What is the state of Black-white relations in South Africa in 2025?
It’s very difficult to capture. Up until Trump’s issue of this executive order and the revived Afrikaner nationalism that it provoked, I would have thought that Black-white relations in South Africa had reached a period of settled cohabitation, where it didn’t feel as if it was the most decisive fault line in South African politics. Obviously, it still looms large, but I think that the 2024 elections demonstrated that some of the political fault lines that would be decisive in South Africa’s future largely occurred among and within the Black majority itself. [In last year’s elections, for the first time since the end of apartheid, the African National Congress lost its majority, hemorrhaging Black support to other political parties.] It felt as though South Africa was this country that, thirty years after the end of apartheid, was coming into its own. Race and race relations, although still prominent in shaping political and social life, were no longer the dominant lines of social polarization.
The population is eighty-one per cent Black African, with a population of multiracial people considered “coloured” making up another eight or so per cent. I would’ve understood the white population in South Africa as being largely reconciled to Black majority rule. What’s alarming about this recent escalation is that it’s demonstrating the extent to which that might not be the case anymore.
What has happened within South Africa since the Trump-Musk escalation to make you think it’s less settled?
Trump and Musk obviously have been amplifying this narrative that white South Africans, and in particular white Afrikaners, who are about half of the white population—which, in total, is 4.5 million people—are a besieged minority and that they are the victims of a slew of race laws that are denying them economic opportunities. And that now, with the passage of the Expropriation Act, they are facing threats of dispossession à la Zimbabwe in the early two-thousands.
Giving legitimacy to that politics means that it’s now expressed in the open. Over the weekend, for example, there was a rally at the U.S. Embassy, convened by a far-right influencer, that had participants numbering in the low thousands. People were expressing a desire for white self-determination. The old apartheid national anthem, “Die Stem,” was sung. There were large banners saying Make South Africa Great Again. And you wonder what it means to make South Africa great again. So I think what were once dismissed as extremist and fringe views are now entering the political mainstream. And there’s a freedom that has been endowed by Trump and Musk to these voices to push and advocate for this racial grievance politics, which is completely unmoored from South Africa’s social reality.