THE LATEST foreign policy nonsense from Trump and his cronies is aimed at South Africa. Earlier this week, Trump blasted that nation of 60.5 million people, saying that it is treating “certain classes of people very badly” and announcing a cutoff of foreign aid.

On Wednesday, Trump’s Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, chimed in. Announcing that he would boycott the February 20 meeting of the G20 nations, he accused South Africa of being racist against its white citizens and of being “anti-American.” Elon Musk, himself of white South African birth and ancestry (as is this author, by the way), also piled on with attacks.

Bashing the black-led South African government has really become all the rage in Washington.

The Trump gang also retailed an accusation made by far-right white South African diehards who long for a return to the apartheid days, namely that white farmers are being massacred with the connivance of the present government. This is a vile lie. South Africa has a murder problem, but it is not a matter of white farmers being specifically targeted.

The main accusations being made are malicious and ridiculous. Currently, whites make up about 7 per cent of the population of South Africa, but 72 per cent of privately owned farmland is in white hands. There is a historical reason for this disparity — a reality that Trump, Rubio, and Musk are refusing to talk about.

Whites first arrived in South Africa in 1652, with the establishment in Cape Town of a post whose intention was to supply ships sailing from the Netherlands to Indonesia, at that time a Dutch colony. As happened in other non-European countries when European colonists showed up, a trading post soon turned into an invasion, as more Dutch, Huguenot (French Protestant religious refugees), and other European settlers showed up and spread northward and eastward from the Cape Town region.

Very soon, conflicts arose between the Christian European settlers and the indigenous population.

Some indigenous sectors were virtually wiped out by the whites’ superior weapons and introduced diseases. Also, a mixed race group of people came into being, with European, Indonesian, and indigenous African ancestry, and, in some cases, Muslim religion. Some of these developed their own micro-states which fought hard against white incursions. Most, however, eventually lost their land to the whites.

But further away from the original Cape colony, there were larger-scale African states which were based on crop raising and cattle farming. These were going to be more difficult to subdue, for they had authoritative governments and warrior traditions.

In 1815, the settlement of the Napoleonic wars transferred the Cape Colony to Britain. Objecting to British policy, especially the abolition of slavery, numerous Dutch settlers and their families moved northward. Here they clashed with more powerful indigenous African states.

Several of these settler groups formed ”Afrikaner” statelets of their own: the Orange Free State, and to the east, the South African Republic, often called the Transvaal. A little later, a number of British settlers arrived in regions eastward of the original Cape Colony. They, too, were land hungry, which brought them into conflict with the Xhosa states and, later, Zulu states.

In just one example among many, the little African kingdom of Lesotho was eyed with envy by the Orange Free State. In the 1850s, this led to wars between Lesotho’s king, Moshoeshoe I, and the Free Staters, with British involvement at one point. Lesotho survived but had to give up a huge amount of land to the Free State Boers.

In short, white colonials, often abetted by the British government, seized vast amounts of agricultural and pasturage land from the indigenous African population, often by force. But it did not end there, and force was not the only tactic used in this piracy.

In 1867, diamonds were discovered in South Africa. Then in 1884, vast gold deposits were unearthed in the Witwatersrand region of the Transvaal Republic. This mining industry required thousands of wage workers and jump-started the business career of the British businessman and ruthless imperialist, Cecil John Rhodes.

The idea of Rhodes and his allies was to push indigenous African farmers off their land and force them to work for low wages in the mines. White farmers liked the idea, too, because it would mean they could grab more land and also access very poorly paid farm labourers to work it.

This plan was implemented by two laws that had disastrous effects for black South Africans. The first was the Glen Grey Act, passed by the Cape Colony Parliament in 1894. Originally applied to a small area in the Cape, it was seen by Rhodes as a trial run that could be implemented later in all of South Africa and beyond.

Rhodes’s rationale had a strong racist tone: his view was that “natives” must be treated differently from the Europeans. Communal or collective ownership of land under existing “tribal” law was to be undermined and replaced by individual ownership, and not only was land to be freed up for acquisition by whites, but displaced black agriculturalists and stock raisers would thereby be made available as cheap labour for the growing mining industry, and other sectors controlled by white farmers and capitalists.

To push people off the land and turn them into cheap labour for capitalists was the main purpose, not a by-product.

South Africa gained effective independence in 1910. Even more abusive practices followed, long before the implementation of “apartheid” in 1948. Taxes were imposed on guns, dogs, and “huts” which could not be paid in produce, only in cash. And cash was only to be had if one worked for it in jobs controlled by the whites. And you could not move just anywhere in the country to find a better job, that was controlled by the authorities, too.

In 1913, the Parliament of the Union of South Africa (as the country was now called) passed the “Native Lands Act.” It was the true precursor of the apartheid system, and a disaster for all South Africans not of European origin. The act prohibited blacks from purchasing or renting land in 93 per cent of the country. In 1936, the law was changed so that 13.5 per cent of the land was available for purchase by black South Africans. There were areas of reserved land exclusively for “Natives,” but they were often not the most fertile or well-watered.

So, this is the history behind the present policy of the South African government to deal with the unequal distribution of land between the races.

That policy is very moderate. For the most part, up to now, land transfer has taken place on a “willing seller, willing buyer” basis, not just uncompensated land seizure. The policy to which Trump and friends object is extremely limited and is governed by a legal regime similar to “eminent domain” in US law. As a matter of fact, there are political forces in South Africa who think the government’s policy is far too timid and weak.

There are probably more factors behind the Trumpists’ attack on South Africa. The country is part of Brics, friendly to socialist Cuba, and acting to bring Israeli leaders to trial at the International Criminal Court. All of these things threaten US imperialism, thus South Africa is a target.

This article appeared in People’s World.