South African president Cyril Ramaphosa faced serious diplomatic challenge and became surprised when US president Donald Trump played a video showing an exhibit during a protest of several crosses lining a road-claiming they were burial sites for murdered white farmers.
Trump told Ramaphosa that he did not know where in South Africa it was filmed. The crosses, in fact, are not actual graves, but appear to be from a 2020 protest after a farming couple was killed in KwaZulu-Natal province. Organisers said at the time that they are an exhibit representing farmers killed over years.
The South African leader was visiting White House to reset his countries’ relations with the USA and also to improve trade relations with the USA. South African exports into the US face a 30% tariff once a pause on Trump’s new import taxes ends in July.
On Wednesday, President Cyril Ramaphosa visited the White House to reset his countries’ relations with the USA, a week after the US granted asylum to nearly 60 Afrikaners. The meeting meant to soothe tensions between the US and South Africa instead ignited sparks as President Donald Trump put his counterpart on the defensive with claims that white farmers in South Africa were being killed and “persecuted”.
Before Wednesday’s White House meeting, South Africa’s leader stressed that improving trade relations with the US was his priority. Ramaphosa hoped to charm Trump during the meeting, bringing along two famous South African golfers and gifting him a huge book featuring his country’s golf courses.
The Oval Office meeting began cordially, until Trump asked for the lighting to be lowered for a video presentation. The mood shifted. The film featured the voice of leading South African opposition figure Julius Malema singing: “Shoot the Boer [Afrikaner], Shoot the farmer”. It then showed a field of crosses, which the US president, talking over the images, said was a burial site of white farmers.
He handed Ramaphosa what appeared to be print-outs of stories of white people being attacked in South Africa. Trump said that he would seek an “explanation” from his guest on claims of white “genocide” in South Africa, which have been widely discredited.
Ramaphosa responded to the opposition chants in the video, saying, “What you saw – the speeches that were made… that is not government policy. We have a multiparty democracy in South Africa that allows people to express themselves.”
“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.”
Ernst Roets, a leading personality on the Afrikaner right, showed his admiration for the US president. “Donald Trump made history today,” he said in a post on X, before thanking him for showing videos of firebrand opposition politician Julius Malema singing “Shoot the Boer (Afrikaner); Shoot the farmer” – and newspaper headlines of the killing of white farmers.
Solidarity’s Jaco Kleynhans went further, saying Trump deserved a Nobel Prize for “putting the farm murder crisis on the international agenda”.
Wednesday’s episode with South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa was a classic of its kind, with the added twist of an ambush involving dimmed lights, a lengthy video screening and stacks of news story clippings.
As television cameras rolled, and after some well-tempered discussion, Trump was asked by a journalist about what it would take for him to be convinced that discredited claims of “white genocide” in South Africa are untrue.
Ramaphosa responded first, by saying the president would have to “listen to the voices of South Africans” on the issue. Trump then came in, asking an assistant to “turn the lights down” and put the television on, so he could show the South African leader “a couple of things”.
