President Donald Trump maintained his claims of state-sanctioned persecution of South African White farmers during a meeting with President Cyril Ramaphosa at the White House on Wednesday.
It was the first time that the two had faced each other after Mr Trump cut all federal aid to South Africa in his first days in office, accusing the African country of “treating its white population badly” after Mr Ramaphosa signed a controversial Expropriation Bill into law.
The law provides the government the right to seize lands without compensation under certain conditions where it is “just and equitable and in the public interest”, which Mr Trump tagged a state-sponsored attempt to seize control of lands belonging to the country’s white population.
Mr Trump subsequently directed the U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio to commence the process of relocating more than 2.7 million White farmers from South Africa, with 59 of them arriving in the United States almost two weeks ago as the first set of beneficiaries of the expedited refugee program.
The meeting began on Wednesday with the two leaders discussing golf and trading opportunities before Mr Trump took a detour and jumped on his claims about the alleged ongoing genocide of white farmers, who are often referred to as Boer or Afrikaners.
He ordered that the light in the room be dimmed. He played the mashed-up video to support his claims about genocide in South Africa, including footage of the country’s opposition leader Julius Malema’s rallying cry of “Kill the Boer”, a line which U.S. officials and Afrikaner activists have cited as evidence that White South Africans are being persecuted.
“We’ve had tremendous complaints about Africa, about other countries too, from people,” Mr Trump said. “They say there’s a lot of bad things going on in Africa, and that’s what we’re going to be discussing today.”
Mr Ramaphosa acknowledged that South Africa suffers from a general crime problem, which is not targeted at White farmers alone, pointing out that the video did not capture the full narrative of the situation.
“We have a multiparty democracy in South Africa that allows people to express themselves,” Mr Ramaphosa said. “Our government policy is completely against what he was saying. We were taught by Nelson Mandela that whenever there are problems, people need to sit down around a table and talk about them.”
