Trump’s diplomacy of the absurd

Last month, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa became the first African leader to visit the White House during US President Donald Trump’s second term. As he so infamously did with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in February, Trump turned his televised meeting with Ramaphosa in the Oval Office into absurdist theater.

Ramaphosa and his multiracial delegation were mere props in a larger performance aimed at Trump’s nativist “Make America Great Again” cult and right-wing xenophobes around the world. Trump, perpetuating racist stereotypes, accused marauding Black savages of hunting down innocent white farmers. It was a bizarre perversion of the historical record—namely, that a white minority had stripped Black South Africans of their land and labor rights for more than three centuries.

Of course, Trump is fully ignorant of that history. The 1913 Natives Land Act, enacted by South Africa’s white-minority government, reserved 93 percent of the country’s land for white ownership. Today, white South Africans, comprising 7 percent of the population, still own 72 percent of all private farmland. Even though Ramaphosa’s administration enacted a law in 2024 allowing for land expropriation without compensation, such land is to be used only for the public good, and any confiscations are subject to judicial review.

Today, 13.2 million people, or roughly one-fifth of the population in what is the world’s most unequal country, still live in extreme poverty, with the vast majority being Black. In 2024, 26,232 murders were recorded in South Africa, 44 of which occurred in farming communities; only eight of those 44 victims were farmers. According to data collected by the Transvaal Agricultural Union – an Afrikaner farmers’ union—only 1,363 white farmers have been killed since 1990, amounting to less than 1% of total murders over that period. Only two of the 18 people murdered on farms between October 2024 and March 2025 were white.