This is the last article of a three-part series. See Tuesday’s and Wednesday’s articles.
It’s peculiar to see white South Africans as victims in need of refuge. They make up 7 percent of South Africa’s overall population but own 72 percent of the land, according to a 2017 land audit, while black people comprise 81 percent of the population and own 4 percent of the land. The Trump administration, however, recently put out an executive order that privileges white South Africans.
History underlies those statistics. The Natives Land Act in 1913 restricted black people from buying or renting land in “white South Africa.” Some faced forcible removal from their land. Others lost their land following passage in 1950 of the Group Areas Act, which amplified segregation by saying South Africa’s apartheid government could zone certain areas for use by a single race.
The expropriation of land also hurt the black church. One South African bishop, Josh Malebye, recently told Parliament that depriving black churches of land needed to build multipurpose centers hamstrung their ability to address social ills. Besides, as political analyst Sithembile Mbete told journalist Peter Granitz, “When people say they want land, part of it is also about wanting ancestral belonging and dignity.”
The end of apartheid in 1994 brought a plan to return 30 percent of this land to its previous owners by 2014, but only one-third of that has happened. So South Africa’s Parliament passed the new Expropriation Act, which allows the taking of land only when “the land is not being used and the owner’s main purpose is … to benefit from appreciation of its market value.”
The act does not force landowners away from their properties: It doesn’t reenact the events of 1913 and 1950, this time with “bottom rail on top.” Expropriation goes into effect “where an owner has abandoned the land by failing to exercise control over it.” The underlying ethic is that waiting for the market price to go up while keeping others from obtaining land is unjust.
Fifteen years ago in Peru, I saw how a similar plan worked. Land uninhabited or unimproved for at least five years could be occupied by the landless poor. Hundreds moved onto one stony hillside at San Juan de Lurigancho. Families put up structures—initially straw or hay, then plywood, then brick or concrete with a stucco finish. City authorities provided electricity and water.
Peru, learning from the work of free-market economist Hernando de Soto, was providing a path for the poor to own land otherwise unused. South Africa could do the same. But the Trump executive order says such a plan is “unjust” and a reason to offer Afrikaners refugee status on explicitly racial grounds.
To punish South Africa for purportedly oppressing its white population, Trump’s executive order says, “The United States shall not provide aid or assistance to South Africa. … [The US] shall, to the maximum extent allowed by law, halt foreign aid or assistance delivered or provided to South Africa, and shall promptly exercise all available authorities and discretion to halt such aid or assistance.”
In some ways, South Africa is the most public whipping boy for what the Trump administration is doing in all of sub-Saharan Africa, which received close to $13 billion in direct US foreign assistance in 2024. The goal of such aid was to save lives, fight poverty and terrorism, and win friends in the one continent where the population is surging. (Also surging in Africa: Christian belief.)
In his recent State of the Union address, though, President Trump attacked aid to Africa. He elicited laughter from some by claiming that America provided “$8 million to promote LGBTQ+ in the African nation of Lesotho, which nobody has ever heard of.” Lesotho is surrounded by South Africa. In the Zulu village of Loskop, not far from Lesotho, 20 years ago I listened to eight boys and girls ages 13 to 18 standing in a circle in a cold, dimly lit room, singing lines from a Ladysmith Black Mambazo song then popular across South Africa: “AIDS killed my father. AIDS killed my mother. AIDS is killing Africa.”
Unless the Trump administration disavows the ordered halt to South African aid, the biggest losers will be many of the 5.5 million South Africans who receive antiretrovirals: Through the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), begun by compassionate conservative President George W. Bush and continued by his successors through two decades, South Africa funded one-sixth of its HIV/AIDS program. Helping those who contracted HIV decades ago is not popular, but an Annals of Internal Medicine analysis last month projected that the Trump decision could result in hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Twenty years ago, 1 in 250 Americans had HIV, compared to 1 of 10 adults in South Africa. Some said the macabre stat would soon be 1 out of 2. Given the number of orphans, it’s no surprise that the World Bank reported high levels of malnutrition, with half of South Africa’s children facing stunted growth. Many children survived by working long hours, sometimes in prostitution.
PEPFAR, though, saved millions of lives. Its shaky future reminds me of what one of the eight teenage singers said 20 years ago, before PEPFAR help arrived in the village of Loskop. Bonga, insisting he could have sex without getting AIDS, claimed that “black people are not the same as white people.” Several years later, a missionary told me Bonga was dead.
Donald Trump’s 1987 bestseller, Trump: The Art of the Deal, includes this memory from when he was in elementary school: “I punched my music teacher because I didn’t think he knew anything about music and I almost got expelled. … Even early on I had a tendency to stand up and make my opinions known in a very forceful way.”
Tony Schwartz, who spent 18 months with Trump in the 1980s to ghostwrite The Art of the Deal, said in 2016 to The New Yorker that Trump “has the ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true.” Trump may change his mind regarding South Africa, or he may follow his negotiating practice of punching first and then offering a deal.
Trump’s Truth Social post may be a leading indicator that he will drop his executive order’s racial discrimination. But some dropping of foreign aid will be hard to unwind. The Art of the Deal proudly describeshow young Trump didn’t have enough blocks “to build a very tall building.” He asked his brother Robert, two years younger, “if I could borrow some of his, and he said, ‘Okay, but you have to give them back when you’re done.’”
Trump and ghostwriter Schwartz wrote, “I ended up using all of my blocks, and then all of his, and when I was done, I’d created a beautiful building. I liked it so much that I glued the whole thing together. And that was the end of Robert’s blocks.”
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