Instead, during a live news conference, Trump shocked Ramaphosa by saying that there was a “white genocide” in South Africa, which was generally seen as false.During a protest, he showed a film of an exhibit with several crosses lining a road. He said they were the graves of white farmers who had been killed.
Trump said he didn’t know where in South Africa the video was shot. They are not real graves; they look like they are from a protest in 2020 after a farming couple was killed in KwaZulu-Natal province. At the time, the people who put them together said they were an exhibit of farmers who had been killed over the years.
Before the meeting at the White House on Wednesday, South Africa’s leader made it clear that his top goal was to improve trade relations with the US. If South African goods are brought into the US after July, they will be subject to a 30% tariff because of Trump’s new import taxes. In an effort to win over Trump, Ramaphosa brought two well-known South African golfers to the meeting and gave him a huge book with pictures of his country’s golf grounds.
A few days before the meeting, 59 white South Africans came to the US and were given refugee status. Ramaphosa called them “cowards” at the time.
Video courtesy by MSNBC
Even so, the meeting in the Oval Office started off nicely until Trump asked for the lights to be turned down for a video demonstration. The mood changed.
- Ramaphosa stays calm during Trump’s planned attacks.
- South Africans had different opinions on Trump’s attack on Ramaphosa.
- Does Trump really mean that white South Africans are being killed in mass graves?
“Shoot the Boer [Afrikaner], Shoot the farmer” was sung by Julius Malema, a major figure in the South African opposition. Then it showed a field of crosses. The US president said over the pictures that this was where white farmers were buried.
It looked like he was giving Ramaphosa copies of news stories about white people being attacked in South Africa. Many people don’t believe the claims that white people were “genocide” in South Africa, so Trump said he would ask his friend to “explain” them.
When asked about the opposition chants in the film, Ramaphosa said, “What you saw—the speeches that were given—that is not government policy.” South Africa is a multiparty democracy where everyone can say what they want.
“Our government policy is completely against what he [Malema] was saying even in the parliament and they are a small minority party, which is allowed to exist according to our constitution.”
Ramaphosa said on Wednesday that he hoped Trump would pay attention to what South Africans have to say about this. He named the white people in his group, such as players Ernie Els and Retief Goosen and Johann Rupert, who is South Africa’s richest person.
“If there was a genocide, these three gentlemen would not be here,” he said.
Trump spoke up: “But you do allow them to take land, and then when they take the land, they kill the white farmer, and when they kill the white farmer nothing happens to them.”
“No,” Ramaphosa came back.
This made the US leader sound like Malema and his party, which is not part of the government, have the power to take land away from white farms, which they do not. Ramaphosa signed a controversial law earlier this year that sometimes lets the government take private land without paying the owner. The government of South Africa says that the act has not yet been used to take land.
Even so, Ramaphosa admitted that there was “crime in our country…people who do get killed by criminal activity are not only white people, most of them are black people.” Trump said about the crosses in the video, “The farmers are not black.” I’m not sure if that’s good or bad, but the farmers are not black.
South Africa doesn’t put out crime rates based on race, but the most recent numbers show that between October and December 2024, almost 10,000 people were killed in the country. Twelve of these people were killed in attacks on farms. One of the 12 was a farmer, five lived on the farm, and four worked there and were likely black.
There have been claims of murder in South Africa for many years among right-wing groups. As of February, a South African judge threw out the claims as “clearly imagined” and “not real” in a case about an inheritance that involved giving money to a white nationalist group.
During Trump’s questions, Ramaphosa stayed cool and tried to win Trump over by joke-telling about giving the US a plane. He used the name of Nelson Mandela, a famous anti-apartheid leader, to say that South Africa was still committed to race reconciliation.
A reporter asked Ramaphosa what would happen if white farmers left South Africa. He sent the question to John Steenhuisen, his white agriculture minister, who said that most farmers wanted to stay. Ramaphosa didn’t get into a shouting fight with Trump, but Trump kept firing insults at him. This is what happened to Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, when he met Trump in the same room in February.
Malema made fun of the meeting after it happened, calling it “a meeting of older men in Washington to talk about me.”
“A lot of intelligence evidence about white genocide has not been produced.” “We won’t give up our political beliefs on land taking without compensation just to make things easier politically,” he wrote on X. The meeting was “truly embarrassing,” said Patrick Gaspard, who used to be US ambassador to South Africa under President Barack Obama.
“It is clear that the president of South Africa fell into a trap.” “Everyone planned to make him look bad and, by extension, South Africa look bad,” he said.
