■ Trump cites disputed claims about S. Africa,
President Donald Trump waded into South Africa’s proposal to seize land from white farmers, saying in a Twitter post late Wednesday that he had asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to “closely study” the “large scale killing of farmers” — a claim disputed by official figures and the country’s biggest farmers’ group.
Trump’s comment that the “South African Government is now seizing land from white farmers” came after the Fox News host Tucker Carlson presented a late-night program on South Africa, including land seizures and homicides, and described President Cyril Ramaphosa as “a racist.”
The tweet gives prominence to a narrative pushed by some right-wing groups in South Africa that there have been numerous seizures of whiteowned land and widespread killings of white farmers. Some of those groups have brought their claims to the U.S. on lobbying trips.
On Thursday, the South African international relations minister, Lindiwe Sisulu, described the tweet as “regrettable” and “based on false information.” The government said it would seek clarification from the U.S. Embassy, and Sisulu planned to “communicate with Secretary of State Michael Pompeo on the matter through diplomatic channels.”
The government has said expropriating farms is necessary to deal with long-standing inequities and that only unused land would be subject to seizure, suggesting that land being actively farmed would be safe.
In a country still struggling with the effects of apartheid and widespread economic inequality decades after Nelson Mandela became its first black president, Trump’s tweet was likely to inflame the divisive landownership debate.
On Thursday, two University of Texas professors who study South Africa said Trump’s tweet obscures a complicated political and economic dynamic in the post-apartheid era.
A “willing buyer/willing seller” approach to land redistribution has not made much progress since it was instituted in 1994, creating pressure on the government to seize land from whites with little or no compensation, said Rachel L. Wellhausen, an associate government professor who recently returned from a research trip to South Africa.
Such expropriation has yet to begin, though, and nonviolent debate about how to proceed is ongoing, Wellhausen said. A 1913 law dispossessed black South Africans of their land, and there is wide agreement that the government should try to level the playing field of landownership, she added.
South Africa’s high rates of crime, unemployment and poverty are intertwined, but Trump’s claim of “large scale killing of farmers” doesn’t square with reality, said Tshepo Masango Chery, a UT assistant professor of African and African diaspora studies. Slayings of farmers, mostly white, have numbered in the double digits annually, while slayings of all types have exceeded 19,000, she said.
Chery said Trump’s tweet is likely to unsettle investors, whose capital South Africa sorely needs. “When you put out a tweet like that, it creates a level of concern for these investors,” she said. “They get concerned because they don’t know politically what’s going to happen.”
According to research published in July by AgriSA, a farmers’ group in South Africa, the number of killings of farmers is at a 20-year low, 47 in 201718, down from 66 the year before. The figures were consistent with a steady decline of violence since a peak in 1998, when 153 were killed.
South Africa recorded 19,016 murder cases from April 2016 to March 2017, according to the South Africa Police Service. The national murder rate last year was 34.1 per 100,000 people, but the number of people living on farms is not fully known, making comparisons difficult.
Most official statistics do not break down homicides by race, and they include farmers as well as employees who live on the land.
“There is no official crime category called ‘farm attack’ or ‘farm murder,’” according to Africa Check, a local fact-checking organization.
Some white South Africans say they believe that farm killings are underreported, politically motivated and part of a conspiracy to rid the country of white residents. AfriForum, a right-wing minority rights group, has lobbied internationally to draw attention to farm homicides and what it calls the “racist theft” of land.
“Nobody is disputing that people living and working on farms and small holdings are the victims of violent and often brutal attacks and murders,” said Kate Wilkinson, an Africa Check senior researcher. “What is disputed is whether they face an elevated risk versus average South Africans.”