Trump and Ramaphosa – between The Orange Man and Mandela’s Boy
By Femi Olugbile
Dateline White House, Washington DC Wednesday, 21st May 2025.
It was a sparring session for which each of the parties had prepared with utmost care.
Ramaphosa’s voice was smooth as silk, and his demeanour was the very soul of calm.
‘…We are essentially here to reset the relationship between the United States and South Africa…’
He wanted, he said, to promote further investment by each of their countries in the other. He had facts and figures. There were twenty-two South African companies with investments in the USA, and there were ‘over six hundred’ companies from the United States doing business in South Africa.
Like any other world leader contemplating a visit to Trump’s White House, he would have watched videos of the mauling of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in the same room, only a few weeks past. The worst conceivable strategy, everyone had learnt so far, was to allow The Orange Man to get under your skin.
He, Cyril, was the appointed prime ANC negotiator of the agreement that ended Apartheid, after being a Union Organiser and urban warrior with massive street credibility during the Liberation War. His brief in those epochal negotiations then, just like in the present negotiations, was not only to define the Rainbow Nation, but to ring-fence and entrench the middle ground that would ensure its survival and prosperity.
It was a herculean, often thankless task. Perhaps sometimes when he was tired, and feeling sorry for himself, he fleetingly wished he could be plain old Cyril, the millionaire black farmer and investor, splashing out the bucks and living the good life. Perhaps sometimes he wished Madiba had picked someone else to carry the burden of his succession. During the Phala Phala farm incident not long ago when some thieves had stolen money from his ranch, and he could not even announce the theft or go after the felons openly, he might have felt some anger at the unfairness of it all. He was no saint, but he was no felon, either.
The light banter with Trump was only an opening gambit. The gloves would come off, and trouble would come sailing in on the afternoon air. He knew that, and he was prepared for it.
It came, soon enough, after a lot of back and forth about how Donald Trump was ‘making deals’ to bring peace to faraway places such as India and Pakistan, and Rwanda and Congo. In the exchange Ramaphosa managed to sneak in a mention of Nelson Mandela as ‘the one who taught us to make peace’.
The igniting question sounded innocuous enough. It came from a female voice among the clutch of journalists in the room.
‘What would it take for you to be convinced there is no white genocide in South Africa?’
Not initially recognising the trap, Ramaphosa jumped in to reply to the journalist,
‘…It will involve President Trump listening to the voices of the people of South Africa…’
Trump, fabled anchor of The Apprentice, had the theatre he sought. He asked for the room lights to be dimmed. On a large television screen that could not have been there by accident, a video was played. It contained snippets of incendiary speeches – from Julius Malema of the FFF, and liberation-era ‘Shoot-the-Boer’ chants from Umkhonto We Sizwe, songs that were still popular at grassroots rallies in the townships, reminding the people of the horrors they had lived through, when the boot had been on the other foot.
Trump pointed to white crosses planted in the ground at an extremist Afrikaner rally as evidence of burial sites of ‘a thousand’ slain Afrikaners. He brought out a trove of paper cuttings that were supposed to show how ‘whites’ were being ‘killed daily’ in South Africa.
Ramaphosa squirmed, as he tried to modulate his reaction. It would have irked Trump, and soured the meeting, if he replied truthfully that it was ironic that the Afrikaner, the inventor of racist Apartheid who historically ‘owned’ 70% of privately held land in the country through murdering and expropriating the black owners, could now be playing ‘poor me’, complaining of expropriation.
He calmly reclaimed the narrative. He spoke of the high rates of murder and criminality, which were neither white nor black. He unfurled his shopping list of economic and developmental partnership requests, even when Trump tried to continue with ‘alternative truth’ on the white genocide story. He invited his white Minister of Agriculture to speak on white and black farm violence.
The air grew more genial.
Trump requested South African golfing greats Ernie Erls and Ratief Goosen to ‘say something’, admitting addressing the White House audience for them might be harder than ‘sinking a three-footer’ on the golf course.
The focus came back to how trade, investment and growth were the real keys to the future. South Africans wanted American technology for various reasons, including to fight rampant crime.
The next summit of the G-20, currently headed by Ramaphosa, would take place in November in Cape Town. It would be the USA’s turn to be the next head of the organisation. Ramaphosa wanted Trump to be there to take over from him.
As the theatre ended, some things were clear. The voice of Malema or Zuma, singing ‘Shoot the Boer’, was already the road not taken in South Africa. Madiba had plugged for a Rainbow Nation-for-all, and demarcated the middle ground to sustain it, foreswearing the retributive temptation to ‘drive the white man into the sea’, and foreswearing civil war by openly and intentionally embracing those who were perceived by some hotheads as ‘cooperationists’ and ‘blacklegs’ in the Liberation War, especially Gatsha Buthelezi and the Zulu nation.
In his bed, in the dead of the night, that night, Cyril Ramaphosa perhaps would reflect that the Mandela vision had held, barely, thirty years on, through today’s most rigorous public examination of his nation’s bona fides. Keeping Elon Musk and the Afrikaners on board, no matter what, was his own equivalent of Madiba’s destiny-changing and much-criticised embrace of Buthelezi. The future was a little more assured.
But with 45% youth unemployment, the highest murder rate in the world, a growing, problematic anti-African xenophobia, and racism and vestiges of Apartheid sentiment still on show when the skin was barely scratched, there was a lot of work to be done, yet.
