The African National Congress (ANC) has slammed US President Donald Trump and local lobby group AfriForum, accusing them of advancing "swart gevaar " politics through their views on farm murders and land expropriation without compensation.

"I don’t think he [Trump] knows a country called South Africa. He thinks SA is a continent... he wants to polarise SA and reverse the gains we have made to build racial harmony, because all what he does is use fear factor, swart gevaar and, therefore, entrenches that we must accept the status quo of inequality," head of the Presidency Zizi Kodwa told News24.

He said Trump was undermining the US' standing internationally, with no one taking the country seriously because of him.

AfriForum welcomed Trump’s controversial tweet that his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, must "closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers".

The group said that Trump’s announcement followed their trip to the US to mobilise pressure against land expropriation without compensation. During the trip three months ago, they met with American think tank the Cato Institute, Fox News’s presenter Tucker Carlson and other institutions.

"Trump’s announcement is not only good news for property owners in SA, but for everyone in the country," AfriForum’s president Kallie Kriel said in a statement.

Trump tweeted after Carlson claimed on the conservative news channel that President Cyril Ramaphosa was a racist, as his government was expropriating land without compensation and targeting white people because of their skin colour.

"The ANC’s continued denial of the fact that farm murders, which are proportionally significantly higher than SA’s average murder rate, is a unique crisis that requires specific attention... [this] compelled Afriforum to also bring the farm murders crisis under the international community’s attention," Kriel said.

'Fossil of apartheid'

Kodwa labelled Trump a "modern leader of the racist group Ku Klux Klan and president of AfriForum in America". He defended the ANC's policy to expropriate land without compensation.

"What we are doing now in terms of land is to create certainty for our future, and it is tied with land ownership. If people continue to be landless, we can't talk about certainty both domestically and internationally," he said.

Kodwa dismissed AfriForum, saying it represented a minority of Afrikaners, instead of supporting efforts to redress historical legacies of racial inequality.

"They are just a fossil of apartheid that we must continue to defeat, and the only way to defeat the fossil is nothing else but to address inequality, is to make sure we build an all-inclusive economy, make sure we bring back the land to the people," he said.

AfriForum said it was ready to provide Pompeo with additional information on expropriation without compensation and farm murders.

However, Kodwa said that the lobby group had failed to include the killings of farm workers in their campaign.

"The AfriForum diatribe talks about white farmers only, yet we have farm workers killed on a daily basis, some of them mistaken to be baboons or dogs, yet they are not commenting about it," he said.