White House meeting

 

Al Jazeera reported that it was President Trump’s first time hosting an African head of state since taking office in January. The state visit came on the heels of the U.S. granting refugee status to 59 Afrikaners (White South Africans), who were afforded “Priority 1” refugee status and arrived in America on May 12.

According to the U.S. State Department’s website, “Priority 1” is a designation within the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) that “allows consideration of refugee claims from persons of any nationality, usually with compelling protection needs, for whom resettlement appears to be the appropriate durable solution.”

As President Trump repeated false claims about White farmers being killed in South Africa at the hands of Black people, President Ramaphosa denied that it was occurring. Several news outlets have previously debunked the claims made by President Trump.

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The New York Times took the president to task, writing, “Mr. Trump made debunked claims that White farmers are being killed in genocide.” According to many news outlets, including The Nation, “(They) are not being persecuted,” referring to White South African farmers.  

Days before President Ramaphosa arrived in the U.S., in Bothaville, South Africa, “thousands of farmers gathered for a lively agricultural fair with everything from grains to guns on display, even some conservative White Afrikaner groups debunked the Trump administration’s ‘genocide’ and land seizure claims that led it to cut all financial aid to South Africa,” reported the Associated Press.

Though there are many news articles in Western corporate-run media outlets debunking President Trump’s latest deviations from the truth, these outlets often fail to consider—in the case of White South Africans—the historical, economic, and geographical context that is always relevant to Western countries’ colonial past on the African continent.  

Whites make up 7-8 % of the population in South Africa, but in 2025, they represent more than 62 percent of corporate leadership positions in South Africa. According to the Nation magazine, roughly “two in every three Black South Africans are impoverished, while just one percent of White South Africans are.”

“The White minority still holds a staggering 75 percent of the country’s land, thanks to a 1913 law that drove Black farmers off 93 percent of the country’s lands…,” the magazine noted.

In his 1916 book, “Native Life in South Africa,” author Sol T. Plaatje chronicles events after the implementation of the 1913 Native Land Act in the country.

This act institutionalized the exploitation of South Africa’s native population, similar to the post slavery American system of exploitation called sharecropping. This system grew out of the need for former slave masters to exploit the labor of their recently freed slaves.

According to Plaatie, “There were two reasons for the introduction of the Natives’ Land Act: Black farmers were proving to be too competitively successful as against White farming and there was a demand for a flow of cheap labor to the gold mines.”

In 1912, Plaatie was chosen as the first Secretary-General of the South African Native National Congress, later to be renamed the African National Congress (ANC), the party of Nelson Mandela, the first president of South Africa in the post-apartheid era. 

In South Africa, not only were Black farmers forced off the land of their ancestors, but if they stayed, they were required to labor exclusively for their new White masters.

Before the new law, Blacks paid 50 percent of their harvest for the right to live on the land. Afterward, they could no longer benefit from the cattle they owned since the law said livestock was now under the control of the White landowner.

South Africa, the continent’s most influential and developed nation-state, is America’s largest African trading partner. In addition, in 2024 the country assumed the G20 presidency, with President Ramaphosa scheduled to host a meeting of heads of state, later this year, November 22-25.

Prior to the May 21 meeting between President Ramaphosa and President Trump, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) posed the question, “How difficult will it be (during his U.S. visit) for Ramaphosa to reverse or suspend this downward spiral of (U.S., SA) relations?”

The downward spiral also includes South Africa’s International Court of Justice case, accusing Israel of genocide against Palestinians. Ramaphosa is faced with a Trump administration, like the previous Biden administration, with a strong pro-Israel constituency.

The CSIS also noted that Secretary of State Marco Rubio has argued that “South Africa is intentionally advancing an anti-American, globalist agenda by siding with Russia, China, and Iran.”

This may be another way for the Trump administration to express its chagrin at the growing developments and membership and influence of BRICS, chaired by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

The true substance of the Trump-Ramaphosa meeting and how it unfolds, in a growing, unstable global climate, is anyone’s guess. After their White House meeting, President Ramaphosa stated that he was “rather pleased that there was a firm agreement and undertaking that we’re going to continue engaging so that there is no disengagement,” he said in part.