Donald Trump has long been preoccupied with South Africa’s most fraught and emotional domestic policy issue: land.
In his first term the US president directed his then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo — via Twitter — to “closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures” and the supposed “large-scale killing of farmers”.
This week he repeated these pet theories in an Oval Office encounter with South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa, who at one point closed his eyes and seemed to will himself to stay calm. Trump’s key claim was that “officials” in South Africa were saying “kill the white farmer and take their land”.
South Africans know the picture on the ground is very different. The most recent land confiscations there took place under apartheid, when 87 per cent of South African land was reserved for white people, who accounted for under a fifth of the population.
Brutal evictions forced some 3.5mn Black people off their ancestral land, which was frequently expropriated without compensation and sold at low prices to white farmers.
By the time the country became a multiracial democracy in 1994, white farmers still held about 77mn hectares of the country’s 122mn hectares of land.
Those apartheid-era seizures shaped today’s South Africa.
“These divides very much persist,” said Ayesha Omar, lecturer at the University of Witwatersrand. “There was a profound way in which people were stripped of their land . . . and of course there was the whole question of dignity.”
Today, white farmers still own roughly half of the country’s land although only 7 per cent of citizens are white. A lack of formal access to land has stopped the Black majority and other historically disadvantaged groups from tapping into the business prospects, including borrowing against collateral, that such ownership brings.
Nelson Mandela’s newly inaugurated government in 1994 sought to redress this balance. It aimed to redistribute a third of land to historically disadvantaged groups, including Black people, through a “willing seller, willing buyer” scheme to purchase land at market prices.
The new democracy’s constitution permitted land expropriation in exchange for fair compensation. This has long been an explosive issue, as some politicians argued it should be amended to specifically allow land to be seized, in some cases, without compensation.
“The constitution itself centrally addresses the questions around how to confront the historical injustices of the past on the land question,” said Omar.
A law passed in January opened up the possibility for seizures without compensation, but there has not yet been a single such case. The Democratic Alliance, a party in the governing coalition, has launched a legal challenge arguing it is unconstitutional.
Progress towards the redistribution goal has been far slower than the post-apartheid government hoped. The state has to date bought out some 3.9mn hectares, or 2.5 per cent of the country’s landmass.
That has been used for various purposes including farming, forestry, tourism and hospitality, said Mzwanele Nyhontso, minister of land reform and rural development.
“The purchase of land from previous owners, in particular white owners, is based on negotiated agreements,” he added.
Government targets for land redistribution have been repeatedly pushed back over two decades to 2030. The slow pace of land reform under Ramaphosa’s African National Congress is one of many reasons that South Africa remains among the world’s most unequal societies. Progress has also been hobbled by corruption.
“The South African state doesn’t have the capacity to do what it wants to do. It’s obviously so much more than a land transfer,” said Jonny Steinberg, author of Winnie & Nelson, a book that re-examines the post-apartheid legacy.
Potential new landowners needed “expertise and capital and market assistance”, he added.
Another drag on the process is the historic transformation by the white minority of the Black majority into an industrial proletariat, severing their links with the land.
Along with his views on land, Trump has claimed white farmers face large-scale attacks. But there is no evidence that they face more targeted assaults than any other group amid South Africa’s high rates of violent crime.
In the first quarter of 2025, there were six murders on farms, of which one was a white farmer and the rest Black people, according to police figures.
Last year, 26,232 people were murdered in South Africa, a rate of 45 per 100,000 against 5.8 per 100,000 in the US. In that period, the Transvaal Agricultural Union, a private agricultural group, said there were 32 murders on farms, affecting both Black and white people.
With reform progressing slowly, populists such as Julius Malema — the radical leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters party, who was shown singing the apartheid-era struggle song “Kill the Boer” during the Oval Office meeting — have seized on growing resentment among Black citizens.
Corne Mulder, a leader of the Afrikaner interest Freedom Front Plus, a minority party in the governing 10-party coalition, meanwhile blamed Ramaphosa for not addressing differences with Trump behind closed doors, calling the Oval Office meeting “an absolute diplomatic catastrophe”.
But he claimed Trump had used the “genocide” claims “strategically” to highlight violence against white farmers.
Trump has repeatedly cited a law enacted in January that allows the government to expropriate privately held land — the vast majority of which remains white owned — for public use. Experts have compared the legislation, passed without a constitutional change, to a US government power known as “eminent domain”.
This law operates through a separate mechanism from the government’s broader land reform policy. Analysts say it is more likely to be used in cases involving, for example, abandoned inner-city buildings where the owner cannot be found.
It specifies that where courts deem it “just and equitable”, no compensation has to be paid. To date, that provision has not been invoked.
Urged by his South African-born billionaire adviser, Elon Musk, Trump has claimed this law aims to seize land from white people, and launched a refugee plan to resettle members of the Afrikaner minority in the US. Washington has claimed the group, who trace their roots to the first Dutch settlers in 1652, are “victims of unjust racial discrimination”.
But few Afrikaners have expressed interest in relocating. “All we know is we’re being inundated with people, with white farmers from South Africa,” Trump said, referring to 59 Afrikaners his administration hastily arranged to fly to the US this month.
Within South African commercial agriculture, which competes globally with countries including Australia and Brazil, farmers are far more concerned about the US proposal for 30 per cent blanket tariffs on their country’s goods.
Far from fleeing the country, predominantly white Afrikaans farmers have helped boost exports — mainly consisting of fruit and wine — from $2bn in 2001 to nearly $14bn in 2024. The industry overall exported $13.7bn of produce last year.
Agriculture remains one of the few South African industries that is flourishing even as overall economic growth has slowed to less than 1 per cent annually, and a third of people are out of work.
The agriculture sector was currently backed by financing of some 220bn rand ($12.3bn) from commercial banks, said Wandile Sihlobo, chief economist of the Agricultural Business Chamber of South Africa.
“That financing shows the level of confidence in the current land reform process,” said Sihlobo, also an economic adviser to the president. “In a sector under siege, you wouldn’t be selling $14bn of products.”
Additional reporting by David Pilling in London
