Pod Save the World - Trump's racist South Africa conspiracy theory

Episode Date: August 29, 2018

Last week, President Trump tweeted about a segment on Tucker Carlson's Fox News show that claimed white farmers in South Africa are being murdered and that the government is taking away their land. The Economist's Africa bureau chief John McDermott joins to explain what the hell he's talking about and what he got wrong.

Welcome back to Pot Save the World. Thank you guys for tuning in. This is Tommy Vitor. Today, I am talking about a Trump tweet. No, it is not one decrying fake news or alleging a witch hunted is something far more strange acclaim about a rampage of murders in the stealing of land from white farmers in South Africa. My guest is John McDermott. He's the Africa Bureau Chief for the Economist. He lives in Johannesburg. Before that, he's a white farmers in South Africa. He's the that he wrote at the Financial Times. He's a very smart reporter, observer, and he helps us understand whether there are any truth to these claims or if they are just a racist trope used by some of the most wretched people on the internet to spread racist views. I'll leave it to you to decide which one of those two it is. But grateful for him jumping on the phone all the way from Johannesburg, where it was quite late at night for him when we talked.

So here is the interview. If you enjoy this, please share it with your friends. Rate and review us in the iTunes store. It helps a lot. And here we go. On August 22nd at around 7.30 p.m. President Trump tweeted the following. I have asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations. That's a hard word to say.

And the large-scale killing of farmers. South African government is now seizing land from white farmers, tagged at Tucker Carlson at Fox News. Trump was apparently watching Tucker Carlson's show on Fox, who featured a segment about South Africa that claimed white farmers were being targeted in a wave of murders. Instead of protecting them, he said the South African government was preparing to take their farms. Since the president decided to tag Tucker Carlson in his tweet, let's play a little bit of sound from that segment about South Africa.

We've got an exclusive investigation for you tonight. The president of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, has begun, and you may have seen this in the press, seizing land from his own citizens. without compensation because they are the wrong skin color. That is literally the definition of racism. Racism is what our elites say they dislike most. Donald Trump is a racist, they say. But they paid no attention to this at all.

In fact, Ramaphosa is one of Barack Obama's favorite leaders in the world. In a speech just a few weeks ago, Obama praised him. He praised the racist government of South Africa, and Ramaphosa by name for, quote, inspiring hope throughout the country. Many observers in the U.S. and abroad scratched their head at this tweet, but unfortunately, the virulent white nationalists and assorted racists on social media cheered. So, John, first question, everyone in South Africa must be freaking out about this rampage of murder and land stealing, right? I mean, this has to be the biggest story ever in the country. Yes, they are freaking out at the same time as the vast majority of white people also employ black gardeners and,

black domestic workers. It's quite a paradox. Yes, I am, of course, being sarcastic because, as we'll go through, there doesn't seem to be any basis, in fact, for these allegations. So let's start with his claim that there are some rampage of murderers. I saw a recent study that said the killings of farmers generally is at a 20-year low and has been in steady decline since 1998. New York Times reported that the South African government actually doesn't break down homicide statistics by race. So it's not clear where these statistics, are coming from. I mean, does that jive with your understanding of crime rates in South Africa? It does. So last year, or 2016, 2017, there were 74 murders of farmers in South Africa,

which sounds pretty bad, right? But then you realize that sadly, there's been 19,000 murders in the whole country. South Africa is a violent place. It has the 10th highest murder rate in the world. Cape Town, which many people know as this beautiful, spectacular city, is actually the most violent city outside of the Americas. And in addition to that context, you have to understand that, as you pointed out, these statistics are not broken down by race. And the majority of people who work on farms are black, not white. So it's quite possible, although we don't know, that actually the main victims of attacks on farms are black farm workers. That's interesting.

I did not know that about the general crime rate that is disconcerting. If you take a list of the 15 most violent cities in the world, I think 13 are in Latin America. One is St. Louis and the other is Cape Town. So regarding the second claim about land seizure, it is true that the South African government, the ANC, plan to change the country's constitution. to allow the seizure of some land without compensation, right? I mean, why are they making that change? It's a big question, and you do have to unpack it a little bit.

You don't necessarily have to start in 1651 when the Dutch rocked up to what is now Cape Town, but you do have to start some way back, which Tucker Carlson didn't on his show. There was the great moment in that segment when he tried to define racism for South Africans. I'm just sitting there watching it being like, I think these guys have a pretty good idea about what that is. Yeah, yeah. Let's do that. Yeah, let's do that. So, I mean, I guess we should

start with the legacy apartheid, right? I mean, my understanding, you know, apartheid was a period from essentially the mid, early 40s through 1991 or 1994, really, of just institutionalized racism in South Africa. And under apartheid, the majority of the black population was moved to segregated areas that made up, I think, like 13% of the country's land. And then according to a 2016 audit of land ownership, white farmers still owned nearly 73% of the nation's agricultural lands. So I believe 8% of South Africa's population is white according to the census. So I mean, isn't that just a glaring injustice that the government is trying to tackle? Yeah, and it's been trying to tackle it since 1994. And like you say, this is the deep,

legacy of not just apartheid, but the system of racial segregation that was in place before then. And that system was, it was cruel and it was vast and it was extensive. You had millions of Black South Africans after 1948 being removed from where they lived and put into cramped pretty vile, often homelands from which they were only irregularly taken out in order to work on the mines. And that legacy is still apparent today, despite what the ANC has tried to do since 1994. It tried to do a number of things, but there were broadly three. One was to give restitution for those people who were moved off the land, so to say, here is your land back, or at least here is some cash compensation.

The second was to try to buy up white-owned farmland on the open market and then redistribute it to black farmers. And the third was to give black South Africans in the main who didn't have proper property rights secure title. So they could take out mortgage and go to the bank and things like that. And so I read that, you know, I think I saw that in 1994, white farm ownership was around 85%. Now it's apparently 73%. So it doesn't seem like a lot of progress has been made since apartheid ended to more fairly distribute land. Is that fair? It's fair up to a point.

Those statistics that you cite only refer to the land that's held by individuals. So there's a whole bunch of other land that's held by companies and trusts and crucially by the government as well. So you see other statistics that suggest perhaps black ownership is a bit higher. And there has been some redistribution from white farm owners to black farm owners. But like with all of the efforts that land reform that the ANC has done since 1994, it's been slow and it's been inept. So while the ANC was, of course, not responsible for the unjust legacy that inherited in 1994, I think most people would agree that it's done far too little to write those wrong since.

Well, so the government is seeking this authority, this constitutional change that would allow them to redistribute land. It doesn't necessarily mean they're going to use it, right? I mean, do you have a sense of whether they will actually move on this issue or, you know, you mentioned previously that a lot of efforts have been stalled and slow at best? Yeah, you need to step back a little bit and understand the political context of kind of South Africa in 2018. So there's a general election next year, and when general elections approach, there's a lot of politic going on. Since February, South Africa has had a new president, a guy called Cyril Ramaphosa, who took over from a guy called Jacob Zuma, who was deeply corrupt and ruined considerable number of South Africa's institutions. And when he took power, when he, Ramaphosa, took power, he was faced with a divided A-institutional. party, which still runs South Africa, but also a kind of growing impatience on the left of

the country's political scene. There's a splinter group party called the Economic Freedom Fighters. And so he was under pressure to do something to show that he was going to be different to Jacob Zuma, that he was doing something about the rampant economic inequality that's still apparent in South Africa. And land reform, making a gesture on land reform was one way to do that. The details, though, as you say, are still unclear. They've said they will amend South Africa's constitution to make it easier or to clarify the conditions under which land could be taken without compensation.

but there's a long way to go before any of that's actually done. And he has said that they would only do this in a way that would not harm the economy and not harm food production, which is a coded way of saying we are not Zimbabwe. So, I mean, just sort of level set on the initial claims Trump was making, these groups were making. It seems like one, the statistics around the murders is just simply inaccurate and frankly, it looks like the numbers are somewhat fabricated.

The question of whether land will be taken and redistributed is TBD. It may happen, but it sounds like you think there's a whole lot of steps that need to happen before anything will actually be moved on. So it kind of brings me back to the tweet to the Tucker Carlson segment and the fact that there are these right-wing groups pushing this lie and they found a willing audience from right-wing racist trolls in the United States like Alex Jones or Anne Coulter or Tucker Carlson. I mean, apparently they are groups from South Africa are making visits to Washington. I read that one of them sat down with Ted Cruz. They sat down with the Cato Institute.

Are these arguments being made in South Africa? Or are they just lobbying foreign governments for action? The white nationalist argument is not something you hear a lot about in South Africa. It's something that's actually kind of pushed more by people from outside than inside. Earlier this year, Australia's Home Affairs Minister, he had picked up on some of the same stuff that Tucker Carlson presumably picked up on. And then he offered asylum to what he called Australia's oppressed and cricket-loving cousins. But in South Africa itself, it's not something that comes up a lot. South Africans are in many ways I see more comfortable talking about issues of race than, say, Americans are. it's something that's salient, which perhaps kind of tempers some of the extremes.

And when it comes to land reform, the two schools of thought are broadly those who think it's not especially important to their daily lives, but has a lot of symbolic value. And those that understand that symbolic value, but think that it's a kind of economically dangerous thing to do. Yeah, you mean, you mentioned these comments by the Australian Home Minister, who has jumped on these news stories too. I mean, two questions. One, do we have a sense that these officials are reading these reports and genuinely being fooled or by essentially fake news? Or do we think this is fitting into a worldview that they want to push? One, and is there a concern in South Africa that

President Trump regurgitating these right-wing tropes could supercharge the story and increase the amount of people who think that this is actually happening? I'm not sure as to how these ideas get in front of politicians, you'll probably have a better idea than I do. As to the second question, yeah, I mean, it's not played particularly well. You've got Ramaphosa today saying in a speech, you know, stay out of our issues, Trump, stay out of our issues, which incidentally has a long history as well.

I mean, many Americans are loved in South Africa, but the American government as a whole still has a bit of a kind of rocky reputation because economic sanctions by America weren't applied to apartheid South Africa until 1986 properly. And people like Ramaphosa who are part of the struggle, they don't forget that stuff very easily. What I think the danger of something like Trump's tweets are in a country like South Africa is, is while race is something that people are comfortable talking about, when there is such economic inequality and such economic problems, anything that kind of stirs up.

up racial hatred, either by whites towards blacks or often from blacks towards whites, is dangerous. Could that be why the government in South Africa called bullshit on Trump's claim pretty quickly? One official called it hysterical and based on false information. I mean, was this huge news in South Africa? And were you surprised by how swift and strong the reaction was? It was big news in South Africa.

and I think sometimes it pays just to remember where South Africa is on a map. It's at the southern tip of a big continent. It can feel like you're quite far away from the rest of the world here. And when you have the president of the United States making, I think only his second tweet about Africa, the other being that has shithole countries about your country, then you stand up. And yeah, it's been all. on the TV news, the talk radio stations, which are popular here, have been talking about it. So it's become very salient.

How much you think the ANC has riding on getting this right? I mean, you mentioned when Jacob Zuma stepped down earlier this year. You know, he survived all these scandals, but ultimately fell out of favor with basically everybody. The ANC has this great history. It's the party of Mandela. They've shouldered so much of the promise of ending apartheid. How much are people looking to them to make meaningful reforms quickly? This is a huge year ahead for the A&C.

Like you say, it has this incredible history, of which most South Africans, white and black, are very proud. But there is a real sense in which, since 1994, while there has been some progress, it has made many, many mistakes. And those were especially prevalent under Jacob Zuma. I mean, he ruined this country's institutions. I was trying to think of a way of explaining this to Americans.

And perhaps if you imagine that if the Treasury, the IRS, the FBI, the DOJ, the CIA, the Department for Interior and the Department for Energy were all run by Donald Trump's cronies and all of the ostensibly neutral officials in the way down were all run by Donald Trump's cronies, and they were all seeking to get off the criminal friends of the president, then you'd have some sense of how badly things got. So South Africans are affectionate towards the ANC, but they're also impatient. And it's important to remember that as of next year,

the median age of a South African will be 25, which means that half of the country won't have been alive when Mandela became president. So they have less reason to care about the struggle narrative. And this is where we find ourselves on the eve of the election. A deep residual of warmth towards the ANC, it will win the next election. But the question is whether it can do so in such a way

that solidifies its whole whole. on power or whether it will kind of go back. It won 62% I think at the last election, but most people think it might drop below that. Wow. That generational issue raised is so interesting because I mean, the thing about apartheid and it's an evil policy and it was so recent. I mean, this was occurring in the early 90s and, you know, I also don't know that young Americans realized how wrong the United States was on this issue for a long time. It was not that long ago that you know, Reagan was denouncing the ANC as a terrorist organization and Mandela was on a watch list. I mean, that did not change until George W. Bush, I believe. I mean, is America looked

at fondly and is that someone who helped in the struggle or is it wary? South Africans have a huge affection for America. And in many ways, South Africa, it feels quite American. If you're here, you know, there's very much a driving culture. It's quite outdoorsy, people go to malls, there's a shouty cable news culture as well. And there's this huge affection for many of the Americans who were involved in the struggle, especially often kind of church leaders, black church leaders. But like I was saying before, the legacy of government policy isn't easily forgotten. And many of the people high up in the ANC still to this day naturally gravitate towards Chinese ideals, which stems originally from the

role of China and to a less extent the Soviet Union in the struggle. There have been a bunch of news stories about the land reform in South Africa that are making comparisons to what happened in Zimbabwe under Mugabe's rule. Can you give just a quick overview of what Mugabe did and how that may or may not be different and whether you think that the comparison is appropriate and fair? It's not a fair comparison. For a start, there actually were land seizures in Zimbabwe. And just to repeat, there are no land seizures taking place in South Africa.

In 2000, Robert Magabee, who by that point had been dictator in Zimbabwe for two decades, he was fearing that he would lose the general election, which would have been a sham anyway. but in order to shore up support amongst some of the people in his base, he essentially gave them free reign to expropriate the mostly white-held farms in Zimbabwe. And this unleashed chaos, unleashed violence. There were dozens of attacks, very violent, not just on the white farm owners, but again on the black farm workers. And this left a catastrophic economic legacy.

Zimbabri today is poorer than it was in the 1980s. This is a country that used to export food to the rest of the continent. It now relies on USAID for food parcels for millions of its people. My final question for you is a broad one. And I realize that Africa is a continent comprised of many, many people in countries. but as you travel around South Africa, as you visit other countries or report, what do you hear about President Trump in the state of U.S. politics? I mean, has the shithole countries comment resonated and change the way people think of us? I think people are able to differentiate America from

Trump. But at the same time, I think it does worry people in the kind of African capital. cities that I visit, that America is run by somebody who, to put it frankly, could be one of their leaders. And that has been something that people have said to me, people expect better from the United States. And this matters, I think, because it's sad. But it also matters because it potentially accelerates a kind of broader structural trend, which is taking place.

And that is the looking eastwards of many of these countries towards China where so much of the investment for infrastructure and the like comes from. So if you don't have a president who is engaged in the continent and at the very least seems to respect you, then why wouldn't you just go ever more towards Beijing, especially when it gives you money without calling you a shithole country? So you mentioned China's investment. I mean, they have this broader. initiative called Belt and Road, where they're essentially paying for huge projects all across

the planet as a way to exert influence. I mean, is that, are you seeing the effects of those investments and more of a Chinese presence and influence on policy in countries across the continent? I haven't been here for so long. I mean, Chinese investment in Africa has been taking place for decades now, and some of it is being wrapped into this kind of broader, slightly nebulous Belt and Road initiative. The key. thing now for many African countries in relation to Chinese investment, though, is that the money is starting to be required to be paid back. And if you remember maybe a couple of decades ago now, there was this huge kind of groundswell of dropping the debts that many African countries

has gotten themselves into. And largely that process was successful. A lot of countries got debt relief and others grew their way out of some of their economic problems. But if you look at recent reports, for example, from the International Monetary Fund, they point to a rise of worrying debt levels again in many African countries, often because they owe quite a lot of money to China. Zambia is one that is worrying people in particular, Mozambique as well. So while the Chinese investment, is clear to see for anyone who travels around Africa.

I mean, you can see trains and roads that have been built with Chinese money. It's what you're not seeing that is potentially more worrying. And that's the accounts of a lot of these government's treasuries. Yeah. I also worry just generally about the total vacuum in terms of American leadership and presence and any effort to push countries on human rights or good governance or corruption or literally any of the things that we have been doing for the last century. Very imperfectly, I would add.

But, you know, I should at least be trying. John, thank you so much for helping us understand what the hell this tweet was all about. It is at once complicated, but also very clear that some dark forces in the United States and other places are trying to use this lie to spread a racist trope. And thank you for help push back on that bullshit. Who knew that Fox wasn't the place? the go-to for your African news. Cheers, Tommy.

Yeah. You're right, you're right. Thanks again, John. Talk to you soon. Cheers, bye. Thanks again to John McDermott from The Economist. Thanks to you guys for listening. I greatly appreciate it.

And have a good week.