JOHANNESBURG—When President Donald Trump issued an executive order condemning the South African government’s alleged plan to seize white-owned farms, it reignited debate about land reform in Africa’s largest economy.
Commentaries and feature stories often cast white landowners as perpetrators of racism, continuing to farm territory they own by virtue of apartheid and colonialism, while their workers and nearby indigenous black inhabitants, the true owners of the land, live in poverty and squalor.