US-SOUTH AFRICA RELATIONS: WHITE SOUTH AFRICANS REJECT PRESIDENT TRUMP’S OFFER TO RELOCATE TO THE US

United States President Donald Trump’s offer to rehouse white South Africans as refugees fleeing persecution may not spur quite the rush he anticipates, as right-wing white lobby groups want to “tackle the injustices” of Black majority rule on home soil.
Trump on Friday signed an executive order to cut US aid to South Africa, citing an expropriation act that President Cyril Ramaphosa signed last month aiming to redress land inequalities that stem from South Africa’s history of white supremacy.
Trump’s order provided for resettlement in the US of “Afrikaners in South Africa who are victims of unjust racial discrimination” as refugees.
Afrikaners are mostly white descendants of early Dutch and French settlers, who own the majority of the country’s farmland.
The act signed by Ramaphosa seeks to address racial land ownership disparities – which have left three-quarters of privately owned land in South Africa in the hands of the white minority – by making it easier for the state to expropriate land in the public interest.
White people represent 7.2 percent of South Africa’s population of 63 million, statistics agency data shows. The data does not break down how many are Afrikaners.
Before South Africa’s independence, its British colonial rulers handed most farmland to whites. In 1950, the apartheid-era National Party seized 85 per cent of the land, forcing 3.5 million Black people from their homes.
Ramaphosa’s African National Congress (ANC), the biggest party in the ruling coalition, says Trump is amplifying misinformation propagated by AfriForum, an Afrikaner-led group.
The group, which lobbied Trump’s previous administration regarding its cause, said it was not taking up the offer.
Separately, the Solidarity Movement – which includes AfriForum and the Solidarity trade union and said it represents about 600,000 Afrikaner families and two million individuals – expressed commitment to South Africa.
Representatives of Orania, an Afrikaner-only enclave in the heart of the country, also rejected Trump’s offer.
South Africa’s land policies since the end of apartheid have never involved the forced seizure of white-owned land.
Still, some said they appreciated Trump’s offer.

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