The contentious debate surrounding racial justice in South Africa, where historical oppression and contemporary land policies collide, raises questions about fairness and reparation, argues the writer.
Image: RON AI
Armstrong Williams
One way to appraise President Donald Trump’s thunder against South Africa’s putative discrimination against white farmers (who own the lion’s share of the country’s land) is through the eyes of white billionaires.
To them, it seems unfair to favour Blacks over whites in 2025 notwithstanding four centuries of savage white oppression of Black people, featuring unrequited toil and grand theft of land, gold and diamonds.
Under this understanding, justice is individual, not group.
Neither white nor Black people should pay for the sins of their ancestors.
Otherwise, we will be engaged in a never-ending cycle of recrimination and retaliation.
Two wrongs do not make a right. An alternate approach sees the situation through Black eyes. Four centuries ago, white Dutch Afrikaners began the colonisation of Black South Africa pursuant to the white man’s “doctrine of discovery.”
It was a euphemism for theft of the labor, land and minerals of indigenous Black people built on the gospel that in human affairs the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. Fabulous white wealth was generated from this stupendous white crime.
Afrikaners established farms on fertile soil for wheat, farm and livestock.
Land values spiked. The Dutch East India Company flourished off this agricultural output.
The British edged Afrikaners from their dominance in 1806. Diamonds and gold on land stolen from Black South Africans centuries before made the British rich symbolised by Cecil Rhodes.
The latter sermonised, “We have got to treat the natives, where they are in a state of barbarism, in a different way to ourselves. We are to be lords over them. These are my politics on native affairs, and these are the politics of South Africa. Treat the natives as a subject people as long as they continue in a state of barbarism and communal tenure … The native is to be treated as a child and denied the franchise.”
In the late 19th century, the Kimberley diamond fields produced diamonds worth millions of pounds annually, the equivalent of 100-150 million pounds today.
Since their discovery, the Kimberly diamond mines are estimated to have produced hundreds of billions of dollars of diamonds, which makes the 1963 Great Train Robbery seem like pocket change.
Gold discovered on land stolen from Black natives rivalled diamonds as a source of unfathomable white wealth.
The Witwatersrand Basin alone has yielded over 40,000 metric tons of gold with a modern value exceeding $2 trillion — which dwarfs even Elon Musk’s unrivalled riches.
The staggering wealth stolen by whites from Blacks in South Africa centuries ago was handed down generation after generation through wills or inheritance laws to remain in the hands of whites.
At present, white South Africans are enjoying the fruits in whole or in part of the crimes of their ancestors against South African Black natives.
What is their moral standing to gripe about discriminatory land laws?
Since 1994, the end of apartheid and the presidency of Nelson Mandela, Blacks have wrested political power from whites.
Who can blame them if they emulate their erstwhile white oppressors: The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must?
As William Faulkner observed, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
When you look at the sweep of history instead of a snapshot, white South Africans may be being treated very gently, not very badly.
This is not a case for reparations.
All experience proves it is a cure worse than the disease.
To get beyond racism, we must be colour-blind and judge only by character and accomplishments.
To the dead, however, we owe the truth, warts and all.
To ignore the history of South Africa exhibits a callousness and insensitivity that divides rather than unites.
The land redistribution scheme in South Africa that provoked Trump, moreover, mirrors the scheme in Hawaii to attack the social and economic evils of a land oligopoly sustained by the United States Supreme Court in Hawaiian Housing Authority v. Midkiff (1984).
Fairness, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.
Armstrong Williams (www.armstrongwilliams.com; @arightside) is a political analyst, syndicated columnist and owner of the broadcasting company, Howard Stirk Holdings. He is also part owner of The Baltimore Sun where this first appeared.
The views expressed here do not necessarily represent those of Independent Media or IOL.
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