THREE major human rights problems stand out in South Africa today: an extreme and intensifying imbalance in wealth; the corruption and incompetence that exacerbate this; and violence perpetrated on women and children. The recently released US State Department report for 2024, which has caused justifiable anger among South Africans, mentions none of these. Instead, in 21 pages it refers to Afrikaners four times and raises the issue of pro-Hamas government ministers and officials. This is clearly a MAGA document.

It would be an embarrassment from a first-year university student. The executive summary highlights the Expropriation Act of December 2024, seeing it as specifically aimed at Afrikaners; arbitrary and unlawful killings, arrests and detention by police; and repression of racial minorities.  No one living in South Africa would recognise these as day-to-day problems.

Over twelve months from 2023 to 2024, the report claims, there were 447 murders on farms and smallholdings, but fails to note that most of the victims would be black workers. Another fact omitted from the report is that while this figure is no doubt accurate, it represents a tiny fraction of all annual murders. The lack of context suggests an attempt to justify claims of Afrikaner genocide. The report unsurprisingly raises the matter of the Economic Freedom Fighters’ use of the chant ‘Kill the farmer, kill the Boer’. Exactly how this piece of hate speech can be justified by the courts as freedom of expression is hard to know. It should be banned as potential incitement along with any invocation to murder, rape and assault. But there is no direct evidence that it has led to any farm attacks. Interestingly, the report does mention the continued disregard for farm worker labour rights; something in view of South Africa’s history that is far more likely to result in murder of farmers than a song. 

The State Department report also focuses on police abuse of human rights. This will be recognised by South Africans who have a very low opinion of their police force; except when it wipes out multiple alleged criminals in shootouts, something the report frowns upon. But it goes on to say that the Expropriation Act increases potential for police assaults and torture (p. 14). Exactly how this connection is made is impossible to know except that it is symptomatic of the amateurish nature of the report, which has all the appearance of a cut-and-paste job. So much for the State Department.

In this mish-mash of a report, apart from trigger-happy police other matters highlighted are intimidation of journalists and the press by politicians; and the arbitrary arrest of foreign workers, refugees and asylum seekers. What supreme irony: these are characteristic of the Trump administration not to mention its attacks on science, universities, museums, public service and the rule of law. Presumably the State Department is not required to produce an annual report on human rights in the USA, or it might be confronted by some embarrassing comparisons.

Interest by MAGA and the American right wing in Afrikaners has been highlighted by a recent publicity stunt in which two groups of them were given assisted passage as political refugees from supposed genocide; yet another exercise in performative politics by the Trump administration. One derivative South African joke was surprise that the USA had a shortage of car guards. The community that gave us apartheid has much in common with the MAGA crowd. Both consider themselves specially chosen by God and therefore separate and superior to others. The ICE reign of terror on the streets of America, particularly in cities that oppose Trump, is reminiscent of the pass law raids in South Africa. Their victims disappeared to prison farms; in America today, ICE sends people to detention centres or despatches them on secret flights to foreign destinations.

Right-wing populism embraces a wide variety of prejudices but it is frequently a cover for religious fundamentalism, paternalism and belief in the chosen. Extremists like Marjorie Taylor Greene have advocated a national divorce in the USA in which red states are distanced from blue (presumably states will be prevented from ever becoming blue), an American version of apartheid. This is an extreme manifestation of growing illiberalism that astute commentators are seeing as a veneration of Home in all its meanings: some people belong in the laager, others don’t. This is interpreted as the end of a long age of growing individual freedom and reversion to imposed group thinking and behaviour.

And this is fertile ground for conspiracy theory, fake news and inversion of the truth. Thus, current myths about Afrikaner genocide, Nazis running Ukraine, and recognition of a Palestinian right to self-determination as anti-Semitism. It is these false narratives that are gaining traction today in the service of authoritarianism.

The South African government was correct to pour scorn on the State Department report: it is shoddy in presentation, partisan and does not reflect the real problems of the country. Given their history, whites are lucky to enjoy a wide range of freedoms under the constitution and most are thriving economically contrary to the picture MAGA desires. But South Africa is hardly blameless in the deterioration of relations with the USA, a major donor and trading partner. Consorting with authoritarian regimes such as those of Russia and Iran and engaging with the terrorist organisation Hamas was likely to come back to bite.

And so indeed it has.