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South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, has called Donald Trump’s policy of allowing white Afrikaners to apply for refugee status in the US “racist”, saying the US president was “truly uninformed” in a rare instance of direct criticism.
Ramaphosa told the New York Times that last year’s Oval Office meeting with the US leader, when Trump turned down the lights and played a video that he falsely claimed showed there was a “white genocide” in South Africa, was a “spectacle” and an “ambush”.
“I just thought that he is so uninformed, truly uninformed,” Ramaphosa said. “I realised that he is looking at South Africa through a completely, sort of, foggy lens, without realising the real, real harm that apartheid did. In my view, he was just dismissive.”
Trump has targeted South Africa since starting his second term in office in January 2025. He has spread false allegations that the country’s white minority are undergoing a “genocide” and that their land is being seized by the government.
In May, the US extended refugee status to Afrikaners – who once led the repressive minority apartheid government and who remain on average many times wealthier than Black South Africans – while slashing its refugee programme for people fleeing war and persecution.
Trump refused to attend the G20 leaders meetings in Johannesburg in November and has banned South Africa from attending the US-hosted gathering in Miami later this year.
“I do think the Afrikaner policy is racist,” Ramaphosa said. “It is that racist sort of demeanour that we want to be able to whittle down so that he can see the truth of the situation.”
In a statement to the New York Times, the White House said that Trump was calling attention to “the harrowing stories of Afrikaners”.
It said: “The South African government, at minimum, does not respond, but President Trump has a humanitarian heart. He will continue to speak the truth about these injustices.”
Ramaphosa said: “There’s no white genocide and there is no grabbing of land, of white people’s land. And white farmers are not being driven out of the country and badly treated.”
South Africa’s president, who is due to step down as head of the African National Congress party next year and as the country’s leader in 2029, was unusually forthright about Trump.
He said: “We are rather amazed at the attention he gives to us. We are a small country, and we are no threat to the United States.”
