Expropriation without compensation Land reform has been a constant feature in the far-right’s obsession with white South Africans, and the current debate on “expropriation without compensation” has further triggered their outrage. On February 27, the South African parliament passed a motion to review and amend the Constitution in a way that will allow the state to expropriate land without compensating its current, mostly white, owners. The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), whose leader Julius Malema has been pushing for “expropriation without compensation” since 2011 when he was president of the African National Congress Youth League (ANCYL), called the move a “victory for black people, [a] victory for Africa.” Meanwhile, Ramaphosa has assured investors that land reform will mostly target unused land, and “will unfold within a clear legal framework and without negatively affecting economic growth, agricultural production and food security.” Many observers, however, have called into question the significance of the motion. Political economist Patrick Bond has expressed doubt that expropriation will ever take place, calling it “more rhetoric than reality.” Land expert Ruth Hall argues that the constitutional change is “neither necessary nor sufficient to advance a truly progressive land reform process,” as the South African government already has the tools necessary for land reform but has failed to effectively use them. Even the Former Finance Minister Trevor Manuel (who transformed from a left winger to a conventional neoliberal while in government) admits that “the biggest beneficiaries of land reform in South Africa [to date] have actually been white farmers,” which raises skepticism towards the effectiveness of any future efforts. For the international alt-right, however, the timing could not have been more perfect. Only weeks earlier, media personalities Katie Hopkins and Lauren Southern had visited South Africa to produce documentaries for North American audiences about the “ethnic cleansing” facing white farmers. The debate over “expropriation with compensation” allowed them to amplify their narrative that white South Africans face imminent genocide, with Hopkins claiming that “this is not just about land, this is vengeance,” and that it provides “political permission” to murder whites. Their propagandistic videos, only recently uploaded to YouTube, proliferated even further across social media, leading broader sections of the right to jump on the white genocide bandwagon, from Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, to Glenn Beck, Jordan Peterson, and Gavin McInnis. Thousands have signed petitions frantically urging the US, the EU, or Australia to prioritize immigration by white South Africans fleeing for their lives, a proposal which has been supported by senior members of the Australian government. In a significant way, the international reaction to land reform in South Africa has been shaped and conditioned by white supremacists and alt-right voices. The surging popularity of the term “white genocide” is clearly associated with rise of white nationalist activity online—it was coined to describe the supposed threat facing “whites” (both culturally and physically) if they become a “minority” in Europe or North America, due to shifting demographics and non-white immigration. The plight of white South Africans has been a welcome addition to this “white genocide” narrative, for it provides an example of the nightmarish future that European and North American white supremacists warn about: a minority white population, surrounded by masses of people of color, facing their very extinction as a people. It also appears that South Africans themselves have played a decisive role in bridging Afrikaner anxieties with the worldview of the global alt-right: according to local weekly the Mail & Guardian, the international popularity of the “white genocide in South Africa” myth can largely be attributed to last year’s prolonged US tour by the Suidlanders—a fringe Afrikaner group—which may be what motivated so many alt-right stars to visit the country recently. The Suidlanders have been ramping up their civil war rhetoric in recent months, tweeting: “8 Farm attacks, 2 Farm murders in the last 24 hours. It’s speeding up. Arm yourself (Legally).”

White genocide lite AfriForum’s response to the proposals of expropriation without compensation has been more measured than that of Suidlanders (a low bar), but still suggestive of an existential threat to white nationhood. Aside from their alarmist warnings that the initiative could lead to a “second Zimbabwe,” AfriForum’s strategy has been to question the legitimacy of land reform itself, and to connect it to incidents of violent crime against white farmers. In a recent memorandum, AfriForum has set out to correct what they say is a “distorted” version of history underlying the entire concept of land reform: that is, the “assumption that white land owners inevitably obtained land through oppression.” Instead, AfriForum argues, in most cases land was “legally bought” by whites, found uninhabited, or—in a minority of cases—taken through conquest (which “had at that stage been a common practice among black tribes”). Similarly, they have pushed back against the idea that black South Africans were ever dispossessed from their land, seemingly suggesting that under Apartheid “whites in black areas” experienced as much dispossession as anyone else. Following this logic, there is no legitimate black African claim to the vast majority of white-owned land, and no justification for land reform—land expropriation can only be “racist theft.” By focusing on individual transactions of land while ignoring the large-scale production of disparities through segregation, forced transfer and separate development, AfriForum is effectively justifying Apartheid-era land holdings as legal and legitimate. AfriForum’s leadership is also trying to conflate the proposed expropriation of land with so-called “farm murders,” which they say have increased in the last few years. Roets has indicated that his forthcoming book will make the case that the South African government is actually complicit in the farm attacks, for the very purpose of advancing its land reform program. (It is worth noting that researchers have repeatedly disputed AfriForum’s claims regarding farm murder; for example, Africa Check has argued that calculating a “farm murder” rate is “near impossible,” and even accused them of “dishonesty” in their use of statistics). This argument, that the government is tolerating or even facilitating gruesome murders of white people to force them off their land, is the same one that is made by the alt-right, who typically use the language of ethnic cleansing or “white genocide.” AfriForum has tried to avoid these terms in their bid to be seen as a more moderate party; in an interview on News24, Kriel denied that they ever use the language of “simple genocide” to describe farm murders, even if there are others who do. This position, however, is disingenuous. Just last year, AfriForum tweeted that they have “received several hundreds of complaints in which genocide of white people” [sic]. Even if such explicit utterances are rare, AfriForum’s leaders never correct anyone who does use that language, as Kriel’s interviewer pointed out to him. If anything, their approach to the discourse of “genocide” is characterized by ambivalence and tolerance. Roets shared his thoughts on the matter on Twitter, in “one of the more important passages” from his forthcoming book, where he equivocatingly states that “this is not to say that farm murders are a form of ethnic cleansing per se,” and then urges that “a reasonable person not convinced that this amounts to ethnic cleansing should at least display a degree of patience, empathy or compassion with those who believe that ethnic cleansing is under way.”