By Steve Ogah in Africa and Jibril Ture in the United States

President Donald Trump yesterday hosted his South African counterpart Cyril Ramaphosa, in a meeting that turned into a clash over allegations of genocide leveled by the U.S. president against his guest.

The conversation kicked off smoothly, as the two leaders touched on light subjects. Ramaphosa spent a good three minutes discussing the historic good relations between the two nations, emphasizing his desire to keep up the good relationship, especially in the area of trade. In a joking tone, Trump asked “How did you get my number?” He then brought up his previously stated false claims about genocide of South African white farmers. “We’ve had tremendous complaints about Africa​, about other countries, too, from people,” Mr. Trump started, adding, “They say there’s a lot of bad things going on in Africa, and that’s what we’re going to be discussing today.”

A dismayed Ramaphosa stayed quiet for a while, then Trump displayed a few newspaper clips showing pictures of bloody white South Africans, after which he ordered that a video alleging the killing of white South Africans be played.

The video included a footage of Black people calling for violence against white South African farmers. One could see in one of the footages crosses planted along a rural road stretching far into the distance, which Mr. Trump described as part of a burial site for murdered white farmers. The truth is those crosses had nothing to do with a burial. They were planted by activists staging a protest against farm murders.

In his rebuttal, a calm Ramaphosa said that the person in the video who called for violence against white farmers did not speak for the South African government. He acknowledged that violence does erupt sometimes, but added that the victims were often Black people, not the other way around.

In reference to the fifty or so white South Africans to whom Trump has granted a refugee status while refusing to do so for other people, including Afghans who have assisted with the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan, Trump made his usual fuzzy remarks when asked questions that he does not have answers to.

The weird situation revived the perception of Trump’s thinly veiled racism as the reason why one of his first acts after beginning his second term was the suspension of aid to South Africa.

In an executive order taken on February 7, Donald Trump froze U.S. aid to South Africa after attacking the government of South Africa in a strong language rarely used by heads of state anywhere. He baselessly accused the sovereign Black nation of a slew of sins, including enacting an expropriation act “to enable the government of South Africa to seize ethnic minority Afrikaners’ agricultural property without compensation.” He also falsely claimed that the South African government’s policies are “designed to dismantle equal opportunity in employment, education, and business, and hateful rhetoric and government actions fueling disproportionate violence against racially disfavored landowners.” Pushing his intrusion further, the American president accused South Africa of taking “aggressive positions towards the United States and its allies, including accusing Israel, not Hamas, of genocide in the International Court of Justice, and reinvigorating its relations with Iran to develop commercial, military, and nuclear arrangements.” Little, probably, does Trump know that South Africa’s Black majority population and leaders enjoyed the unwavering support of Palestinian leaders and people during the inhumane, racist apartheid system.

Trump’s vitriol climaxed into an offer for resettlement in the United States of Afrikaners in South Africa as refugees—an interesting move on the part of a president widely accused at home of anti-minorities racism.

Viewed by many as a disrespect to the history of South Africa’s dispossessed community, Trump’s decision to freeze aid to the country displays a poor grasp of South Africa’s land politics and antecedent events.

Less than 15% of South Africa’s land is suitable for productive crop farming, a dismal figure further fueling bloody struggles over available fertile land. When South Africa’s racist apartheid system of government became an instrument of state in 1948, Black South Africans began losing access to ancestral lands to the early Dutch settlers who established themselves in the country in the first half of the 17th century. The economic dispossession of Blacks continued unchecked, culminating in the current reality where public land data shows that whites have 72 percent of farming fields, with poor Blacks controlling a miserable 4 percent.

In 1994, under the leadership of President Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s first democratically elected government passed the Restitution of Land Rights Act No. 22 of 1994, an act providing “for the restitution of rights in land to persons or communities dispossessed of such rights after June 19, 1913, as a result of past racially discriminatory laws.” Another post-apartheid land policy is the Land Reform (Labor Tenants) Act No. 3 of 1994, which recognizes the rights of labor tenants to land ownership. Other post-apartheid land laws are the Communal Property Associations Act No.28 of 1994, the Land Survey Act No.8 of 1997, and the Interim Protection of Informal Land Rights Act No.3 of 1996. President Ramaphosa’s latest land stroke is nothing extraordinary and should ordinarily not provoke Trump’s racist tics. But that is far from being the case.

Ramaphosa, not unlike other African leaders, does not underestimate the bite of Trump’s suspension of international aid, so far, for 90 days. In his State of the Nation address on February 6, the leader of the rainbow nation said, “We are concerned about the potential impact of the decision by the United States government to suspend some of its funding for HIV and TB programmes in African countries for 90 days.” However, South Africa’s response to Trump has been nothing short of defiance, the country framing the 47th U.S. president as a bothersome meddler in African affairs. In his State of the Nation address, President Cyril Ramaphosa made it abundantly clear that his country stands for “justice, for equality, and solidarity,” underscoring the fact that “Black South Africans were deprived of land, of capital, of skills, of opportunities.” Ramaphosa has made it clear that the people of South Africa will not be bullied.

The starch in President Cyril Ramaphosa’s land expropriation Act is that it is backed by law. The country’s constitution offers legislative backing for “expropriation if it is in the public interest,” the government’s official information and services arm said in an earlier clarification on land reform. South Africa’s attempt at land redistribution is “a constitutionally mandated legal process,” President Ramaphosa remarked in a post on X.

The land expropriation Act is not a violation of Blacks’, Whites’, or Coloreds’ rights and privileges, but a recognition of the rights of the wrongly dispossessed. Recall that in 1950, the white Apartheid government superintended over the cruel eviction of close to four million Black people from their ancestral homes when the National Party forcefully took possession of 85 percent of the country’s land and its rich resources.

President Donald Trump’s social media reactions and body language over land reforms in South Africa pander to racial prejudice. To many, his stock behavior and racist tantrums are hardly surprising, though his attitude remains disturbing in global geopolitics. Racism flourishes at the center of his positionality, fueling his reported disregard for Africa and those at the fringes of the international political and economic order. The president has done little to change his perception of Africa dating from his previous term when he called the continent (among other places) a dirty word not worth repeating here. For his critics, his latest interference in South Africa’s internal land politics firmly reestablishes him as a racist leader, a significant world figure obsessed with promoting and sustaining white privilege in a country searching for equality and harmonious coexistence among races.

And this is not Trump’s first attempt to intrude in South Africa’s internal affairs on the grounds of the thorny land reform issue.

In August 2018, Fox News, one of the relays of anti-minority, sometimes outright racist ideas in the United States, aired a show that accused South Africa’s president Cyril Ramaphosa of being a racist and a coward, and claimed the president has changed the constitution to “steal land from white citizens because they have the wrong skin color.” The comments sparked popular outrage in South Africa, but South African authorities, including President Ramaphosa himself, reacted calmly and sought to explain the government’s approach to land reform. In a swift, opportunistic reaction to the Fox News show, President Trump tweeted, “I have asked Secretary of State Pompeo to closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers.”

For his part, Ramaphosa kept his cool, contenting himself with publishing a column in the Financial Times in which he explained that the lingering economic disparities of the apartheid era, which translate to severe inequality between Black and white South Africans, justified the land reform initiative. He stressed that the extension of land ownership to Blacks is a prerequisite for South Africa to reach its full economic potential.

But the reaction from the South African majority-Black community to both the Fox News show and Trump’s zeal to take advantage of it was anything but diplomatic. Floyd Shivambu, deputy president of a left-wing party, The Economic Freedom Fighters, tweeted, in reference to Trump’s meddling: “That’s madness and highest form of foolishness by a racist bigot who lacks the basic intelligence to understand anything. South Africa will never be intimidated by global racists who believe in lies. Land expropriation will happen against all forms of threats by Foolishness.”

One might have thought, with the fiery rebuttal back in 2018, that Trump would ponder his next move multiple times before embarking on another adventurous meddlesome, imbalanced, and racist intervention in South Africa. But he hasn’t.