Trump focused on the white farmers, particularly Afrikaners – the descendants of mainly Dutch settlers who instituted apartheid. He alleged they are being killed because of their race despite evidence showing that attacks and killings are common across all groups in the country.
“We have a real safety problem in South Africa, and I don’t think anyone wants to candy-coat that,” said John Steenhuisen, the agriculture minister and a member of the Democratic Alliance party, which is part of South Africa’s governing coalition.“Certainly, the majority of South Africa’s commercial and smallholder farmers really do want to stay in South Africa and make it work,” the minister, who is himself an Afrikaner, said. Trump claimed that “thousands” of white farmers were fleeing South Africa.
Steenhuisen added that the people in the video Trump showed were leaders of opposition minority parties and his party had joined forces with Ramaphosa “precisely to keep those people out of power”.The meeting began cordially where Trump complimented South African golfers, including well-known Ernie Els and Retief Goosen, who were part of the delegation. They both implored Trump for enhanced trade to uplift South Africa’s economy.Also in the delegation was South Africa’s richest man, Johann Rupert, a luxury-goods mogul and an Afrikaner. He countered claims of racial persecution against the white minority, saying that while criminality was rife, Black people were more often the victims.
“We have too many deaths, but it’s across the board. It is not only white farmers,” Rupert said to Trump.Ramaphosa kept his cool, local media and observers said, noting that the South African president chose to remain calm, patient and light-hearted even in light of Trump’s attack.
He steered talks back to trade, saying South Africa needed economic investment from its allies, and mostly sat expressionless while the video was played, occasionally stretching his neck to look at it.
Ramaphosa went into “the lion’s den” and was met with an ambush but he remained calm, South African political analyst Sanusha Naidu said.A Ugandan human rights activist, arrested in Tanzania after travelling to the country to support an opposition politician at a trial for treason, has been tortured and dumped at the border, according to an NGO.
Ugandan rights group Agora Discourse said on Friday that activist and journalist Agather Atuhaire had been “abandoned at the border by Tanzanian authorities” and showed signs of torture.The statement echoes reports regarding a Kenyan activist detained at the same time and released a day earlier, and supports complaints of a crackdown on democracy across East Africa.
Atuhaire had travelled to Tanzania alongside Kenyan anticorruption campaigner Boniface Mwangi to support opposition leader Tundu Lissu, who appeared in court on Monday.Both were arrested shortly after the hearing and held incommunicado.