Ramaphosa’s response to White House ambush

President Cyril Ramaphosa came to the White House looking to persuade President Donald Trump to stop floating the conspiracy theory that there’s a genocide against White people in South Africa.

Instead, the man who’d helped negotiate the end of apartheid walked into a trap.

Ramaphosa had sought the meeting with Trump in a bid to build a relationship with the president and boost trade.

He brought two White South African professional golfers and the country’s White agriculture minister plus a book on the sport to present to the US leader.

“If there was Afrikaner farmer genocide I can bet you these three gentlemen would not be here,” he said.

That was the cue. 

Trump asked that the lights be dimmed and teed up a video that purported to back up his claims that White farmers are being targeted.

Among its images was leftist South African opposition leader Julius Malema chanting “kill the Boer,” which means farmer in Afrikaans.

“Each one of those white things you see is a cross, and there’s approximately a thousand of them,” Trump said, as the video showed a field of white crosses representing White farmer deaths.

“You’re taking people’s land away from them and those people in many cases are being executed.”

The episode confirmed the fears of some of Ramaphosa’s advisers, who had warned he was being lured into an Oval Office encounter similar to the one that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy experienced earlier this year when Trump berated him over his handling of Russia’s invasion.

It was “definitely an ambush, because the program format was changed at the last minute,” South African Presidency spokesman Vincent Magwenya said in an interview after the meeting.

“You could see, standing in inside the Oval Office, that this was a well-planned, well-orchestrated operation.”

“That video and those articles had no credibility whatsoever,” he added. “But from here onwards, we can now deal with substantive issues, because they’ve made the point, they will feel good they’ve made the point, and we can now focus on what needs to be done to take the relationship forward.”

The rand weakened as the discussion between Trump and Ramaphosa became more heated. It traded 0.1% lower at 17.9450 per dollar by 20h25 in Johannesburg, reversing an earlier gain of as much as 0.4%.

Three decades after the end of White rule — during which Black people were subjugated and excluded from commercial and political life — the income of White families is on average almost five times as much as Black families, Statistics South Africa said in a January report.

White people own more than 70% of rural land owned by individuals even though they make up around 7% of the national population. Killings of farmers — another specter raised by Trump — have been falling over the last 20 years. 

That’s even as more than 27,000 people are murdered annually in South Africa, with a disproportionate number of the victims being young men in low-income areas including predominantly Black townships. No land has been seized by the state since apartheid ended.

There were multiple signs that Trump and his team had this welcome in mind for Ramaphosa in order to defend their decision to grant refugee status to White South Africans. 

At the last minute, the administration changed the program to put the leaders in front of press cameras instead of first having a private meeting.

The television that played the video was prepositioned to the side of the leaders — unusual for an Oval Office sitdown with a foreign leader. As Ramaphosa defended himself, Vice President JD Vance handed Trump a stack of paper he said backed up his views. 

The White House’s official X account almost immediately posted the exchange with the caption “President Trump always brings the receipts.”

The head of Afriforum, the fringe Afrikaner group that lobbied the first Trump administration and helped plant the seed for some of the president’s claims, said the video was similar to some of their own content. 

“I think it’s the White House’s own compilation of video material that we’ve also used,” said Kallie Kriel, chief executive of Afriforum, in a voice note. The group hasn’t claimed there’s a genocide of White Afrikaners and hasn’t taken Trump up on his offer of asylum.

“But I think it was important,” he added, because it put issues like “property rights and infringement of human rights through racial measures and also this ‘Kill the Boer’ question” on the table.

“The reality is that they know that what they’re claiming is not true,” said Magwenya, the South African spokesman.

“However, President Trump was never going to back down from a claim that he has consistently made, and it is a claim that aligns with his constituency, obviously.”

Ramaphosa had initially struck an upbeat tone at the meeting, calling for a reset in ties between the two countries and to advance trade. And after the video aired, Ramaphosa kept his cool and didn’t push back too hard on Trump — unlike Zelenskiy.

He stressed the necessity for the countries to work together and as reporters were ushered out of the room, said “they don’t like to leave — they like you so much.”

Ramaphosa’s comments after the meeting

At a post-meeting media briefing, Ramaphosa again tried to put a positive spin on the ordeal.

He said they’d had constructive closed-door talks about continuing to engage on trade and expressed confidence that he would see Trump at the gathering of Group of 20 leaders in Johannesburg in November.

But the US didn’t commit and top people have skipped G-20 meetings in the run-up to the leaders’ summit.

On the issue of genocide in South Africa, Ramaphosa said he didn’t think Trump was convinced it was happening: “Much as he flighted the video and all those press clippings — in the end I do believe that there is doubt and disbelief in his head about all this.”

Ramaphosa also responded to a question about Trump’s comparison of his claims about White farmers to apartheid. “Of course it cannot” be compared “because there is just no genocide in South Africa,” he said. 

Trump was joined in the room by his billionaire, Pretoria-born backer Elon Musk. Both have spread the conspiracy theory that the country that overcame apartheid is conducting a genocide against the White minority that once ruled it.

“We are completely opposed to that,” Ramaphosa said in response to a question about whether he denounced the remarks from those who appeared in the video. 

Trump has objected to a land bill that Ramaphosa signed late last year that will make it easier for the government to expropriate private property if it’s in the public interest.

While similar to eminent domain laws in the US, the law in South Africa allows for expropriation without compensation in certain cases such as land that’s been abandoned and state-owned property not in use.

The South African president sought to explain the law and it’s relationship to the country’s apartheid era. 

Ramaphosa, a lawyer who has led South Africa since 2018, was accompanied on his trip by the agriculture minister — John Steenhuisen, who has called claims of genocide “nonsense” — along with the trade and foreign ministers as well as billionaire Johann Rupert.  

In February, Trump froze almost all aid to Pretoria, claiming it persecuted White Afrikaner farmers and took “aggressive positions” toward the US, including filling a court case in the International Court of Justice that accuses Israel of genocide.

Last week, the US granted a first batch of White Afrikaners refugee status, flying them in on a chartered plane.