BREAKING NEWS
May 14, 2025
South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphisa is scheduled to meet with U.S. President Donald Trump next week in Washington as part of his four-day Official working visit to the U.S. this month.
The meeting is expected to take place at the White House on May 21. The White House has not officially confirmed the date of the meeting as of the time of this publication, President Trump did say during remarks in the Oval Office Monday that he’s meeting with South African leaders next week.
The two leaders are expected to discuss bilateral, regional, and global issues of mutual interest and find common ground amid growing tensions that have developed between their two countries over the past few months over geopolitical ideological differences, trade tariffs, and alleged domestic racial discrimination, which President Ramaphosa and the South African government have repeatedly denied.
Ramaphisa’s visit will mark the first African Head of State to meet with President Trump at the White House since the American President returned to office in late January. The meeting is seen as defining for Ramaphosa’s presidency, according to many US-Africa political observers.
The South African President hopes the in-person meeting will help reset the strategic relationship between their two countries on a better course.
Whether or not that could be achieved during this meeting is left to be seen given the skepticism Trump expressed during remarks he made in the Oval Office Monday before he departed for a trip to the Middle East when he repeated a claim that white farmers are being targeted for murder under the country’s new land expropriation law.
The law is meant to redress the inequalities entrenched under the former apartheid system. But Trump asserted it allows the government to seize white Afrikaners’ agricultural property without compensation.
The White Afrikaners are an ethnic minority who are descendants of Dutch settlers who settled in South Africa.
Despite official data that shows most victims of killings are young black men in urban areas, Trump continues his claims that white Afrikaners face discrimination and genocide in South Africa.
On Monday, a group of 49 White Afrikaners, arrived in the US after being offered preferred refugee status and American citizenship by Trump based on claims of unjust racial discrimination.
South African Foreign Minister Lamola echoed Petroria’s statement reiterating that allegations of discrimination are unfounded, noting the government is glad that several Afrikaner organizations denounced “this so-called persecution.”
White South Africans make up 7.3 percent of the population and generally enjoy a higher standard of living than the black majority of the country who were denied political and economic rights under the Afrikaner-led government race-based apartheid system until 1994.
