The US president has claimed the South African government is seizing land from white farmers. The reality is much more mundane, writes Alex Dyzenhaus.
US President Donald Trump has issued an executive order that accuses the South African government of “disproportionate violence” and land seizures from the country’s white minority. The order suspends all aid to the country and offers Afrikaans-speaking white South Africans asylum in the United States. A subsequent ‘Fact’ Sheet containing many vague and dubious claims clarified that Trump believed that “the recent Expropriation Act enables the government of South Africa to seize ethnic minority descendants of settler groups’ agricultural property without compensation”. However, the new Expropriation Act does not provide for race-based land seizures, and it does not persecute white South Africans.
Between 1913 and the end of Apartheid, the colonial and Apartheid governments seized Black-owned land and forbade Black South Africans from owning land in areas designated for white settlement. Laws confined the non-white population – who made up over 80 per cent of the population – to just 13 per cent of the country’s land. In the post-1994 democratic era, South Africa has struggled with its promise to redistribute land to address this inequality.
Since the 1990s, the post-Apartheid government has adopted a land reform program on the principle of “willing buyer, willing seller”. The existing landholder must agree to the sale of their land, and they are afforded fair compensation. But progress has been slow, and many have called for more expropriative measures where the state can either pay for land without the willingness of the seller or compensate them at a below-market rate. The most radical of these calls is for “expropriation without compensation,” which would involve the seizure of lands without any compensation for the landholder.
Calls for expropriative land reform within South Africa do exist and have been brought before parliament, albeit unsuccessfully. Anyone who has read the Expropriation Act can see that it does not lay the groundwork for uncompensated expropriation. Instead, the Act updates the 1975 Apartheid-era Expropriation Act for the legislation to be better able to respond to problems of today, rather than 50 years ago.
The new Act begins by outlining the 1994 constitutional provision on protecting property rights, thereby bringing Apartheid-era legislation into the new constitutional order. It also has a raft of new additions, including measures for compensating unregistered rights-holders on expropriated land (e.g. customary rights holders on traditional land or farm dwellers) and has provisions to combat land speculation. Most countries have state expropriation provisions as they are crucial to state infrastructure projects, and the 2025 Expropriation Act should be read as an instance of a very normal piece of legislation.
The main critique of the Act from groups that represent white farmers is that it lays the groundwork for uncompensated expropriation for land reform by allowing public interest as a ground for expropriation. The Act also has a provision for zero-rand compensation during expropriation. In other words, there are instances where the state can expropriate without compensation. However, the fears that this is seizure in disguise are overblown. The conditions that the act outlines for zero-rand compensation are so stringent that they seem unlikely to apply to productive farmland. For zero-rand expropriation, the land in question must be entirely unproductive, abandoned, held for pure speculation purposes, or indebted to the state for more than its market value (e.g. through unpaid rates).
Most of the Act lays out robust safeguards for landholders that guarantee fair compensation and an expropriation process that follows the rule of law with recourse to the court system for a landholder. What the Act might do is provide leverage to the state when it comes to dealing with landholders who are holding up public works or specific land reform projects by overvaluing their land.
The Expropriation Act should not be seen as a politically driven or racially targeted move. It is more focused on making public infrastructure projects more feasible, whether purchasing land for the construction of a power line or for assisting emerging Black farmers access land. There are concerns about how the Act may be used by corrupt local municipalities when it comes to expropriating captured urban properties or legalistic concerns about contradictions in provisions and timelines within the Act, but these do not imply the expropriation of rural farmland.
Trump’s executive order is disconnected from the reality of rural life in South Africa. Trump’s supporters have evoked claims of a “white genocide” due to rural violence exacted on white farmers. However, there is a gulf in how the global right presents the plight of white farmers in South Africa and what those farmers report on the ground. Instead of believing rural crime is a symptom of “white genocide,” white farmers have reported that Black farmers experience more crime than white farmers. While white farmers have invested in private security measures, Black farmers have less ability to do so given the historical inequality in access to capital and are thus more vulnerable.
Claims of “white genocide” rely on a statistic that white farmers are murdered at a higher-than-average rate. However, this statistic lumps all victims of farm attacks – regardless of race and occupation – into a numerator and limits the denominator to only include white landholders, rather than farmworkers, managers and dwellers who are often Black. This inflates the per capita effect of rural crime on white farmers. No one denies that rural life in South Africa is violent, but stock theft, robberies and violent attacks concern South African farmers of all races.
Contrary to Trump’s claims, rural crime does not target White farmers more than it does Black farmers, and the state has no real means or desire to strip white farmers of their land. The response to the Expropriation Act is another sign of the worrying trend of the global far-right amplifying and exaggerating concerns across countries, with little context or understanding of the real-life situation in those countries.
Photo credit: Gage Skidmore used with permission CC BY-SA 2.0 and the author.
