JOHANNESBURG — Legal arguments over South Africa’s polarizing Expropriation Act, a land reform policy that has severely strained bilateral ties between Pretoria and the former Trump administration, got underway in the Western Cape High Court on Monday. The judicial challenge marks a critical flashpoint in the country’s decades-long effort to redress historical injustices stemming from the apartheid era.
Enacted last year by President Cyril Ramaphosa, the Expropriation Act forms the cornerstone of the South African government’s push to address the deep-rooted land dispossession and systemic economic inequality that defined 40 years of white minority apartheid rule, which formally ended in 1994. Under the legislation, the national government gains the authority to seize privately held land when doing so serves the public good. It also allows for expropriation without financial compensation in cases where negotiations over a fair purchase price collapse. Government officials have repeatedly emphasized that the law does not permit arbitrary land seizures, and that its core goal is to bring underutilized private land into productive use to benefit historically disadvantaged Black South African communities.
The law has sparked fierce domestic and international backlash. Then-U.S. President Donald Trump claimed the legislation was crafted to specifically target white South African farmers, and used the policy as justification to cut all U.S. financial aid to South Africa and place steep new trade tariffs on the country. The Trump administration also moved to grant asylum to Afrikaner farmers—descendants of Dutch and other European settlers who arrived in South Africa more than 300 years ago—who claimed they faced systemic persecution, a claim the South African government rejects.
Leading the domestic legal challenge is the Democratic Alliance, South Africa’s main opposition party that currently holds a seat in the country’s national unity government. The party has joined forces with multiple civil society and lobby groups to contest the law’s constitutionality. Other parties to the lawsuit include the Institute for Race Relations, which argues the law fails to establish sufficient protections for private property rights, and AfriForum, a prominent Afrikaner advocacy organization.
On the opening day of proceedings, legal representatives for the challengers argued that the Expropriation Act directly violates foundational protections for private property enshrined in South Africa’s post-apartheid constitution, which explicitly bans the expropriation of land without just compensation. Court proceedings are scheduled to continue through the end of this week, but there is no clear timeline for when judges will issue a final ruling. Judicial observers note the ruling could take weeks or even months to be delivered, as the court weighs the complicated constitutional and societal questions at the heart of the case.