WeeklySA_AdminAPPRENTICE: Did the SA President take it lying down or should he have fought back ‘a little more’ in the Oval Office furnace?
By Kate Bartlett
JOHANNESBURG — “All in all it was awful but it could have been worse,” was how one South African newspaper summed up President Cyril Ramaphosa’s extraordinary Oval Office meeting with President Trump on Wednesday.
Many South Africans — including members of the government delegation visiting Washington — had feared a repeat of February’s heated exchange between Trump and and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
But despite what another newspaper called “serious provocation” by Trump — which included the dramatic moment he asked to dim the lights and played a lengthy video montage purporting to prove what Trump falsely claimed was a “genocide” against South African white farmers — Ramaphosa kept his cool.
The South African leader, who was a protégé of Nelson Mandela, has experience with intense negotiations. He was one of the key mediators in the talks that ended apartheid in 1994.
Most of the South African media as well as many social media users are praising Ramaphosa for remaining calm and polite throughout what’s widely being called the “ambush” by Trump, though some wished he had hit back harder.
“Who among us did not also secretly yearn to see Ramaphosa fight back a little more?” writer Rebecca Davis asked in the Daily Maverick newspaper.
Ramaphosa himself tried to put a positive spin on things at a press briefing later on Wednesday. He said behind closed doors, at the lunch that followed the Oval Office drama, things had gone well. Trump might still attend a summit of the Group of 20 leading rich and developing nations in Johannesburg later this year, he said, adding they had also had good trade talks.
“I know that many South Africans were filled with concern and fear that we will have a ‘Z’ moment,” the president said, apparently referring to Zelenskyy, “and all that did not ensue.”
He added that he was sorry to disappoint the South African press corps who had traveled to Washington and wanted to see some “drama.” That prompted one reporter to say: “Mr. President … I don’t know what constitutes drama in your book, but that was very dramatic.” Another reporter told Ramaphosa he deserved a stiff drink.
Despite the South African delegation’s attempts to explain the facts to the U.S. leader, Trump again and again repeated a right-wing conspiracy theory that there is systematic persecution and “genocide” of white South Africans, using disinformation to support his allegations.
He misrepresented a video showing a protest, where people placed white crosses in a field to commemorate a farmer and his wife who were murdered in a 2020 home robbery, as a “burial site.” South African news site News24 said there are no bodies at the site and the number of crosses do not relate to the number of killings.
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The first group of Afrikaners from South Africa to arrive for resettlement listen to remarks from US Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau (right) after they arrived at Washington Dulles International Airport in Dulles, Virginia, on May 12.
Immigration
Episcopal Church leader says helping Afrikaners over other refugees is ‘unfathomable’ White Afrikaaner South Africans demonstrate in support of U.S. President Donald Trump in front of the U.S. embassy in Pretoria, South Africa, Feb. 15, 2025. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay, File)
Africa
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Trump also played clips of two controversial South African opposition politicians — who in no way speak for the government — singing songs from the struggle against apartheid, including one called “Kill the Boer,” which means Afrikaner or farmer.
One of the politicians, firebrand Julius Malema, heads a flailing opposition party that won just over 9.5% of the vote in last year’s elections. Trump asked why he wasn’t arrested. In fact, Malema was taken to court on charges of hate speech for singing the song at rallies, and the constitutional court ruled the singing of the song was protected by freedom of speech.
Malema seems to have delighted in his 15-minutes of Oval Office fame, posting on X: “A group of older men gathered in Washington to gossip about me.”
Trump later handed Ramaphosa a bunch of printed articles that he said showed “death, death, horrible death.” News outlets in South Africa, as well as the Agence France-Presse news agency, studied the articles and found some were from partisan blogs and unsubstantiated online sources.
One article Trump held up, saying it was about “white farmers being burned,” was in fact about the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Standing from left, South African businessman Johann Rupert and golfers Retief Goosen and Ernie Els look on as President Trump meets South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office of the White House on Wednesday.
Standing from left, South African businessman Johann Rupert and golfers Retief Goosen and Ernie Els look on as President Trump meets South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office of the White House on Wednesday.
About those golfers
Whatever one’s take on the meeting, it has dominated social media feeds. White South African right-wing groups — and MAGA commentators — applauded Trump for repeating their talking points on race relations. Some far-left groups denounced Ramaphosa for bringing white South African businessmen and golf stars along to the meeting.
Ramaphosa and Trump are both avid golfers, and the presence of former world No 1 Ernie Els and two-time U.S. Open champion Retief Goosen was a tactic the South African team hoped would defuse tensions at the meeting. Els is a personal friend of Trump’s and is reported to have helped Ramaphosa get the White House meeting.
Also present was South Africa’s richest man, business mogul Johann Rupert, also a white Afrikaaner and a friend of both presidents.
Rupert won some praise from South African media for telling Trump “it’s not only white farmers” who are victims of violent crime, “it’s across the board,” and stating that non-whites are in fact the biggest victims. Ramaphosa’s white agriculture minister, John Steenhuisen, also challenged Trump, telling him most white farmers wanted to remain in South Africa.
But the golfers angered many.
Els seemed to support Trump’s narrative of white persecution, referring to the apartheid era but adding: “I don’t think two wrongs makes a right.”
He also thanked the U.S. for supporting South Africa during its war with Angola — but as social media users were quick to point out, that support had been for the old apartheid regime.
A Daily Maverick journalist wrote that the men were talented golfers but “what the hell do they have to do with international relations?” Reporters asked Ramaphosa after the meeting if the golfers should not have been better prepped. He defended them as patriots, but admitted they could have been.
What is particularly galling to many though, is Trump’s derisive treatment of the head of state of a constitutional democracy. Several local newspaper articles pointed out he doesn’t treat authoritarian leaders with dubious human rights records like he treated the South African president.
Comment
The week that was
With this week ebbing to a close, it might well be that somewhere a gleefulUS President Donald Trump might still be relishing his much-televised “bruising” with the South Africans, especially at the thought of having socked it to our President Cyril Ramaphosa and his entourage.
Well, victory is eternally in the eye of the beholder, shall we say.
Anyway, not for an enigma like Trump to show decorum to a perceived opponent on the home turf. Especially when he relishes holding all the aces, buttressed by the largest economy in the world, with a gross domestic product (GDP) of more than $30 trillion (R531.3 trillion). A comfy position held by his superpower nation since the 1960s, according to some economic indices, and a world envy at that.
Yet, for the South African entourage, the encounter bore a hard reality: that our country is in a bind – thanks to the fact that we trade, in a symbiosis, with the US, and, with the two nations being tied to each other’s hip. A reality hard to escape, however intractable we may think Trump is, and his off-putting antics.
At least, Ramaphosa and his delegation were already forearmed and expected that Trump would characteristically lace his televised White House show with outlandish falsities spewed for his fawning hangers-on or lieutenants to lap up, while knowing fully well his claims are not borne by reality or facts. Hardly the hallmark – by any stretch of imagination – of a textbook ambush he laid for his visitors, as some pundits would have us believe.
Yet, no one should have been surprised that at the repeat of the untruths about white genocide. The world being a stage for him, just as long as he is egged on by his party and fellow Americans to full rage, what could possibly go wrong? And, so too what more could be expected of the most powerful man with so much power on his hands and latitude to do whatever he pleases, except to wield it like the battering ram at any moving object of lesser ilk.
Thankfully, South Africa sorely needed this ‘R’ moment to be prodded to do some long-overdue soulful introspection. It took a raging Trump in a China shop for the mirror to flash to us. So, we could realise that we need to revisit our inner selves to find out who, as a nation, we really are. Whether, it is not we, ourselves, who have not exposed our fault lines for the world to see how broken we are as a nation.
If not Trump, perhaps someone would have found it irresistible not to take the opportunity to punch into the schisms that reflect our fragmented self. Truth is, we have long given our sovereignty away to foreign powers.
As we take solace that Ramaphosa, and to some extent businessman Johan Rupert, tried his best to stand their ground for on behalf our nation over a marauding overlord, which was commendable, though some back home thought Ramaphosa held back far too much, the future beckons with even more formidable challenges. As we mull over it, the question is, were Nelson Mandela to be resurrected today, would he still recogn
