The US president, Donald Trump, has signed an executive order to cut financial assistance to South Africa, accusing the country’s government of “unjust racial discrimination” against white Afrikaners and offering them asylum in the US.

The order criticised a law signed by the South African president, Cyril Ramaphosa, last month that allows for land to be expropriated with “nil compensation” in limited circumstances.

South Africa was ruled by white Afrikaner leaders during apartheid, which violently repressed the country’s black majority, including forcing them to live in segregated townships and rural “homelands”. Afrikaners are descended mainly from the Dutch, who began colonising South Africa in 1652, as well as French Huguenot refugees sponsored by the Dutch.

More than three decades after white minority rule ended, South Africa remains hugely unequal, with land and wealth still largely concentrated among white people, who make up 7% of the population, about half native Afrikaans speakers, while black people are 81%.