2 days ago
Commentary
Trump's diplomacy of the absurd
Last month, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa became the first African leader to visit the White House during US President Donald Trump's second term. As he so infamously did with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in February, Trump turned his televised meeting with Ramaphosa in the Oval Office into absurdist theater.
Ramaphosa and his multiracial delegation were mere props in a larger performance aimed at Trump's nativist 'Make America Great Again' cult and right-wing xenophobes around the world. Trump, perpetuating racist stereotypes, accused marauding Black savages of hunting down innocent white farmers. It was a bizarre perversion of the historical record — namely, that a white minority had stripped Black South Africans of their land and labor rights for more than three centuries.
Of course, Trump is fully ignorant of that history. The 1913 Natives Land Act, enacted by South Africa's white-minority government, reserved 93 percent of the country's land for white ownership. Today, white South Africans, comprising 7 percent of the population, still own 72 percent of all private farmland. Even though Ramaphosa's administration enacted a law in 2024 allowing for land expropriation without compensation, such land is to be used only for the public good, and any confiscations are subject to judicial review.
Today, 13.2 million people, or roughly one-fifth of the population in what is the world's most unequal country, still live in extreme poverty, with the vast majority being Black. In 2024, 26,232 murders were recorded in South Africa, 44 of which occurred in farming communities; only eight of those 44 victims were farmers. According to data collected by the Transvaal Agricultural Union — an Afrikaner farmers' union — only 1,363 white farmers have been killed since 1990, amounting to less than 1 percent of total murders over that period. Only two of the 18 people murdered on farms between October 2024 and March 2025 were white.
Equating apartheid-era atrocities with the current plight of white South Africans, who still own most of the country's wealth, is simply preposterous. Despite this, Trump has granted refugee status to white South African farmers, 59 of whom arrived in the US days before his meeting with Ramaphosa. Opening America's doors to this group, particularly as the Trump administration launches a crusade against illegal and legal immigrants, is less about protecting an endangered minority, and more about appealing to nativist sentiment among white Americans.
It is perhaps not surprising, then, that Trump ambushed Ramaphosa. After all, Trump has launched an assault on diversity programs in the US, is restoring the old names of military bases honoring Confederate generals and has taken extraordinary measures to erase America's long history of slavery.
While the exchange between Ramaphosa and Trump started off friendly enough, it quickly degenerated into hectoring, with Trump repeatedly painting the perpetrators of oppression as its victims. After describing Ramaphosa as 'a little controversial,' the same president who once described Africa as full of 'shithole countries' proceeded to reinforce the trope of Black barbarism, noting: 'They say there's a lot of bad things going on in Africa.'
At this point, Trump zeroed in on the egregious claim — amplified by the South African-born billionaire Elon Musk — that the Black-led African National Congress government was committing genocide against white people. Trump proceeded to screen a video of Julius Malema, a firebrand South African opposition leader who was expelled from the ANC in February 2012, chanting an apartheid-era song 'Kill the Boer,' referring to white farmers. Although South Africa's Supreme Court of Appeal ruled that the chant did not constitute incitement to violence, it is a divisive relic.
The next video, which Musk had posted twice on X before the Oval Office meeting, depicted white crosses that Trump falsely claimed represented a burial site for more than 1,000 murdered white farmers. These were, however, temporary memorials, not gravesites, and were later removed. Trump also showed Ramaphosa an image, purportedly of massacred white South African farmers, that was later revealed to have been taken in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Derrick Johnson, president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, described Trump's remarks as 'extremely biased and racist.' They were also an attempt at a power play. One could hardly imagine Ramaphosa inviting Trump to the Union Buildings in Pretoria to accuse him of committing 'Black genocide' in America, before showing him a video of white policemen brutalizing and killing innocent Black motorists.
In requesting the White House meeting, Ramaphosa had naively believed that he could reason with a Mafia don wielding a loaded pistol. The South African president maintained a dignified calm, but did not do enough to refute Trump's bogus claims. His delegation, which included three prominent white South Africans, the billionaire Johann Rupert and golfers Ernie Els and Retief Goosen, at Trump's behest, did not help matters.
The presence of these wealthy white South Africans reassured Trump: he enthusiastically invited them to speak, even as he failed to make eye contact with his black counterpart. Els betrayed his inadequate understanding of history when he thanked the US for having supported the murderous apartheid army's invasion of Angola in the 1980s. Goosen talked of his crime-afflicted relatives having to erect electric fences. Rupert lobbied for Musk's Starlink satellite company to equip South Africa's police stations.
These responses fed into the 'white savior' complex, imploring American knights in shining armor to save South Africans from savage Black criminals. Even Zingiswa Losi, the Black trade unionist who tried to set the record straight on land expropriation, spoke of Black women being raped and murdered. All this reinforced the message that South Africa is a crime scene — far from a powerful sales pitch for a country keen to attract foreign investors and tourists.
This visit was supposed to 'reset' South Africa-US relations and start trade discussions, with Ramaphosa touting his country's critical mineral deposits. But despite efforts by South African officials and some media to spin the encounter as a success, it exposed deep and damaging divisions between the two countries. The only consolation is that Ramaphosa at least made it to the official lunch. Zelenskyy was not so lucky.
- - -
Adekeye Adebajo, a professor and a senior research fellow at the University of Pretoria's Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship, served on UN missions in South Africa, Western Sahara and Iraq. The views expressed here are the writer's own. — Ed.
