South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, has called Donald Trump’s policy of allowing white Afrikaners to apply for refugee status in the US “racist”, saying the US president was “truly uninformed” in a rare instance of direct criticism.
Ramaphosa told the New York Times that last year’s Oval Office meeting with the US leader, when Trump turned down the lights and played a video that he falsely claimed showed there was a “white genocide” in South Africa, was a “spectacle” and an “ambush”.
“I just thought that he is so uninformed, truly uninformed,” Ramaphosa said. “I realised that he is looking at South Africa through a completely, sort of, foggy lens, without realising the real, real harm that apartheid did. In my view, he was just dismissive.”
