On May 19, Donald Trump met with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office. Trump was mostly interested in claims of “white genocide” that led him to accept 59 Afrikaners to the U.S. as refugees — while non-white migrants face a harsh reality of mass deportations, travel bans, and halting of all other new refugee processing. While Trump flaunted print-outs of white supremacist articles to back up his case, Ramaphosa generally won praise from South Africans for keeping his cool.
South Africa’s leader was balancing on a tightrope: he needed to factually refute Trump’s claims about the mass killing of white farmers, while also emphasizing that South Africa needs U.S. foreign investment. He brought a large retinue, including the head of COSATU, South Africa’s trade union federation, but also Johann Rupert, a prominent South African billionaire, plus two of the country’s top golfers. By repeatedly stating his hope that Trump would attend the G20 summit in South Africa this year, Ramaphosa displayed the country’s post-Apartheid, neoliberal position on a global stage.
Land Redistribution
The focus of this meeting was on land expropriation and redistribution, which has a long history in South Africa. When Ramaphosa signed the Land Expropriation Act in 2024, most outrage came from right-wing white protectionist groups such as AfriForum or The Freedom Front Plus. Their racist alarmism reverberated in Trump’s ears as well.
On paper, the act seems quite progressive, granting the government further rights to expropriate land for public use. This is intended to tackle South Africa’s vast land inequality along racial lines. White Afrikaners make up 7 percent of the population, while owning 70 percent of the private rural land, while Black South Africans, more than 80 percent of the population, own just 4 percent of land.
The African National Congress (ANC) promised racial equality, economic prosperity for the many, and liberation from white capital at the end of Apartheid in 1994. Yet they ultimately maintained the country’s economic structure. As a result, South Africa continues to rank as the most unequal nation in the world.
South Africa’s post-Apartheid government was forced to make heavy concessions to international capital. It accepted $850 million in IMF funds in 1993 under the condition of “responsible [i.e., neoliberal] economic policymaking.”
In 1996, the government launched its neoliberal Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) programme, the function of which was to downsize the public sector, lower wages, undermine conditions, outsource, and privatise. Wage labour was presented as a tool for Africans to escape poverty and reclaim dignity.This was supposedly an alternative to property redistribution or the de-commodification of social provisions.
Marikana
The state’s commitment to private property became clear when 34 striking miners were slaughtered by police at Marikana in 2012. This struggle mirrored past struggles by Black mineworkers resisting white global capital. It was harrowing to note that Ramaphosa, the founder of the National Union of Mineworkers, had a seat on the board at Lonmin at that time. Once a leader of workers’ struggle against the Apartheid regime, his interests shifted to align with those of foreign capital.
As noted by the Tricontinental, some of the programs set up for restitution and redistribution of land have ended up benefitting large landholders over subsistence farmers and lifelong farmworkers. By maintaining capitalism, successive ANC governments have proven incapable of overcoming the legacy of material inequality. Since they refused to collectivize the means of production, Black workers continue being exploited by white capital.
The exclusion of the Black South African population from land today has roots going back to the colonial period. Following the discovery of gold in Witwatersrand in 1886, for example, hundreds of thousands of Africans were indentured into a forced labour system both by European mining companies and European farmers. Gold became the epicentre of the South African colonial economy, and it was extracted via horrific exploitation.
The gold industry was solidified by forcing Black South Africans to pay heavy taxes – often driving many out of agriculture and into the white-owned mines. This, coupled with the 1913 Natives Land Act, which limited African land ownership to 7 percent of all land, and restricted them from buying land except as employees of a white master, explains the vast racial discrepancy in land ownership to this day.
South Africa’s Apartheid economy was built by extending the colonial mining model to the rest of the population, as outlined by Harold Wolpe. The mechanisms for exploiting Black labour are baked into the very structure of the South African capitalist state itself.
Today, South Africa allows imperialist plunder and racialized inequality — with roots in the colonial period — to continue under a guise of progressivism. The continued exploitation of Black workers is sold as liberation.
Without a plan to collectivize the means of production, South Africa was not and will not be able to break from white capital’s centuries-old chokehold on the country. The end of Apartheid allowed a small Black bourgeoisie, including Ramaphosa, to join the ranks of the exploiters. But for the masses, inequality is worse than ever. Ramaphosa’s performance at the White House was all about securing his own position, as a junior partner of imperialists in exploiting South Africa’s workers.