U.S. President Donald Trump followed through on his promise to punish South Africa by signing an executive order Friday stopping all aid to the country over what he called a human rights violation against a white minority group.
The Trump administration says a land expropriation law South Africa recently passed was “blatantly” discriminatory against its white Afrikaners, who are descendants of Dutch and other European colonials. The Trump administration said the South African government was allowing violent attacks against Afrikaner farming communities.
It also accused South Africa of supporting “bad actors” in the world, including the militant Palestinian group Hamas, Russia and Iran.
Oh yeah on that I agree. I was merely trying to provide context for South Africa’s love for Russia but honestly, the Soviet Union and Russia aren’t even the same country. But people on the ground who aren’t that well educated or versed in history don’t see it that way.
Interesting to hear about Sweden. I can’t say they or any of the Scandinavian countries have ever come up in history class or even really featured much in geopolitical shenanigans involving South Africa for as long as I’ve been alive and able to form memories.
May I ask where you get the stats from? Not out of doubt, I’m just interested. And trying to search “ANC apartheid era funding” wasn’t very helpful.
The link downloads a pdf, so be forewarned; sorry, couldn’t find a simple webpage with it. First paragraph in gives the 400 million number, but if you go further in it describes it piecemeal and in Swedish krona, if you’ve an interest in more precise figures.
This primarily pro-Soviet piece cites 16 million rubles by official figures; I missed further down where it cited an additional 36 million rubles in military aid, which would make the total 52 million rubles, which would total ~70 million USD by official Soviet exchange rates. Quadrupling that number to factor in the price of goods and miscellanea still yields 280 million to Sweden’s 400 million, however; and while Sweden was by far the largest Western backer of the ANC, it was far from the only one.
Thank you! I will take a good look at that a little later when I’m in front of my laptop. Kind of a useless reply but I don’t want to come across like I’m ignoring this either while I still go on shitposting elsewhere.