold white privilege. Given that colonial South Africa—still very much intact—holds a special status in the global racial hierarchy, AfriForum’s recognition at the UN is unsurprising. Few realise that Jan Smuts was present at the League of Nations’ founding in 1918, and even fewer understand the significance of his role as leader of a newly established white state, aligned with Cecil Rhodes’ vision of entrenching white dominance in British colonies.
Quigley notes that Rhodes sought to advance British interests and shape an Anglo-Saxon-dominated world order, including his belief in reincorporating the US under British rule. Around 1891, he and Smuts joined a secret society with figures like Lord Milner and Lord Selborne, which Quigley describes as “one of the most important forces in the formulation and execution of British imperial and foreign policy.” This group’s key achievements included orchestrating the Boer War (1899–1902), establishing the Rhodes Scholarship, unifying South Africa (1906–1910) and promoting the ‘British Commonwealth of Nations’, influencing the creation of the League of Nations in 1918.
The current political manoeuvrings involving Trump and South Africa continue Rhodes’ legacy of protecting and promoting Anglo-Saxon interests, particularly in South Africa as a ‘white man’s country’. This means that the ‘international community’ must confront its complicity in perpetuating racial hierarchies. Trump’s EO and other imperialist conquests in Greenland and Canada provide a unique opportunity to elevate the plight of the world’s subalterns under multiple layers of oppression.
Siya yi banga le economy!
Siyabonga Hadebe is a PhD candidate in international economic law and a labour market expert based in Geneva.
