JOHANNESBURG — The sentiment in South Africa ahead of its leader’s meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump at the White House on Wednesday was one of fear and trepidation.
“Into the mouth of Trump hell” was how one newspaper headline described his mission.
South Africans worried that President Cyril Ramaphosa was exposing himself to the kind of public thrashing that Trump and Vice President JD Vance meted out on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in front of the world’s media three months ago.
But after being confronted by Trump with baseless allegations that there are widespread killings of white farmers in South Africa — and made to watch a video of a fringe South African politician repeating a chant referring to the killing of white farmers — Ramaphosa seemed to think the Oval Office meeting wasn’t that dramatic.
“You wanted to see drama and something big happening,” Ramaphosa said to reporters afterwards. “I’m sorry that we disappointed you somewhat.”
Ramaphosa is renowned in his home country as a calm, measured politician who is hardly ever emotional.
He made his name, though, in some of the toughest, highest-profile political negotiations his country has ever faced. Ramaphosa was the African National Congress party’s chief negotiator during the talks in the early 1990s that ended the apartheid system of white minority rule that had forced racial segregation on South Africans for nearly a half-century.
After apartheid, he was seen by some as the logical successor to Nelson Mandela as South African president. He missed out but returned to politics more than a decade later and became president in 2018.
Ramaphosa sought out the meeting with Trump in an attempt to correct what he said were mischaracterizations of South Africa by the U.S. — and to negotiate critical new trade deals.
Many South Africans didn’t want him to go to the headquarters of an administration that has made serious and false allegations against their country, including that Ramaphosa’s government is allowing white farmers to be routinely killed in what Trump has repeatedly called a “genocide.”
“I honestly don’t understand why Ramaphosa is actually in the United States when Trump has made it very clear how he feels about South Africa,” said college student Dumisani Mnisi in Johannesburg.
Ramaphosa’s spokesperson said that the video, the newspaper clippings of farm murders that Trump produced, and the overall confrontation in the Oval Office made for “an orchestrated show for the cameras,” and the real business was the closed-door meeting afterwards.
Ramaphosa said he was pleased after that meeting and listed what he counted as successes to take home from Washington.
He said he thought he had persuaded Trump to attend the Group of 20 summit in South Africa in November after the Trump administration said it would boycott. South Africa will hand over the rotating presidency of the G20 to the U.S. next year. Ramaphosa said he believed he had started to change Trump’s mind over South Africa, although he conceded that would probably be “a process.”
