WASHINGTON, United States
U.S. President Donald Trump will host South Africa's leader at the White House on Wednesday for a meeting that might be tense after Trump accused the country's government of allowing a “genocide” to take place against minority white farmers.
South Africa has strongly rejected the allegation and President Cyril Ramaphosa pushed for the meeting with Trump in an attempt to salvage his country's relationship with the United States, which is at its lowest point since the end of the apartheid system of racial segregation in 1994.
Trump has launched a series of accusations at South Africa's Black-led government, including that it is seizing land from white farmers, enforcing anti-white policies and pursuing an anti-American foreign policy.
Ramaphosa said he hopes to correct what he calls damaging mischaracterizations during the meeting, which is Trump's first with an African leader at the White House since he returned to office.
Some in South Africa worry their leader might get "Zelenskyy'd" — a reference to the public bashing Trump and Vice President JD Vance handed out to the Ukrainian president in their infamous Oval Office meeting in February.
In advance of the meeting, a White House official said Trump's topics of discussion with Ramaphosa were likely to include the need to condemn politicians who “promote genocidal rhetoric” and to classify farm attacks as a priority crime. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal planning, said Trump also was likely to raise South African race-based barriers to trade and the need to “stop scaring off investors.”
Here’s what to know ahead of the Trump-Ramaphosa meeting.
Trump's criticism of South Africa began in early February in a post on Truth Social when he accused South Africa's government of seizing land from white Afrikaner farmers and a "massive Human Rights VIOLATION" against members of the white minority.
Trump's allegation that Afrikaners were being mistreated was at the center of an executive order he issued days later that cut all U.S. assistance to South Africa.
He went further this month, alleging there was a “genocide” against white farmers and the Trump administration has brought a small group of white South Africans to the U.S. as refugees in what it says is the start of a larger relocation program.
The U.S. has been asked if it will stand by the genocide allegation. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in an interview with CBS that it would and that the administration felt there was evidence, citing instances of white farmers being murdered and claiming some were being “forcibly removed” from their properties.
Some white farmers have been killed in violent home invasions. But the South African government says the causes behind the relatively small number of homicides are misunderstood by the Trump administration; they are part of the country's severe problems with crime and not racially motivated, it says. Black farmers have also been killed.
The South African government has said the allegations against it are misinformation.
South African Agriculture Minister John Steenhuisen, who is white and a member of a different political party from Ramaphosa, said in an interview with The Associated Press that no land was being seized from farmers and claims of genocide were false.
“When you mischaracterize things like that and this misinformation gets out, it does have real-world consequences,” said Steenhuisen, who is part of the South African delegation in Washington.
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