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It Begins: South Africa Officially Starts Seizing White-Owned Land

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American liberals love to talk about the supposedly rampant racism and oppression of minorities in the United States, but recoil and look away when presented with examples of blatant racism and obvious oppression of racial minorities in other countries — if those minorities don’t fit the liberal worldview.

Right now, that means what is happening in South Africa, where the majority black government is literally stealing land away from minority white farmers to be redistributed among the black population as compensation for past racial sins, ignoring the timeless adage that two wrongs don’t make a right.

In response to racially oppressive policies by apartheid-era South African governments, the current African National Congress ruling party has enacted a policy that will expropriate land from white farmers, without just or reasonable compensation, to be redistributed among the majority black population. And it looks like that policy has already been put into action for at least two parcels of land, according to Australia’s News.com.

Local media in South Africa is reporting that two game farms in the northern province of Limpopo are slated to be seized by the government at an unspecified date, a decision that was made after “negotiations” broke down between the government and the land owners.

One of the land owners, Akkerland Boerdery, demanded he be compensated 200 million rand — roughly $18.7 million — for his land and the improvements on it, but the government offered him only one-tenth of that price, 20 million rand, or about $1.87 million.

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Boerdery had received notice that his land would be seized from him earlier in the year via a letter from the government’s Department of Rural Development and Land Affairs, but managed to obtain an emergency injunction by a court to prevent his eviction until the court issued an ultimate ruling on the matter. Of course, the department opposed that motion.

“What makes the Akkerland case unique is that they apparently were not given the opportunity to first dispute the claim in court, as the law requires,” Annelize Crosby, a spokeswoman for the AgriSA union, told the City Press newspaper.

The effort to take Boerdery’s land without just compensation is believed to be a “test case” on the whole expropriation policy, which some believe is already allowed under a certain provision in South Africa’s constitution — as it is being done “in the public interest.” Others are calling for an amendment to the constitution that would specifically allow for expropriation of white-owned land without any compensation.

The reasoning behind this manifestly racist and tyrannical policy of stealing white-owned farms to be redistributed communally among blacks is the fact that some 72 percent of private farmland in South Africa is owned by whites, who number only about 4.6 million in the entire country and make up less than 9 percent of the population.

Do you think this South African policy is racist?

Previously, after the racist apartheid regime fell in 1994, the South African government had an appropriate “willing seller, willing buyer” policy with regard to the desire to see fewer white-owned farms and more black-owned farms, but that apparently wasn’t righting the racial wrongs fast enough, so to speak.

Ominously, the Boerdery farm was near the top of a list released by a civil rights group known as Afriforum. Afriforum represents the white Afrikaner minority and claimed the list of about 190 farms was being “circulated” among the Department of Rural Development and Land Affairs as prime pieces of land that were targeted for expropriation.

The government has denied using such a list and claimed it was fake, with department spokeswoman Linda Page telling the media outlet News24: “We don’t know where they got (the list) from. There is no truth to this document.”

The government, as well as South African media, has slammed Afriforum for “fearmongering” and distributing “fake news,” but the deputy CEO of Afriforum, Ernst Roets, countered by pointing out that the two targeted farms were the first two farms on the list he had leaked.

“So the debate about the authenticity of the list is settled then?” Roets asked via Twitter.

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“We hope that the gravity of the state’s plans for expropriation is understood and that people will see through the dishonesty of the Department of Land Reform and Rural Development. We hope that the attempts to discredit the legitimacy of the list has now been proven to be malicious for good. We shouldn’t be misled by those who sing Kumbaya while the state is planning to expropriate property,” he added.

According to News.com, a farmer named Jo-An Englebrecht, who operates a cattle ranch outside Johannesburg, explained to the media last month how his land was now “worth zero” in light of the expropriation policy, and described how he couldn’t even sell his land if he wanted to now, as “Why would you buy a farm to know the government’s going to take it?”

This anti-white racist policy of expropriating land without compensation from minority white farmers by the majority black government in South Africa has been all but ignored by the liberal American media. While that in and of itself is a travesty, it is also quite revealing of just how one-sided the liberal view of racism truly is.

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Ben Marquis is a writer who identifies as a constitutional conservative/libertarian. He has written about current events and politics for The Western Journal since 2014. His focus is on protecting the First and Second Amendments.
Ben Marquis has written on current events and politics for The Western Journal since 2014. He reads voraciously and writes about the news of the day from a conservative-libertarian perspective. He is an advocate for a more constitutional government and a staunch defender of the Second Amendment, which protects the rest of our natural rights. He lives in Little Rock, Arkansas, with the love of his life as well as four dogs and four cats.
Birthplace
Louisiana
Nationality
American
Education
The School of Life
Location
Little Rock, Arkansas
Languages Spoken
English
Topics of Expertise
Politics




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