President Trumps unfortunate tweet in response to a Fox News broadcast should not distract the United States from improving relations with South Africa, Sens. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) and Christopher A. Coons (D-Del.), who are members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a joint statement. We care deeply about the United States relationships with all African countries. Constructive relationships require measured dialogue as opposed to arbitrary tweets.
The complicated issue of land expropriation has been fraught with emotion in South Africa, whose leaders quickly sought to stanch the enthusiasm of the far right over Trumps tweet.
Government officials said they would summon U.S. diplomats to explain the Trump administrations position, although Trump has yet to name an ambassador to the country.
We would like to discourage those who are using this sensitive and emotive issue of land to divide us as South Africans by distorting our land reform measures to the international community and spreading falsehoods that our white farmers are facing the onslaught from their own government, David Mabuza, South Africas deputy president, said while attending a land summit in the province of Limpopo. This is far from the truth.
Members of Afriforum, the South African white-supremacist group, recently toured the United States, and the groups causes have been taken up by other white supremacists, including Duke, said Jill Kelly, a South Africa scholar at Southern Methodist University.
She said studies have shown that farm murders in South Africa are at a 20-year low and that murders in general in the country have been declining since the end of apartheid.
Analysts said the idea that white farmers in South Africa were being unfairly treated and are attacked in large numbers by nonwhites has persisted for decades. Brian Levin, a professor of criminal justice at California State University at San Bernardino who studies hate groups, said the narrative of white genocide has been central to the white-nationalist movement across the globe.
Now we have an American leader parroting these talking points once theyve been transmitted through cable news. Its astounding, Levin said. Cumulatively, these messages and particularly the bluntness and adherence to inaccurate information or conspiracy theories are taken like rocket fuel within this fragmented, but still very significant, white-nationalist community.
In a news briefing in Johannesburg, Julius Malema, the head of South Africas far-left EFF party, said: We are more determined, after the Donald Trump tweet, to expropriate our land without compensation. . . . Theres no white genocide here. There is black genocide in the USA.
At the State Department, spokeswoman Heather Nauert confirmed that Trump and Pompeo discussed South Africa and added that Pompeo promised the president he would review the matter of land being taken from white farmers.
In general, she said, expropriation of land without compensation would not be a good thing and would send South Africa down the wrong path.
Foreign policy analysts said that Trumps administration has not articulated a clear Africa strategy and that the presidents lack of interest has harmed U.S. interests in sub-Saharan Africa, which features fast-growing populations and economies. Obama visited the continent three times as president, and he gave the Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture there last month.