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The Internationalist
  May 2025

Mobilize Workers Power to Defend Democratic Rights!
For a Black-Centered Workers Government!

Trump Embraces Afrikaner Racist Trope


South African president Cyril Ramaphosa at Oval Office meeting with U.S. president Donald Trump attempting to counter the racist myth of “white genocide” being pushed by the White House in admitting Afrikaner “refugees.” Rather than apologizing for South Africa's tepid land “expropriation” law, Trotskyists call to fight for expropriation of all the capitalists through socialist revolution.  (Photo: New York Times)

On January 20, among the more than three dozen executive orders and actions by President Donald Trump on Inauguration Day was one banning all refugee admissions (or even processing of requests for asylum) to the United States for 90 days. But before that deadline was up, even as immigration police abduct immigrants across the country, on May 12, a plane landed at Dulles International Airport in Washington, D.C., bringing 59 so-called refugees from Africa to the United States. This was no act of benevolence by the imperialists toward people desperately fleeing armed conflicts in, say, Sudan or Congo. Rather, it was a sinister and racist PR stunt headlined by the white-supremacist in chief. The “refugees” were Afrikaners, mostly farmers, ditching South Africa for greener, or should we say whiter, pastures in the United States.

On the day these “refugees” arrived, Trump held a press conference where he stated there was a “genocide taking place.” He, of course, was not referring to the ongoing U.S./Israel genocidal war against Gaza, but to the completely fictitious and overtly racist claim that there is an ongoing genocide against white people in South Africa. That much was nothing new for Trump, who had touted this fiction during his first term. But then it came up again, when Trump met with South African president, Cyril Ramaphosa and other South African government leaders at the White House on May 21. This time the U.S. president subjected the black South African leader to a tongue-lashing and a staged media event with photographs and video of supposed murders of Afrikaner farmers and other white people, in a blatant attempt humiliation.

This all occurred in the aftermath of a February 7 Presidential Order to suspend aid to the country to protest South Africa’s Expropriation Act 13 of 2024,1 allowing for the seizure of idle lands, and the expulsion of South Africa’s U.S. ambassador, Ebrahim Rasool, the following month. Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, official declared Rasool persona non grata on March 14, over the latter’s criticism of the U.S./Israeli genocidal war against Palestinians, stating Rasool was “a race-baiting politician who hates America and hates @POTUS [the President of the United States].” The Trump regime has been particularly incensed over South Africa’s bringing a case to the International Court of Justice charging Israel with genocide for its massive slaughter of the Palestinian people of Gaza.

The Billionaire Tango

In the May 21 White House meeting, which lasted around an hour, about 20 minutes in, a South African journalist asked Trump “what will it take for you to be convinced there is no ‘white genocide’ in South Africa.” That sprung the trap, although it was hardly unexpected, since Ramaphosa had gone to Washington precisely to refute those claims. The U.S. president told staffers to dim the lights and put on a queued-up video, and then started flipping through pages of articles and photos purportedly about murders of Afrikaner farmers saying “death, death, death, death.” Yet one of the main images was later confirmed by Reuters as a photo their journalist captured in Congo. Not too many white farmers there!

The video showed a clip of Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) leader Julius Malema speaking at a rally agitating for land occupations and singing Dubul’ Ibhunu (roughly translated as Shoot the Boer), a popular anti-apartheid struggle song. “Boer” means peasant or farmer in Afrikaans, the Dutch-derived language of the initial white settlers in South Africa. In fact, Afrikaners were at the hard core of support for the apartheid system of rigid racial segregation and restrictions on the non-white population, designed to institutionalize the superexploitation of black labor. Thousands of black South Africans were killed in the decades-long struggle against that cruel system, while some took up arms to combat the brutal South African Defense Forces and the fascist Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) that were its front-line defenders.

To refute Trump’s claims, a white South African billionaire, Johann Reupert, cited statistics showing that white people were not the primary murder victims, while John Steenhuisen, the white leader of the Democratic Alliance (DA), said that his party had joined with Ramaphosa’s ANC in a “Government of National Unity” (GNU) precisely in order to keep the likes of Malema’s EFF and former ANC president Jacob Zuma’s uMkhonto weSizwe (MK party),2 out of power. He argued that most Afrikaner farmers want to stay and what’s needed is more policing. After this disgusting display of imperialist arrogance and white supremacist garbage from Trump and bourgeois obsequiousness from leaders of South Africa’s GNU, Ramaphosa invited the U.S. president to an official state visit to South Africa.

For Socialist Revolution, Not EFF and MK Black Capitalism

While Ramaphosa boasted to South African media that his White House visit was a success, everyone knows that it was anything but. Yet even Ramaphosa’s ANC, greatly weakened by endless corruption scandals in years at the helm, has far more support (40% in the May 2024 elections) than Zuma’s MK (14.5%) or Malema’s EFF (9.5%). To the extent that the EFF has gained some popularity, it is in largely due to its call for expropriation of land without compensation, also raised by the MK. The land question is fundamental in South Africa, where 80% of the population is black and 7% is white, yet over 70% of the land is owned by whites and less than 5% by black South Africans. The ANC’s 2024 land law which Trump vituperated against and U.S. secretary of state Marco Rubio called “racist,” would do little to change this.

Yet the calls by the EFF and MK for expropriation maintain the capitalist framework and the neo-apartheid system that condemns the masses to abject poverty (see article below). Nationalization of the land and abolishing private landownership is not in and of itself a socialist demand. Karl Marx raised it in the Communist Manifesto and an 1872 address on “The Nationalization of the Land” as a transitional demand leading toward the overthrow of capitalism. However, if corporations can lease the land, as the EFF foresees, it would lead not to socialist revolution but to a black capitalism where billionaires of Ramaphosa’s type continue to exist. Don’t forget that Zuma and Malema were tight with Ramaphosa until they got cut off the gravy train. Jacob Zuma is sitting on US$20 million of net worth, while Julius Malema at US$2-3 million is a bit lower on the wealth totem, but a millionaire nonetheless, and the owner of two mansion estates!

The calls for expropriation by the EFF and MK are at bottom no more radical than the ANC’s land law with its tepid talk for expropriation in certain circumstances. No amount of calling members “comrade” at party functions will change the base reality. South African working people need revolutionary expropriation of the Randlords who own the mines, of the large farmers who have become agribusinesses, farmers, and of capitalism overall. The League for the Fourth International calls to build a revolutionary workers party to fight for a black-centered workers government and socialist revolution throughout the continent and the world to consign the arrogant imperialists like the white supremacists in the White House to the dustbin of history. ■

South Africa: Drop the Charges Against Xolani Khoza!


Internationalist Group at May 9 NYC protest called by the Partisan Defense Committee against repression of South African Trade-Unionist Xolani Khosa.   (Internationalist Photo)

The government of South Africa is attempting to railroad a unionist who dared to speak out against the current critical state of affairs in the country, including the acute housing crisis and lack of clean water supplies for the poor, as well as “load-shedding” by the electricity system leading to widespread blackouts. Xolani Khoza, a member of the South African Commercial Catering and Allied Workers Union (SACCAWU) and the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), a populist bourgeois political party, was arrested on 24 June 2024.

Khoza is being charged for posting a TikTok video criticizing the social realities of South Africa, calling for a shutdown to protest the so-called “Government of National Unity” (GNU) headed by the African National Congress (ANC), and for the ouster of Cyril Ramaphosa as president of South Africa. For this he has been charged with “incitement to commit terrorism, public violence, and intimidation” under the apartheid-era (1956) Riotous Assemblies Act. He was further charged under a 2020 Cybercrimes Act for “inciting violence” via social media.

What Khoza said in his Tik Tok video was that “the country must be shut down and the President must be removed.” This is pretty tame, and hardly an incitement to terrorism or violence! But in the precarious conditions of neo-apartheid South African capitalism, even such political statements are not tolerated. And it speaks volumes that a government headed by the African National Congress is resorting to the same 1956 law that was used in the Treason Trial against ANC leaders, including Nelson Mandela.

Though Khoza was released on bail – having been banned from social media as part of the condition for his release – he is set to go on trial on May 9. The Internationalist Group and League for the Fourth International call for the immediate dropping of charges against Xolani Khoza and to mobilize workers power to defend democratic rights in South Africa. A work stoppage by SAACCAWU (and other unions) for their union brother’s freedom would go a long way to countering this attack on the basic democratic right of freedom of speech in South Africa.

Whither South Africa?

The case against Xolani Khoza comes amidst a substantial shift in South African politics. The ANC-led “Government of National Unity,” formed the same month of Khoza’s arrest, includes: the Democratic Alliance (a right-liberal party with significant backing in the Cape Coloured 3 and white communities), the Patriotic Alliance (a right-wing populist and anti-immigrant party), Freedom Front Plus (FPP, an ultra-reactionary and racist Afrikaner4 party), the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP, a virulently anti-communist, anti-worker Zulu-nationalist party), amongst some other smaller ones.

Since first coming to office in 1994 – both during and after the earlier Government of National Unity with FW de Klerk’s National Party broke apart in 1999 – the ANC governed at the head of the Tripartite Alliance, a class-collaborationist “popular front” together with the South African Communist Party (SACP), and Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). Throughout this period of “majority rule,” although the political system was bourgeois “democracy,” South African capitalism has remained intact and continues to be based on the brutal superexploitation of black labor in the mines, the economic basis of apartheid rule.

Since 2017, the ANC has been headed by mining boss Ramaphosa, who has been president since 2018. The stark contradictions of neo-apartheid South Africa were laid bare in the 2012 Marikana massacre, when 34 striking miners were gunned down by the police.5 Ramaphosa, the founding leader of the National Union of Mineworkers, had by then become a member of the board of directors of the struck mine, and called for the police to be used against the strikers. That he has now broken with the Tripartite ANC-SACP-COSATU Alliance follows the logic of his personal evolution, and of the popular front, which invariably spells defeat for the workers.

As the social and economic crises in the country have been exacerbated over the past few decades, the ANC has lost popular support gained during the struggle against apartheid, and has now pivoted to align with those same political forces (the FFP and IFP) which fought to keep the system of white minority rule chugging along. And recently the South African Police carried out Operation Vala Umgodi, surrounding hundreds of informal miners trapped in a Stilfontein gold mine, preventing aid and delaying rescue operations for months, from August 2024. When they were finally let out in January 2025, only 284 survived, while 87 had died in this mass murder.6

The ANC has presided over the maintenance of capitalism in a country where the majority of the politically conscious working class considers themselves communist or socialist. It serves to maintain the wealth of the white business magnates, the black nouveau riche, the Randlords7 and imperialists. It resorted to the current “national unity” government as the only way to maintain political control, having garnered only 40% of the vote in the last election, while the EFF won 10% and disgraced former ANC leader and president Jacob Zuma’s uMkhonto we Sizwe (not to be confused with the armed-wing of the ANC during Apartheid) party got 15%.

Forward to Socialist Revolution

The fracturing of the Tripartite Alliance and its utter failure to bring a decent life to those who toil in the mines and lack essential services in the impoverished, segregated townships, has pushed the rulers further to the right, but it also offers openings for revolutionaries, as well as for opportunists. The League for the Fourth International calls to fight for a black-centered workers government and socialist revolution throughout Africa. The International Communist League (ICL) and Spartacist South Africa, however, while rightly campaigning to defend Xolani Khoza against repression cross the class line by giving “critical support” to the bourgeois populist EFF.8

The EFF is headed by demagogue Julius Malema who cut his teeth in the ANC Youth League, forming the EFF after his expulsion from the ANC. He seeks to get a piece of the pie by exclusively promoting the black bourgeoisie. The EFF calls for expropriation of land without compensation, but says that land leases may be “applied for by private corporations and individuals.”9 He also says he would uphold South Africa’s constitution, which protects private property (Section 25). As for immigrants, who have been the targets of murderous pogroms, partly incited by the Ramaphosa government, EFF leader Malema says, “They must come with their documents” (African Times, 28 May 2024).

The ICL also sharply criticized the EFF up until 2020, saying, “While the EFF uses left-sounding populist rhetoric, both [it and the ANC] are bourgeois-nationalist parties that represent the class enemy” (Workers Vanguard, 3 May 2019). This is true! So why the pivot? The ICL, under new nationalist-oriented management, now endorses a “two-stage” revolution in South Africa and elsewhere, completely abandoning the Trotskyist program of permanent revolution. In justifying its political support for the bourgeois EFF, the ex-Trotskyist ICL calls for “national liberation” is at bottom the same as the “National Democratic Revolution” espoused by Stalinists, pseudo-Trotskyists and “socialists” of all stripes under apartheid.

South Africa has recently been in the crosshairs of U.S. imperialism under President Donald Trump, who has denounced the 2022 law providing for expropriation of unused land, saying that it “blatantly discriminates against ethnic minority Afrikaners.” This is no outlier, as his hatchet man Elon Musk, who grew up in South Africa, has accused South Africa of having “racist ownership laws” and slammed the government for supposedly doing little to stop what he called “genocide” against white farmers. For a reality check, 72% of land in South Africa is owned by whites (Government of South Africa, Land Audit Report [2018]).

Citing South Africa’s very limited land expropriation law, Trump offered to bring white South African “refugees” to the U.S. and issued an executive order cutting off all U.S. aid to South Africa, including funding for programs for HIV/AIDS treatment. But whether under Democrat Biden or Republican Trump, U.S. imperialism is an enemy of the working and oppressed peoples of Africa, supporting formal apartheid up to the end, and today deploying its Africa Command in the Sahel region of West Africa. Revolutionary internationalists call to drive out the U.S. and all imperialists, and for a socialist federation of Africa.

Support to the EFF or any bourgeois faction spells more misery for South Africa’s working class. Only class independence of the working class can lead to genuine liberation, which in South African means fighting for a black-centered workers government, not a “progressive” black bourgeoisie! And only a party forged in class struggle, on the proletarian internationalist program of Lenin and Trotsky, can lead this fight to victory. ■

  1. 1. The Act, drafted by the ANC in 2020, provides for market-rate compensation for expropriation save for cases in which the land is not in use (usually in order to cash in on rising land prices), and in instances wherein the market value of the land is equal to or less than existing state investment on that land.
  2. 2. Zuma demagogically took the name of the ANC’s armed wing in the anti-apartheid struggle.
  3. 3.Cape Coloured are an interracial population, predominant in the Western Cape region.
  4. 4.Afrikaners are the white South African ethnic group descended from the mostly Dutch settlers who first arrived in the region in 1652. They were the base of the National Party, the predominant political force under the white-supremacist apartheid regime.
  5. 5.See “Bloody South Africa Mine Massacre Unmasks ANC Neo-Apartheid Regime,” The Internationalist, November-December 2012.
  6. 6. See “Death of Miners in South Africa a Government Failure,” Human Rights Watch, 22 January 2025. “"We are not sending help to criminals. We are going to smoke them out…. Criminals are not to be helped; criminals are to be prosecuted,” said a government minister (Deutsche Welle, 14 November 2024).
  7. 7. Owners of the mines on the Witwatersrand.
  8. 8. See SSA leaflet of 27 April 2024, reprinted in AmaBolsheviki Amnyama No. 2, 24 November 2024.
  9. 9. From the Founding Manifesto of the Economic Freedom Fighters. See “On Land Expropriation Without Compensation: Frequently Asked Questions” (2020). The call for nationalization of land is a supportable democratic – rather than socialist – demand, essentially to break up monopolies of land ownership, which South Africa certainly suffers from.