When I first heard that South African President Cyril Ramaphosa was going to visit the White House, I wondered if he had properly thought it through. Considering what happened recently to Ukrainian President Vlodomyr Zelensky in the Oval Office in front of live world-wide television audiences, why should any leader be in a hurry to visit the White House these days?
Probably no man has Donald Trump’s ears quite as much as Elon Musk, who left South Africa for USA 16 years ago and has systematically sold to Trump the idea that a “genocide” is on-going in that country, that White farmers are being killed, “their lands” are being confiscated and that they are lining up to flee to USA.
In the event, Ramaphosa, one of the great heroes of the anti-Apartheid struggle as President of the South African Union of Mineworkers, walked straight into a racist ambush last night. An unbelievable spectacle, of a US president waving in the face of a visitor cuttings from obscure newspapers alleging the killing ofWhite farmers, followed by a racist propaganda video allegingthe burial site of 1,000 killed White farmers in South Africa, which no one ever heard about.
Trump spoke of “genocide” in South Africa. He never used the word genocide to describe Israeli actions in Gaza, where 53,000people, mostly women and children, have been killed in an on-going slaughter, together with a two-month siege that prevents all food, water, medicine and fuel reaching more than two million people, a specter so horrible that UK, France, Canada and the European Union have risen against it this very week.
Trump said White farmers’ lands are being seized in South Africa. When these farmers’ ancestors arrived from Holland four hundred years ago, did they bring this land along with them, and what happened to the native populations that were expropriated and in many cases exterminated?
Racism in South Africa today? When real White minority racistrule prevailed in South Africa under National Party rule from 1948 to 1994, wasn’t the US government one of the few that defied world opinion, refused to impose sanctions and continued to trade with and shield the Apartheid regime?
Last night’s Oval Office event was a dagger stab in the African heart. A US President shamefully assuming the role of an international Ku Klux Klansman, with manufactured videos and false allegations of mass burial sites. All African leaders should hearken well. Whoever goes to the White House again in the next four years, is on his own.
