By Nandita Bose
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump confronted South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa at the White House on Wednesday with the most contentious areas of dispute between the countries, including Trump’s claims of a “white genocide”.
South Africa rejects the allegation that white people are disproportionately targeted by crime. Murder rates are high in the country and the overwhelming majority of victims are Black.
After a friendly initial chat in which Trump complimented South African golfers and Ramaphosa said he wanted to talk about critical minerals and trade, Trump played a video that purported to show evidence of a genocide of whites.
Ramaphosa mostly sat expressionless while the video was played, occasionally craning his neck to look at it. Trump said the video showed the graves of thousands of white farmers. Ramaphosa said he had not seen that before, and that he would like to find out what the location was.
Trump then displayed printed copies of articles that he said showed white South Africans who had been killed, saying “death, death” as he flipped through them.
Ramaphosa said there was crime in South Africa, and the majority of victims were Black. Trump cut him off and said: “The farmers are not Black.”
Ramaphosa responded: “These are concerns we are willing to talk to you about.”
In recent months, Trump has criticised South Africa’s land reform law aimed at redressing the injustices of apartheid and its genocide court case against Israel.
He has cancelled aid, expelled South Africa’s ambassador and offered refuge to white minority Afrikaners based on racial discrimination claims Pretoria says are unfounded.
Trump has accused South Africa of seizing land from white farmers and of fuelling violence against white landowners with “hateful rhetoric and government actions”.
Pretoria says these claims are inaccurate and “fail to recognise South Africa’s profound and painful history”, meaning its long history of domination by white colonialists, enshrined in the “apartheid” system.
The stakes in Wednesday’s meeting are high for South Africa. The United States is its second-biggest trading partner after China, and the aid cut has already resulted in a drop in testing for HIV patients.
(Additional reporting by Nellie Peyton, Siyanda Mthethwa, Tim Cocks and Colleen Goko-Petzer in Johannesburg and Daphne Psaledakis in Washington; Writing by Estelle Shirbon; Editing by Sharon Singleton, Ed Osmond and Kevin Liffey)
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