A Not So New Meaning to Being White and (South) African in Africa and the World.

By Takura Zhangazha*

USA president Donald Trump recently issued an executive order about South African domestic politics.  In it he was basically protecting white South Africans and in particular those of Afrikaner (Dutch) origin. This was after one of his infamous and closest political advisors, Elon Musk had warned via his social media platform X, that there would be consequences for South Africa’s new Land Expropriation Act.

It would appear that this executive order suspending USA aid to South Africa by Trump is the immediate consequence. And one which has had ripple effects within South Africa’s white community.  To the extent that they held a weekend press conference to explain their reactions to this mainly via the again infamous AfriForum group that is assumed to represent a lot of Afrikaner or Boer individual and collective economic and social interests.

In this they stated, via their website,

“The civil rights organisation AfriForum is going to write an official letter to the United States government and request that the punitive measures that President Donald Trump wants to introduce against South Africa should rather target senior ANC leaders directly and not South Africa’s residents. AfriForum’s request follows in response to an entry that Trump made on his social media last night, around 18:00 Eastern Standard Time (EST) in America.

AfriForum is also going to make an urgent request to the South African government to, in an attempt to avert this crisis, table an amendment to the Expropriation Act that will ensure the protection of property rights in South Africa.”

I have quoted this at length in order to demonstrate what can be viewed as not only a sense of gratitude for Trump’s executive order (EO) but also a strange sense of entitlement to still be able to live in a land that their new benefactor, the USA government, perceives to be a threat to their Afrikaner (also read as white) livelihoods.

I refer to this entitlement in a particular historic respect that the AfriForum is likely to be quite clear that based on Trump’s EO, they are now quite literally untouchable in the short and probable long (4 year term of his presidential tenure).  Or as long as Musk is still his right hand man.  Not only in South Africa but also other parts of Africa such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) where they have major economic, mining and attendant military interests.

While I am not South African by birth my Pan Africanism cannot let this matter simply be drowned away in abstract notions of what current and former settler states and their outpost communities deem to be preferable.  

Especially with either the threat of implementing economic sanctions and in some cases (as in the previous Trump administration) that of military intervention on the basis of a false pretext of neo-colonial liberalized property rights to land and minerals.

More-so because I am also a Zimbabwean and we have a direct experience and long standing history  of what former colonial and neo-colonial global superpowers can and will do to stop attempts to redress colonial injustices of land dispossession.

This despite the efforts we had made since the expiry of what was then our Lancaster House Constitution through to many other conferences and bilateral agreements we entered into with our former colonial power, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (UK).  And now politically and technically under the aegis of USA and EU sanctions for what was then our Fast Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP).

One which regrettably has now shifted into more of state capitalism than equitable distribution of our natural resources.

But back to the matter of the South African white community and its newfound, by default racial/ racist relationship with the new American administration.  Beyond being Afrikaner, English, Scottish, Australian or French in origin or ancestry.

It is either you value the country of your birth, with all its baggage of having fought a liberation struggle to emancipate a majority based on the principles of democracy racial and economic equity or you decide to purposefully undermine them.  

Directly as Afriforum is doing. 

Or even in liberal white complicit silence (Biko anyone?)  Or you stand up to what was the then rainbow nation that we all applauded Nelson Mandela and his struggle stalwarts for undertaking. 

What Trump has done however is not a social media fad. Or an opportunity for South Africans, particularly a white minority to prove a false consciousness on still Chinese owned Tik-tok.  

Instead it is a racist maneuver aimed at proving that it is not only global but in particular ‘white capital’ that can control the economy of South Africa.  And by default Southern Africa. 

Well we, as Africans, do not have nuclear weapons or any other military capacity to stand up to the USA, the UK or even the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO).  But we have progressive and revolutionary anti-colonial history on our side. 

Where we assumed a global progressive humanity via the United Nations, we were mistaken.  Especially because of the globalized wars that we are seeing or experiencing directly. 

The Trump executive orders we are witnessing in various forms mean that we may have to revert to remembering what Africa is and who we are as Africans.  We reject racism, global inequality and we believe in a shared progressive future for all of humanity. And that at some point despite as Cabral said, “the struggles against our own weaknesses” we will have to defend this vision of a progressive humanity for all as Africans.  Beyond who owns X or what an exeuctive order from the USA can mean. 

And that there is no such thing as a return to an ahistorical former or current colonial center of power to prove a false importance of whiteness in Africa or elsewhere in the Global South.  

Finally there is a book published in 2007 by Gerald Le-Ange titled the ‘White Africans. From Colonisation to Liberation’.   It would help if cdes re-read it to understand that we too, as black Africans can talk back about belonging in a globally progressive and inclusive historical way.  Because we know what was done to us historically by colonialism and its offshoots of neo and post colinialism.  We will never forget. And we will resist.

*Takura Zhangazha writes here in his personal capacity (takura-zhangazha.blogspot.com) (takurazhangazha.com)