MALAIKA MAHLATSI | Painful to watch Ramaphosa plead with divisive Trump who has no regard for Africa and its people

On Monday, President Cyril Ramaphosa landed in Washington DC for a working visit. According to the presidency, the aim of the trip, during which Ramaphosa is expected to meet President Donald Trump, is to “reset” and “revitalise” bilateral relations between SA and the US.

The reset follows the Trump administration’s hostile and vindictive actions towards SA. This includes Trump signing an executive order aimed at creating a special visa regime for Afrikaner farmers who are supposedly being persecuted in SA. About 49 of them landed in the US just over a week ago and were welcomed by senior officials of the administration. 

To Trump, these opportunists, some of whom have been exposed as not even being farmers but people in financial hardship who conveniently blame affirmative action and BEE policies for their situation, have affirmed a false narrative that Trump has been peddling.

And make no mistake, Trump knows that this narrative is false. He knows that statistically, black people have a disproportionately higher experience of violent crime in SA than white people do.

He knows that white people are at the very top of the economic food chain and that it is black people who are on the receiving end of structural inequalities. He knows this. The entire world, including white people in SA, know this.

But Trump is not invested in the truth, because his fight with SA has nothing to do with the imagined persecution of white people, but with his desire to put this “Third World” country that has dared to offend his Israeli allies and his No 1 funder, Elon Musk, in its place.

Trump has never hidden his disregard for Africa and her people, and for him, the idea that an African country has taken Zionist Israel before the International Court of Justice to account for their genocide of the Palestinian people, is unthinkable. 

The SA government has responded to Trump’s irrationality by doing everything possible to appease him, fearing the repercussions of being excluded from the African Growth and Opportunity Act and other trade benefits that the country enjoys with the US.

We have, over the past few months, seen politicians and business people bend over backwards to defend the Expropriation Bill and to justify why affirmative action is crucial for redressing injustices of the past. We have seen black leaders, those who know the horrors of apartheid, twist their tongues to explain to a white man in America that apartheid harmed black people. Nonetheless, we are not going to make life uncomfortable for white people because we just want them to give us some crumbs, if they want to, and we will be good girls and boys.

This is effectively what our leaders have been doing and what Ramaphosa is doing in Washington. He is there to give reassurance to Trump that black people in SA are just asking to be treated as humans, to have some level of justice, and that this does not and will not be to the detriment of white people who benefited from 342 years of colonialism and apartheid.

The presidency may call it a “reset” to strengthen bilateral relations or whatever they wish to call it. But when you remove all euphemism, what this trip is really about is a black president going to plead with a white man in the US to see black people as humans worthy of justice and for them to not be punished for it. 

This is what black people are and will always be reduced to for as long as the continent remains so divided and without vision. This treatment, where our presidents must sit before an incorrigible racist who is impervious to logic, begging for understanding of policies aimed at redress, is what we will always endure for as long as we don’t pursue self-sufficiency as a continent.

We are reduced to figures of pathos because we are yet to dismantle a system in which we need those who dehumanise us. It is an indictment on us as a people. And it is painful to watch.