President Donald Trump challenged South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, alleging that he was not safeguarding white farmers from violence, while showing deceptive videos corroborating controversial and unsubstantiated allegations of white genocide in the nation.
Following a query by a reporter on what it would take for Trump to believe there is no white genocide in South Africa, Ramaphosa stated it would take Trump “listening to the voices of South Africans” and affirmed that the statement isn’t true. He mentioned that white members of his cabinet would not have been with him at the Oval Office on Wednesday had there been genocide.
Trump then requested his aides to “turn the lights down,” and roll a video of South African activists and demonstrators chanting to kill farmers and an aerial view of what he described as massive burial grounds.
Ramaphosa pushed back that the videos were of small minority groups, and not government policy, and indicated that South Africa is a “multi-party democracy…that permits people to express themselves.”
“There is criminality in our country,” he stated. “Those who do get killed unfortunately because of criminal activity are not just white individuals. Most of them are Black individuals.”
Over the last few days, the Trump administration has made a show of welcoming Afrikaners, mostly white South African farmers, who claim to be persecuted on grounds of race. White South Africans hold three-quarters of privately owned land in the country and exercise about 60 percent of senior corporate management positions despite occupying just 7 percent of the population.
Afrikaners are the descendants of largely Dutch settlers who colonized South Africa centuries ago. They developed apartheid, the racist system of government that placed the country’s white minority at the center of official policy which ended 30 years ago.