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MAKE APARTHEID GREAT AGAIN?  
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Zeb Larson, William Minter
February 21, 2025
Foreign Policy in Focuss
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_ Trump's actions signal need to understand global history of white
supremacy. His executive order "human rights violations occurring in
South Africa" echo a long history of support for racism in Southern
Africa, for apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia _

Apartheid-era sign, part of an exhibition in the Apartheid Museum,
Johannesburg, South Africa.,

 

On February 7, Donald Trump issued an executive order “to address
serious human rights violations occurring in South Africa
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The order charged “blatant discrimination” against “ethnic
minority descendants of settler groups,” and mandated “a plan to
resettle disfavored minorities in South Africa discriminated against
because of their race as refugees.” His actions echo a long history
of right-wing support in the United States for racism in Southern
Africa, including mobilization of support for white Rhodesia (now
Zimbabwe) as well as the apartheid regime in South Africa.

Analysts in South Africa quickly pointed out the many factual errors
in Trump’s diatribe
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Even Afrikaners, who he alleges are persecuted, are unlikely to accept
being refugees since South Africa is their home country.
The post-apartheid constitution of 1997
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echoing the African National Congress’ Freedom Charter
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1955, clearly states that South Africa belongs to “all who live in
it.” But Trump’s misunderstanding is an example of the
transnational scope of white racist nostalgia.

An essential component of opposing the MAGA offensive against human
rights in the United States has been new understandings of U.S.
history, as reflected in the 1619 Project
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a host of other publications. Most often, however, this discussion has
focused on the United States in isolation. Scholars such as Ana Lucia
Araújo, in _Humans in Shackles
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Howard French, in _Born of Blackness
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pioneered wider global histories. But however influential this trend
is among historians, it has not been matched by attention in the media
or public debate.

In the global history of white supremacy, the close relationship
between the United States and South Africa stands out for centuries of
interaction between the two settler colonies, with both ideological
and material links from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries.
Significant links between Black resistance movements in the two
countries also date back at least to the early twentieth century. But
until the end of official apartheid in the 1990s, the closest bonds
were between white America and white South Africa.

In a short history of the Boer War written by 8-year-old future CIA
Director Allen Dulles in 1901, and published by his grandfather,
Dulles noted that the Boers landed at the Cape in 1652, “finding no
people but a few Indians,” and that “it was not right for the
British to come in because the Boers had the first right to the
land.” For Dulles, as for other U.S. policymakers until almost the
end of the twentieth century, it was axiomatic that only whites had
rights.

The parallels between these two settler colonies were
significant. Robert F. Kennedy, speaking to university students
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Cape Town in June 1966, put it like this:

_I come here this evening because of my deep interest and affection
for a land settled by the Dutch in the mid-seventeenth century, then
taken over by the British, and at last __independent; a land in which
the native inhabitants were at first subdued, but relations with whom
remain a problem to this day; a land which defined itself on a hostile
frontier; a land which has tamed rich natural resources through the
energetic application of modern technology; a land which once the
importer of slaves, and now must struggle to wipe out the last traces
of that former bondage. I refer, of course, to the United States of
America._

The parallels were matched by a long history of interaction. The
concept for the African reserves (later Bantustans) in South Africa
was modeled on American Indian reservations. As noted by historian
John W. Cell
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Americans and South Africans debated how to shape “segregation” in
urbanizing societies in the mid-twentieth century. The Carnegie
Corporation of New York financed both the classic study of the
situation of “poor whites° in South Africa
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Gunnar Myrdal´s _The American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and
American Democracy
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In the early twentieth century, mining engineer Herbert Hoover (later
U.S. president) was the founder and director of the Chinese
Engineering and Mining Corporation, which shipped some 50.000
Chinese laborers to South Africa to work in South African mines
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The scheme was abandoned in 1911. Mention of it was recently deleted
from Wikipedia, most likely in 2018.

Both countries were united during the Cold War through anti-communism.
South African officials studied McCarthyist legislation in the United
States and applied it at home through the Suppression of Communism
Act. In both countries, “anti-communism” became a way to defy
demands for civil rights. Although white racism in South Africa became
the focus of international condemnation after the official adoption of
apartheid in 1948, the United States and other Western countries
systematically opposed sanctions against South Africa for decades
until the rise of the international anti-apartheid movement resulted
in the congressional override of President Ronald Reagan’s veto to
pass the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986
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That success came after decades of campaigning in the United States
and around the world, with heightened international attention coming
in response to resistance in South Africa itself. The Treason Trial
from 1956 to 1961
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in which Nelson Mandela and 135 other leaders of the African National
Congress were charged, evoked widespread anti-apartheid actions in the
United Kingdom and other countries. The Sharpeville Massacre in 1960
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the Soweto Youth Uprising in 1976
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even larger waves of protest, fueled by new media options. Resistance
reached a new peak after the formation of the United Democratic Front
in 1983
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Following the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990, and the first
non-racial election that brought him into office, there was worldwide
celebration at the end of political apartheid. In later years, it
became clear that only a minority of Black South Africans had joined
the elite at the top of a still sharply unequal society.
Disillusionment and discontent over high rates of unemployment and
poverty arose among the majority of Black South Africans.

But that is a very different sentiment than the nostalgia for the old
apartheid order among white South Africans who left the country as
well as many who stayed in South Africa.

The right wing in the United States as well as Great Britain, Canada,
and elsewhere, has held a fascination for apartheid and has regretted
its abolition. The global anti-apartheid movement unleashed
unprecedented demands by citizens to rein in corporate activity that
supported apartheid. In the same way that climate activists studied
divestment, so too have conservative lobbying groups studied how to
block divestment groups. The sympathy that even liberal Robert F.
Kennedy expressed for South African white pioneers on a hostile
frontier evokes the common ideology of legitimizing settler conquest.
Trump’s Executive Order can only be understood in that context.

_[ZEB LARSON [[link removed]] is a writer and
historian of the anti-apartheid movement based in Columbus, Ohio. He
got a PhD from The Ohio State University in 2019. He writes on a wide
variety of topics, including foreign policy and history. WILLIAM
MINTER [[link removed]] is the editor of
AfricaFocus Notes and a senior consultant to the U.S.-Africa Bridge
Building Project. Minter’s most recent book is None of Us Is Free
Until All of Us Are Free; New Perspectives on Global Solidarity
(Africa World Press, 2025).]_

* Donald Trump
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* Trump Administration
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* Trump 2.0
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* Elon Musk
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* Racism
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* South Africa
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* Rhodesia
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* Zimbabwe
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* Afrikaners
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* apartheid
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* Anti-apartheid
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* Peter Theil
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* colonialism
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* D.E.I
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* Human Rights
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