“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world,” Nelson Mandela said in the summer of 2003, when post-apartheid South Africa was in its fledgling state. In the White House on Wednesday came a crash course history lesson on oppression and violence in that complex country, delivered to South Africa’s president, courtesy of the US president Donald Trump.
“Death. Death. Death,” he declared in what sounded like an impromptu haiku for his guest, Cyril Ramaphosa, the latest international statesman to find himself the subject of a diplomatic mugging in the Oval Office, again broadcast on live television. The president was scrolling through sheaves of documents listing the crimes South Africa has perpetrated.
“Horrible deaths. I dunno. White South Africans are fleeing because of the violence and racist laws. So, when you say ‘what would I like to do?’ I don’t know what to do. Look at this!”, he continued, holding a photocopied article of unknown provenance. “‘White South African couples say they were attacked violently.’”
The Oval office lights had already been dimmed so everyone could enjoy a video of South African politicians shouting the rally cry of “Kill the Boer”. Another clip showed a straight road lined with cars which, president Trump explained to his guest, were mourners visiting the graves of the white farmers murdered in a land reclamation and murder which, he inferred, was a genocide in the making.
“Burial sites. Over a thousand. Those cars are lined up to ... pay love on a Sunday morning. I’ve never seen anything like it. Both sides of the roads you have crosses.”
“Have they told you where this is?” Ramaphosa asked.
“South Africa,” Trump clarified.
“We need to find out where,” the president of that country said softly.
The morning meeting had begun warmly. Ramaphosa, with his old-school gravitas and deliberate speaking style, buttered Trump up by pointing out that he had brought with him the champion golfers Retief Goosen and Ernie Els – although Trump was unimpressed to learn that 89-year-old Gary Player had sent his apologies.
The visitor thanked the president for the 150 respirators Trump had sent South Africa during the Covid-19 pandemic. “We became the respirator kings,” Trump reminisced. Wisely, the South Africans came bearing gifts even if they seem to have woefully underestimated the lavishness of the going fare.
“I brought you a really fantastic golf ...” Ramaphosa said cordially and slowly.
Club? Tournament?
“… book. It weighs 14 kilograms”.
If the prospect of curling up with this weighty tome thrilled Trump, he hid it well. But then, he had a history lesson to give. A Maga fascination with the persecution of white Afrikaners has been simmering as a background issue since the beginning of the month when the White House announced some 59 white South Africans, including entire families, had arrived in the US as refugees fleeing attack.
In February, Trump signed an executive order cutting financial assistance to South Africa, citing “unjust racial discrimination”. Recently, the US state department reported that some 8,000 inquiries have come from other Afrikaners looking to leave their country.
The Oval Office guest list for Wednesday’s visit was a motley crew. Elon Musk, not so long ago the most celebrated South African in the Trump administration, stood behind the sofa where vice-president JD Vance, defence secretary Pete Hegseth and commerce secretary Howard Lutnick sat dressed in their best. Musk had no seat, nor had he a voice. Instead, he fixed a glassy stare on the South African president as Trump continued to explain to his guest that he was the head of state of a country where it was open season on white people.
Trump’s rebuke generated ecstatic reviews even as it unfolded among the strain within the Maga movement who believe the white race to be under siege. The notion of a genocide against white Afrikaners fuels their wildest paranoias of what could happen in open-borders USA. It’s a myth that South Africa’s tech fraternity like Musk and Peter Thiel have fed into.
“There is literally nothing better than president Trump calling out foreign leaders at the White House,” wrote David Sack, a Cape Towner who has made his fortune in the US on Musk‘s X platform. In 1995, Thiel and Sack co-authored The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Intolerance at Stanford.
“Zelenskiy didn’t have the cards. Ramaphosa is playing dumb about genocide. President Trump brings the receipts.”
White farmers have indeed been attacked and murdered in South Africa and many Afrikaners have expressed apprehension about the future of their language and traditions. But the idea of a programme of persecution against white farmers has been widely discredited. Still, Trump pressed on, casting a brief glance at the wider sweep of South Africa’s notorious history of white supremacy.
“Now I will say – apartheid ... terrible. That was reported all the time. This is sort of the opposite. Nobody knows about it. Marco Rubio was telling me he has never seen anything like it – the numbers of people that want to leave South Africa because they feel they are going to be dead pretty soon.”
The South African contingent may be accused of naivety for arriving at the White House without anticipating this line of attack. But bewildering as it must have been – videos and documents – the visitors succeeded in penetrating the fantasia with a few coolly delivered counterpoints.
Ramaphosa held his nerve and calmly, politely, explained to Trump that South Africa, as a multiparty democracy, allows conflicting voices. He allowed that the country has problems of violent crime but that it is not concentrated on the 7 per cent of the population who are white. (PBS reported on Wednesday the statistic that white farmers, who own over 50 per cent of the land, account for less than 1 per cent of the 27,000 annual murders in South Africa).
Ramaphosa introduced his agriculture minister, John Steenhuisen, who is white and who is a member of an opposition party. The minister respectfully told Trump that, indeed, South Africa needed to “start making farm attacks and stock theft a priority crime”.
“And it affects all farmers – particularly stock theft has a disproportionate effect on small elder black farmers.”
Patiently it was explained that Julius Malema, the Economic Freedom Fighter leader leading the anti-Boer chant, had been expelled from the ANC more than a decade ago.
“The reason we chose to join hands was to keep those people out of power,” Steenhuisen said.
“We can’t have those people sitting in the union buildings making decisions. That is why after 30 years of us exchanging barbs across the floor, we have decided to join hands. Need support of allies around the world. Shut the door forever on that rabble.”
Els spoke and gave a succinct if ambivalent account of the difficult years of the post-apartheid transition and of what Mandela represented. Goosen followed with an account of the difficulties his parents, who are white and farmers, had faced, including home attacks.
Trump listened gravely to this more nuanced version of South Africa’s history as told by those living, breathing and shaping it. He brooded. He may have been thinking about his – America’s – blingy new jet plane from Qatar, which the Pentagon officially accepted on Wednesday.
To the president’s obvious exasperation, some US media seemed more interested in asking him about that acquisition than discussing the evidence of murders and persecution he had just exposed. At one point, he turned to Ramaphosa to lament the state of the US fake news media who just want to talk about “jets”.
“I am sorry I don’t have a plane to give you,” Ramaphosa said.
“I wish you did”, said the president of the United States. “I’d take it.”
The occasion once again demonstrated Trump’s contempt for the politesse of statecraft. It was a blatant piece of theatre designed to thrill the Maga heartland.
But Ramaphosa is a veteran of the formative days of a country of which Trump knows nothing. Mandela was his mentor. The visitor remained unflappable. He kept his counsel on South Africa’s vociferous pro-Palestinian stance, declining to elaborate on his views on the genocidal conditions there.
And the presence of two fading golf stars brought to the White House a version of golf diplomacy. Ramaphosa left the weighty golf book behind and promised Trump he has been practising his game and joked that he is ready to play a round – maybe at the G20 summit in Johannesburg in November. Had he been in the Oval Office, Gary Player could but admire his countryman’s coolness under pressure.
